Even though the wind showed signs of waning by the end of the evening yesterday, it still blew like an insatiable trumpeter throughout the night. Mother Nature posed the daunting prospect of another sleepless night. Despite being terrified of the thought of spending another night with eyes wide open, we bravely hopped up to the attic bedroom in the hope of hitting the hay right after carefully placing our weary heads onto the pillow. I was almost charmed by the gentle shadows on the wall drawn by the moonlight when the sudden horror of realising what this phenomenon really meant slowly lifted my eyelids. When the visual stimuli poke the brain with photons, one’s mind automatically sets itself into alert mode. And so did mine. It woke my system up without saying, “Bonjour Triest!”. However hard I tried to goad my cerebral cortex into losing consciousness, it wouldn’t obey. I still need to figure out how the following events unfolded, but one thing is sure: in the middle of my agony, one...