By Walter de Backer

Long periods of touring without the type of budget that can afford hotels or even separate beds means we often have to be understanding and accommodating of each other's... er, less "savoury" characteristics.

It's taken a while, but my Tourette's, incontinence and leprosy have slowly been accepted by Tim and Kris over the course of this two month world jaunt. I, on the other hand, have not been as tolerant of some of their traits.

Tim sometimes snores like a banshee.

This may be due to the fact that he's often shunted onto the couch while Kris and I enjoy the mattresses on offer. However, it must be said that he has recently displayed a fascination for sleeping in intensely scrunched-up positions, often choosing small couches as his first option for bedding down.

Anyways, we went to sleep the other night after our first day back in Japan, still jet-lagged from the 24-hour plane ride from London - Kris and I on my friend David's lounge room floor, and Tim on the small couch just behind our heads. At some stage I awoke in the darkness to one of those really ear-wrenchingly consistent snores from somewhere nearby.

Try as I might, I couldn't zone out from the loud and scratchy nasal bursts, each one more frustratingly established-sounding than the last. Now when I say "established-sounding", I mean displaying no signs of potentially abating soon. Anyone who finds themselves in this situation inevitably lies there for a while, desperately wanting to believe that whoever is making the horrible noise will very soon turn over or magically stop the uninvited concert of sleep obstruction/destruction. But of course this never happens and you are left to endless mental meanderings evaluating the pros and cons of enduring the noise, escaping to a more private area, effecting physical interruption of the aural pollution, or maybe making even louder snoring noises yourself to wake the instigator of this malaise up with a dose of their own medicine.

The next stage is the wild fantasies of grievous bodily harm enacted upon the perpetrator which one concocts to satisfy the indignation at such unwelcome breaks in one's precious sleep time. I imagined wrapping Tim up in his sleeping bag, squashing him into the washing machine and selecting the longest pre-wash super-stain option available. I smiled maniacally at the thought of stuffing his mouth full of sushi, dancing about the room and shouting "Put that in your pipe and snore it". In the end, after what felt like an age of fighting that peculiar mid-night muscular failure, something akin to entropy itself, I reached my arm up with great effort and shook what I thought to be Tim's back.

But being somewhat uncoordinated at my current level of exhaustion, I kind-of missed and instead found myself a big old handful of Tim Heath ass. Reflecting on it now I can't say for sure, but there may have been something of a hand-between-two-pillows situation for a millisecond there.

Tim woke up instantly, uncurling himself from the foetal position and squaring me with a shocked expression.

The snoring continued.

It's a testament to Tim's easy-going and forgiving nature (and perhaps also his heterosexuality) that he relaxed his stunned-mullet mug almost right away, mumbled simply "It isn't me" and fell straight back to sleep.

In the other room, David continued his impression of a lumberjack sawing old growth forest (Day 53 is a good example) and I lay back down feeling very embarrassed. Incontinence will do that to you.