PROBABLY the best-known fact about Margaret Thatcher is that she only had four hours' sleep a night. I don't know if that made her the person she was but maybe it did. Recently I've taken to sleeping only four hours a night and I am now totally convinced we should send a task force to the Falklands, though not having a navy to call on I feel at something of a loss.
So yesterday I just got up at about four o'clock, looked round my empty bedroom, muttered "there's no such thing as society" and made do with a DVD of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place In The Sun (if you missed it in 1951 it's really not a bad way to pass a couple of hours until Farming Today kicks in).
What have I got against sleep? Well, I'm slightly ashamed to admit it but it may simply be retarded childish rebellion. As was common among mothers of children born in those post-war years, mine believed in nothing so much as the power of sleep.
Nowadays there's dyslexia, dyspraxia, attention deficit disorder, nut allergies, hormones, overstimulation, under stimulation, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder. In those days the only explanation for insolence, boredom, moroseness, disobedience or debilitating illness was "you're tired" or "it's past your bedtime". Up till the time I was about 20, countdown started at about 9.30 pm.
What have I got against sleep? Well, I'm slightly ashamed to admit it but it may simply be retarded childish rebellion
It wasn't such a struggle for parents then.
There wasn't exactly much to watch on television and in the outside world everything closed at about 10 o'clock (or was it six? ) and there was always Horlicks to fight off night starvation, or Ovaltine and for that you could have a special mug that had a nightcap as a lid. Why did they go out of fashion? Maybe kids today prefer to smoke skunk. SO, TO put it bluntly, I have always thought "a good night's sleep" is something of a surrender. It would be nice to be able to say I see it as a waste of time that could be used for something creative or productive but that would be a lie. Most people who find themselves awake in the early hours are in a sort of no-man's land between sleeplessness and brainlessness.
Reading would be far too demanding, DIY too noisy and going out for a jog in luminous clothes completely grotesque. One of the blessings of the internet is that there's something to do 24/7 (as they say) though that way lies madness, or eBay.
At least one could always take comfort in the truth that as you get older you need less sleep. But apparently it isn't a truth. Psychologists in California, after so-called research, find sleep shortage is no respecter of age. People of 68 had exactly the same response as people of 27 to sleep shortage. It affected both of them badly. The more sleep you have the more effective you are the next day. Now, it's always healthy to disbelieve these sorts of experiments. Psychologists make their livings by trying to disrupt long-held beliefs that have served us perfectly well. If psychologists slept more the world would be a far happier place.
They say their tests showed that both groups were less good at learning and remembering things if they had slept less. To which I respond with the evidence of real life experience: teenagers are quite capable of sleeping 15 hours a day then learning nothing and forgetting everything. A state of full-time sleepiness, not irritable or tetchy, not quite braindead but gently and benignly restful, has a lot to recommend it. For both individuals and for a society sleepiness is the best possible condition.
Sleepy nations don't go to war, sleepy people don't terrorise the streets. If bankers had been a little sleepier, as they used to be in the old days, they wouldn't have dreamed up all the hyperactive schemes that brought the economy to its knees.
WE LIVE at a time when logic has been turned on its head. In Scottish schools they are trying special lessons teaching teenagers how to sleep. The country is reportedly suffering from serious sleep deficit which, among other things, apparently increases the risk of obesity. I can see the logic: if you're sleeping you can't be eating and vice versa. I have sometimes suspected myself of waking up in the middle of the night for the sole purpose of having a plate of cereal (one of my five a day).
In these sleep lessons, Sleep Scotland, a charity combating Caledonian deprivation, is taking time to tell children that mobile phones, laptops and games consoles in the bedroom are the enemies of sleep and must be kept under control. Obviously they have a point.
There are myriad things to keep kids awake. Times have changed. Clearly.
I think many of us remember when virtually all lessons - English, French, maths, history, geography and the rest - were sleep lessons. The teacher would start babbling on and it was a heck of a struggle to keep your head off the desk.
