Book extract

MAKING IT UP AS I GO ALONG

Sleep, how much do I love you? A lot, oh a huge lot! But for most of my life, it’s been like a shy, almost mythical beast that is occasionally sighted through a thicket of trees and skitters away fearfully when it realises it’s been spotted. It is nervy and fragile and will only approach when it’s shown how much it is loved. Every day I must begin anew to win its trust, trying to lure it towards me with mint tea and Valerian tablets and dim lighting and boring books.

Insomnia, on the other hand, is a thuggish bruiser who barges in whenever it feels like it, putting its dirty boots on my coffee table and hogging the remote control and breaking out the good wine that I’d been saving for Important Visitors. I plead with it to leave, and sometimes it does, but always with a swaggery proviso, ‘You ain’t seen the last of me, gel,’ just like Nasty Nick Cotton in EastEnders. It is a difficult way to live, my amigos. I crave sleep – I mean, don’t we all? My head is a whirry, busy place, filled with anxieties and to-do lists and peculiar memories. I like to escape from it once in a while, the way rich people helicopter off from the hustle and bustle of the city for their peaceful weekend treat.

Without sleep I spend the following day feeling queasy and borderline psychotic, and there is no greater misery than lying awake, staring into darkness, worrying about all the important things I have to – have to – do when morning arrives.

There are many varieties of insomnia: there’s the one where sleep refuses to show up at bedtime; there’s the one where I’m awoken abruptly at 4 am and that’s my lot for the night (with that version, the sound I dread the most is the first bus – it means the night is over and there’s no more chance of sleep). Then there’s the 5.15 am version, when – oddly – I eventually tumble back into sleep, ten minutes before the alarm goes off, and I wake up feeling like I’m coming round from a general anaesthetic. I’m prone to them all.

Every day my preparations for sleep begin about twenty minutes after I wake up. I have my lone daily permitted cup of coffee and instantly wish I could have twelve more, but I chide myself, ‘No, no! Think of the caffeine! In fifteen short hours’ time, you’ll be desperately trying to fall asleep and you don’t want to scupper all chances by flooding yourself with stimulants. So I’m sorry, but no.’

They say that lavender is the insomniac’s friend – that

if, at bedtime, I drench my pillow in lavender mist, I’ll tumble easily into eight blissful hours of oblivion. But surely I can’t be the only person who thinks that lavender smells gank? Because, yes, I bought the spray and drenched my pillow with it, only to wake in the darkness-of-the-night, thinking, ‘Christ alive, what’s that

horrific stench?’ And I was only able to get back to sleep by putting the ruined pillow outside the front door and borrowing a smell-free pillow from the spare room.

A long soak in a hot bath is another recommended sleep-lurer. But I hate water, I hate getting wet, and if I had one great wish for the human race, it wouldn’t be something worthy like us all being able to live in harmony, but that we could be ‘self-cleaning’ – that we’d have no need to ever wash ourselves.

Nevertheless, during a recent bad bout of The Awakes, I gave the hot-bath thing a go. But when Himself looked in on me, and saw me sitting bolt upright among the bubbles, anxiously watching the clock, he said sadly, ‘I don’t think you’re really getting the best from this experience.’

‘Grand,’ I said, eagerly clambering out. ‘I tried, I failed. C’est la vie. Pass me the towel.’

I usually ‘retire’ before Himself, hoping to be asleep before he arrives, because he nods off in two seconds flat and I lie staring into the darkness, feeling like a lonely failure.

If I’m still awake when he comes to bed, we have a little snuggle, but if I feel stirrings in his nethers, I have to say, ‘No. No! Not now. Leave it till the morning and I’ll see you right, but not now. Now I need to concentrate hard on going to sleep. Goodnight, goodnight, sorry, but goodnight.’

I’ll tell you what does work with insomnia – tablets. Yes. Sleeping pills. They are lovely. Ambien, Stilnoct, Zimovane… They do all the hard graft, they welcome me on board the Sleep Express and soon enough they’ve whisked me away to merciful oblivion. But after a while they stop being lovely, and higher amounts of them are needed to achieve the initial blissful effect, and then I find myself in my doctor’s, begging for more and being told to hop it, that they’re addictive and only intended for ‘short-term use’. Also there are countless reports of people doing very strange things while under the influence of sleepers – eating the entire contents of the fridge and remembering nothing about it, or more sinister stuff, like driving and crashing, and really, I don’t want to do that. So actually, sleeping tablets are very bad news.

Over time I’ve learnt some tricks to help me sleep – regular exercise is one of them. (I realise this isn’t exactly breaking news, but when you’re in a queasy insomniac fog it’s hard to muster the will to exercise, so you never get to find out that actually it really does help).

And all that blah about having no electronics in the bedroom is also true. As is reading an extraordinarily detailed biography of an army general.

Lists, too, they’re handy. Each night I list all my jobs – from ‘google Gucci nail varnishes’ to ‘lose two stone’ – then the notebook has to be placed outside the bedroom door because otherwise I can ‘feel’ it at me all night, disturbing me with its countless demands.

Next I do some sort of gratitude list; it doesn’t have to be a War and Peace- length opus, but it’s good to write three or four things I’m grateful for (e.g. a lavender-free pillow, the gift of sight, the fact that the cold sore on my lip didn’t burgeon across my chin, that sort of thing).

Most importantly, I do a scan of my day, seeking unpleasant emotions that I tried to gloss over at the time: shame is usually a biggie – shame that I didn’t stand up for myself, or shame that I did stand up for myself. I try not to bury any negative emotion, because it’ll burrow up through me and emerge as awakeness at 4 am.

Even so, there are still some nights when I literally don’t sleep at all and I feel like I’m going insane.

Himself says I should just admit defeat and get up and go to the spare room and read. But I lie in my bed in the dark, raging to myself, ‘Sleep is a basic human instinct. It’s like hunger and lust and the desire for lovely shoes. I am entitled to it. It is my right. I’m not moving, I’m staying right here in this bed, where I deserve to be, and I am not leaving until my needs have been met!’ I’m on the verge of singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.

There is no loneliness like the middle-of-the-night loneliness, and recently I actually did go to the spare room, and into the emptiness of cyberspace I tweeted, ‘Is anyone awake?’ But nothing happened, and I felt very sad. Then my tablet made a little noise – a tweet had arrived. One word, ‘Yes.’ So someone else was awake! Next thing another tweet arrived: ‘I’m awake too.’ And then more: ‘I’ve been awake since two’; ‘I’m breastfeeding my baby’; ‘I’m still on LA time’; ‘I had a bad dream and I’m afraid to go back to sleep’; ‘I’ve got a big presentation tomorrow and I’m catastrophising.’

And suddenly there were dozens and dozens of us, all of us awake at the wrong time – then I felt really happy and sang ‘Message in a Bottle’ at the top of my voice: ‘Seems I’m not alone in being aloooonnne. Hundred million castaways looking for a HOOOOOOMMMME!’

And from the next room, Himself’s voice shouted, ‘Quieten the feck down, I’m trying to sleep in here.’