Insomnia in winter

It’s four thirty in the morning and on BBC1 an old woman is celebrating making £241 at a car boot sale to put towards a two week Kenyan safari. (That won’t get you a one night safari at Longleat, my love). ITV, in a desperate competitive bid for my viewing, is offering me eight chances to win thousands of pounds if I can think of a word to follow ‘half’. Wit?

Who calls a TV quiz at 4.30am? Maybe the phones are ringing off the hook with nurses returning from the night shift not quite tired enough to go to bed yet. Or taxi drivers needing to wind down from the excitement of drunken clubbers and airport runs. And, I suppose, insomniacs like me who, fed up with tossing and turning are giving up on sleep and resorting to flicking through channels of rubbish you wouldn’t watch during the day, let alone in the middle of the night.

It’s starting to get to me now. I’m relatively new to insomnia and waking at 4.30 wasn’t so bad when it was light and the longest, hottest summer in 30 years. As long as you know it’s coming, you go to bed straight after the kids and there’s something quite magical about sitting outside with a cup of tea, wearing next to nothing and watching the sun come up. For a few blissful, silent moments I was the only person in the world. Some mornings, I’d wander around the field in my PJs, mug in hand, followed by the dog, the cat and a couple of brave chickens – even the deer didn’t bother to run away from us. Other days I’d run down to the beach, enjoying the feeling that, for once, there was no rush; I’d get back, shower and then sit in the garden with my breakfast while behind me the house slept on.

But being an insomniac in winter isn’t nearly as much fun. Now 4.30am is black and most definitely night time. There is nothing I want to do but sleep. I’ve always been one of those people who falls asleep the minute their head hits the pillow, but we’ve been burgled and since then my brain struggles to shut down. I’m a light sleeper, woken by a leaf falling two miles away, so I was deeply shocked to discover that people could wander around my house in the middle of the night and not wake me up.

I’d also thought having a big scary dog would help. But it turns out that my loyal hound and best friend will bark ferociously at hedgehogs, plastic bags and passing Jack Russells, but if strangers let themselves in in the middle of the night and help themselves to my best stuff – not to mention my mobile phone charger for which they had to physically reach over his bed – he won’t even get up. So the only solution is not to go to sleep at all in case the vermin return.

When I was travelling we used to sleep in all sorts of dodgy places – pavements, beaches, rooftops, station platforms – and we'd stuff everything that mattered half way down the sleeping bag and lie on it so no-one could nick it. Not comfy but relatively safe. Never thought I’d still be doing it, years later, under the Hungarian goose down, inside my own home.

But now I think I’ve cracked it. I’ve come up with a better solution than staying awake 24 hours a day. I've put traps around the house to trip up the burglars, a neat little trick I learned from my mother who used to do it to catch us coming home after curfew. This way, just in case I drop off briefly, the thieves will fall over folded garden chairs as they enter, sending them crashing to the quarry tiles (the chairs, not the burglars. Though actually that would work too). If that doesn’t scare them off, they will have to negotiate their way around a trail of marbles, various toy farm buildings and Barbie’s camper van (oh yes, even Barbie and Ken camp in our family). At which point they will discover that the interior door is locked and bolted from the far side and the only other entry is blocked by the dog’s bed. I'm working on the theory they won't know he's a big pansy. Who needs an alarm?

Talking of alarms, I’ve just noticed it’s about an hour until I have to get the girls up for school. So, now of course, I will fall into the deepest possible sleep known to mankind just in time for the alarm to go off………