Wit's End

I've given up.
It's five forty in the morning and I've given up all attempts at sleep. Sleep seems to be off the cards for the foreseeable future. We live in a semi-detached house and my neighbours have installed some kind of new electrical equipment that comes on and goes off on a timer switch. From twenty to every hour until ten to every hour it fills my house with a loud electrical hum that I just can't sleep through so my early night was a waste of effort. My sleep pattern through the last three nights, since they turned it on has been :- sleep for thirty minutes, get woken up as the bloody thing turns on, lie awake listening to it for ten minutes, spend twenty minutes going back to sleep, repeat until nervous breakdown ensues. I tried getting up and finding some earplugs even though I then run the risk of sleeping through my alarm. No good. They may block the alarm but not this low frequency irritant. I tried going downstairs to sleep on the sofa. No good. The hum, as I said, fills my whole house. So, tired and irritable, I've finally been forced to concede that sleep is out of the question and get up.
Tonight I shall try moving my bed into the room that's furthest from the adjoining wall, and closing all the doors, and using earplugs.

Complain you say? Not sure that I can. They aren't the easiest of neighbours to get on with and the equipment is most likely something medical. That room is occupied by my bedridden cousin who has breathing difficulties. It's probably something to do with that. They won't be affected by the noise because every one in the family has the same low frequency hearing impairment. They simply won't hear it but I can hear it and it's driving me crazy.

And yes, this post is entirely out of keeping with the normal style of posts in this blog but I am at my wit's end and just venting my frustration.