She plays acoustic guitar, and the flute and the harp

I was woken up this morning - at 5:21am, I might add - by a mysterious tapping noise. About three loudish clicks, of no particular origin. Followed by a quiet wail. Then silence. Bemused, I went back to sleep.

At 6:09, I was woken by the same clicks, but much louder. It sounded as if they were coming from the wall by my head. Was it Eve, the elderly lady in the next flat, banging for help? Surely not. Two or three irregular, single, sharp taps would be a weird way to signal to anyone. And again some quiet wailing.

This time, I stayed awake. On the very edge of hearing, the wail continued, notes rising and falling as of a distressed and disconsolate theremin.

Suddenly, my bedroom lit up! Oh no, that's not supernatural activity, that's just my phone doing the stupid Android thing of telling you it's 100% charged. Unfortunately, the act of switching its backlight on slightly depletes the battery, so a few minutes later, it makes it up to 100% again and notifies you by turning the backlight on. Etc.

The theremin continued to be upset. Oh, and was that a crying baby? There are, as far as I'm aware, no babies in my block of flats. I counted off the familiar noises: a bus going up the hill, the background hum of the A40. A distant siren. The tiny tick noise that radiators make when they think no one's listening. No, not a baby. Just the ongoing sobbing of an unhappy electronic instrument.

The room lit up more dimly, as it does when someone switches the staircase lights on. Doors opened, and closed. And presumably someone took the theremin out for a walk, because I didn't hear it any more.

Is this here the season of joy? Or the season to inject?

Recently, I saw a display of cheap inflatables intended for swimming pools. A ring with a horse's head, a dolphin. The seams of the plastic stuck out, rather than being nicely taped flat.

And suddenly I remember standing in the North Sea on seaside holidays, and the feeling of such a seam scraping across legs made cold and goosebumped by the water (my inflatable ring was yellow with a horse's head, from memory, although given the colouring it might have been a giraffe). As sensations go it was actually quite painful, but very distinctive and something which - in a life which rarely involves swimming in bodies of cold water and even more rarely involves inflatables - I haven't felt in years.

I set myself to wondering what other sensations might have got lost in the last few decades. The one that immediately sprung to mind was ( grazed knees )