Wendyl Nissen: Down and out

The hens have stopped laying. They are officially in hibernation and do little except eat and lie around, begging the question posed by my husband: "Why are we stepping over hen poo, exactly?"

Without the daily three eggs, it becomes increasingly difficult to overlook the inconvenient aspects of keeping hens.

The same could be said about my existence, except unlike the hens, I don't leave deposits on the front steps. Yet.

But I am an inconvenient believer in hibernation. It is part of my Palaeolithic lifestyle, the one where you live like a cavewoman.

I'm sure that when it got cold all those years ago, there were no crops to harvest but plenty of old wood lying around, so women simply snuggled up by the fire underneath their favourite fur, played with the kids, wished Van Morrison had been invented and waited for the men to bring in a woolly mammoth.

I can rarely be found away from my cavewoman fire and when I am, I'm in bed.

"The average human only needs nine hours' sleep a day," ventured my husband, entering a territory into which no right-headed man should ever stray.

"I'm not average," I snapped. "I'm Palaeolithic and I'm wintering over."

My husband is usually a very tolerant man, but he is also a method ghostwriter. This does not mean he acts out ghost stories.

It means that he writes biographies of well-known people and when he does so, he immerses himself in his subject's personality, letting it overtake him for the period it takes to write the book. Just as Hollywood method actors do when they prepare for a film role.

It was fun when he wrote Victoria Cross medal-holder Willie Apiata's book. For months he strode around the house manfully, eating more red meat than was good for him and coming over all macho every time a fire alarm went off, grabbing the closest person to him and diving for cover under the kitchen table.

I found the character takeover quite exhilarating, as I'm sure anyone would who found themselves waking up next to Willie every morning.

My husband also insisted on replying to any problem I might be having with the words: "What would Willie do?" This was obviously designed to instil some courage and determination in me, which worked - right until the book launch when I met the man himself.

Instead of saying, "Gosh, you seem so familiar", I recounted a story about myself trying to find the energy to run up a hill, asking myself what Willie would do and then managing to get to the top.

I thought it a very triumphant story to share. Willie just looked at me and said: "I would have told you to have a rest."

When my husband was writing the biography of a humanitarian, he became obsessed with human suffering, reading out long, agonising stories from the newspaper about starving children and making us sit through hours of documentaries about victims of war.

There were tears shed, by me, as I waited for the manuscript's last page to leave the house and take with it the soulful looks and touching moments.

The book he is writing at the moment is about an entrepreneur who has a great deal of self-help advice for success in life, which involves some alternative therapies.

My husband is following a strict regime of nine hours' sleep a night, eating a lot of steamed fish, meditating and encouraging positive visualisation.

My hibernation is not being tolerated well in this environment.

"Here's an idea. How about you find a famous sleep therapist to write about for your next book?" I suggested, after he calculated that I had been in bed for 13 hours and had helpfully made the bed in the five minutes it took me to walk into the kitchen and make a cup of tea.

"I think it's probably going to be a politician," he volunteered, giving me no hope of luxuriating for a week or two in my husband's real personality.

"Either that or another millionaire."

I pulled back the blankets on the neatly made bed and climbed back in.

"Wake me up when we're moving to the Riviera."