Rab McNeill on his battle to get enough sleep

AT this time of year, you’d expect me to put forth a few uplifting words. Drink, telly, chips. Well, that’s me out. What you got? Same? Well, there ye are. Actually, here’s another one: sleep. Yes, that cheered you up. Surveys show we value sleep more than life itself.

So what happens on this earthly paradise, dear readers? Correct. Sleep eludes us.

Many folk get around five hours a night, the lucky sods. You’d certainly think that, in the last year, folk would be getting hardly any Z’s, what with mutants, pandemics an’ a’ that.

And yet it says here – study by Brown University in the US – that the pandemic is allowing people to sleep more. I can’t believe this is because they’re having a night of untroubled sleep.

Indeed, it’s because they are sleeping later, taking advantage of time formerly spent trauchling into the workplace, washing themselves and getting dressed. I haven’t done any of these things for years. Load of nonsense.

Ever intent to rise early, I set the alarm. But I wake in the middle of the night and remain so for hours.

On days when I don’t have much work – basically Monday to Friday, with weekends off – I just re-set the alarm for some time in the afternoon and, thus, tend to get my regulation four hours in the end.

A sleep of two halves is nothing new. Another study recently claimed it was an ancient norm, with people in medieval times using the break productively, making soup, reading a woodcut, watching the tapestry if there was anything on, or engaging in lewd and libidinous behaviour.

I don’t believe that thesis. Apart from being hanged, tortured, and working a sevenday week, they didn’t know what stress was.

Their work in the fresh air would surely have knackered them. When I was a garden labourer, I slept like a baby.

But I was young then and, apart from the odd instruction in October to get all these leaves swept up by Christmas, didn’t know what a deadline was.

As a professional intellectual nowadays – shut up, youse – my mind is always working overtime. It’s my brain: it gets on my wick.

Lying awake in the peerie wee hours, I start working out how much money I’d save by giving up fruit; greetin’ out of selfpity; promising God I’ll be a better person if he lets me sleep; warning God that, if He is there then when I die, He’s getting decked.

But, most of the time, I listen to audiobooks. I use them at the start of the night too and, oddly enough, am usually asleep in under a minute.

But they don’t work so well in the middle of the night.

I put them on to take my mind off existential problems, ken?

Last night, in order of literary merit, I listened to Star Wars: Heir to the Empire; The Two Towers (Book 2 of The Lord of the Rings, as you know); Virgil’s Aeneid; A Christmas Carol (read by John Gielgud); and Five on a Treasure Island (don’t judge me).

I don’t listen to these all the way through. I set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and, if I’m still awake when that switches off the audio, I try something else.

Other night-time stand-bys include Dad’s Army, Dick Barton – Special Agent, The Wind in the Willows, and The Moomins. Sometimes, I worry that, if I do get to sleep with one of these on, my subconscious will absorb them.

Indeed, it’s not unusual for me to wake up shouting: “Bah, humbug, don’t tell him your name, Mole, someone’s shining a light on that island, they shall not pass, shut up, ya wookie galoot!”

The days all go downhill after that. It’s the worst part of life really: being awake and conscious.

So, let us all pray for more sleep in 2021. G’night, all.