Perhaps it was the shock of being returned to a state we thought we’d escaped forever, or just that no amount of experience can truly prepare you for the next bout of sleeplessness. Either way, we took our second child’s 18-month sleep regression hard. Getting up two or three times a night to settle a wide-awake toddler was bad enough, but it was the next day at my desk that I really suffered. The sleep regression happened to coincide with my attempt to read Jacques Derrida’s a typically dense and digressive reading of Freud’s theories about memory. Not the easiest writer to follow at the best of times, Derrida’s words swam before my
