Our obsession with the mechanism of sleep has become as bad and boring as Freud and Jung encouraging everyone to think their dreams are interesting. Jumping on the zeitgeist bandwagon, HarperCollins has published Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasure of Sleep and Dreams, while the BBC has just screened a documentary series called The Trouble With Sleep. Advertisements bombard us with images of Botox-smooth, cupid-lipped women slumbering amidst the graceful drapes of Persil-white sheets as radiantly and readily as their waking selves make cups of instant coffee for handsome neighbours. Any fool with money can buy sexual favours, but the richest billionaire cannot guarantee himself a cure for insomnia.We have become a nation of sleep fetishists, filling our homes with designer bedsteads, scented candles and soothing whale music, even though the luxury of a person’s bedroom tends to be in inverse proportion to the time they spend there. Sleep has become complicated and elusive at the same rate that sex has become easy and available. A recent, tell-us-the-bleedin’-obvious, survey revealed that if there were an extra hour in the day most Britons would use it for sleep rather than sex. By the time people realised this propaganda sprang from the same school of intimidation that makes despicable exam candidates demand sheaves of extra paper they never intend to write on, they have children, an ulcer, or a cocaine habit.
Why go to bed when you can phone America, learn Russian or play poker? My generation was reared on the legend that Margaret Thatcher could get by with four hours kip, ergo: sleep is for wimps. Nowadays sleep is a luxury commodity – a self-indulgent interruption of our jam-packed schedules. If you’re a student, MCC member or Mexican, you’re probably saying, “Hey man, why the frantic lifestyle? Learn to chill.” But most working adults will have turned a bilious shade of green as they realise I’m the lucky liddle lady who hit the sleep jackpot.Sleep used to be something people did because the sun had gone down and nobody had thought to invent electricity or a 24-hour Tesco. I still can’t fathom it – all I know is that I’m no longer taken in by their spotty, dotty, nursery-rhyme persona.)
But 30 consecutive days of 20-plus temperatures are as nothing to my very own swaggering, June statistic: last month I averaged 10 hours sleep a night. I remember seeing whole bushes flushed red with the brutes and learning that a frustrated ladybird can give an eight-year-old a nasty nip (Don’t ask me how. The weather men tell us that June was the hottest since the apocalyptically sizzling summer of 1976, when a plague of ladybirds overran the land. By comparison, Mr Duncan Smith, though not as clever – in fact not clever at all – is rather more promising material, except that he is very bald
More from Alan Watkins.
For did he not play the organ? And where was his wife? It was with a shout of relief that Central Office discovered his interest in sailing and, by various means, exalted this hobby to heroic stature At the 1970 election no one gave him a chance. Mr Heath, as he used to be, was widely thought to be not up to the job Worse: he was supposed to be remote, out-of-touch. Then there is the Bill on hunting, where the Government was defeated by its own side, accepted the defeat but – if Mr Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions is any guide – is unwilling to use the Parliament Acts to force the measure past the Lords.There is a further parallel. These had to be handed over to the High Court because the Commons committees always divided on party lines. Here, by the way, the committee system is once again in danger of bringing itself into disrepute, which is what happened with the committee on the Marconi scandal of 1912 and, earlier, with committees on disputed elections.
By their nature they are no more than parallels; otherwise they would not be parallels but straight lines There was the adventure in Iraq There is the row with the BBC. The same year saw the D-Notice affair, to which I referred last week, and two years later the defeat of the government by its own supporters over his and Barbara Castle’s trade-union proposals in In Place of Strife.There are parallels today. Wilson’s spell of domestic dominance came to an end with the devaluation of 1967. There was an age of Wilson, from his election to the leadership of the Labour Party in 1963 to his resignation as Prime Minister in 1976; just as, before him, there had been ages of Attlee and Macmillan and, after him, of Thatcher and Blair. It is too easily forgotten today how completely Harold Wilson once dominated British politics.
