Singular life
Sweet dreams
Petronella Wyatt
Sleep is the curse of the shirking classes. As winter draws in, which, in this country, is around the middle of October, I feel an irresistible urge to go to bed. Others claim that it is heat that makes them tired, but when the cold weather arrives my endo- morphines go into underdrive and I nod away like a dope-head. Last week I fell asleep during a dinner party. Or rather just after. I had settled on the sofa with my libation, indulging in a bit of harmless crise de foie, when the next thing I knew was that my hostess was pok- ing my arm with her finely manicured index finger. 'Did you realise you had fallen asleep?' she asked.
Of course I hadn't realised I had fallen asleep otherwise I would have taken pains to avoid it. But I can look back to this som- nolence embarrassing my social life all the way up to Christmas. The only person I know who falls asleep during parties with a similar facility is Charles Powell, who once dropped off during lunch. He was sitting next to me.
All my life people have been asking, `How can you sleep so much?' They say this in the sort of horror-struck incredulous tones that might be used to ask, 'How can you commit murder so much?' This is invariably followed up with 'Mrs Thatcher only slept five hours a night.' I am, unfortu- nately, the changeling in a family that believes that sleep is for wimps. But no more. Vindication is at hand. They will have to eat their words. Bow down before me in abject humility and repentance; go forth and sneer no more. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have discovered that not sleeping enough can seriously damage your health. It makes people three times more likely to contract heart disease, for one thing. It causes as many car accidents as too much alcohol. Lack of sleep also leads to colds, depres- sion, diabetes, obesity, strokes and cancer.
I have always suspected that people sleep less than they used to. Before they invented the electric light bulb everyone had to go to bed when it got dark. In winter sleep must have been very long. Now we are up all night watching cable television, fiddling with the Internet or stuffing ourselves with tuna carpaccio in Notting Hill eateries. People think they can catch up on their sleep, but they can't. The report says that the effects of sleep deprivation build up over time. An hour here, an hour there and before you know it you've got cancer. At the very least you're a candidate for the Priory. The Nazis knew about sleep depri- vation. They used it as a form of torture on prisoners from whom they wanted to extract information. They knew tired peo- ple have no mental resistance. Some of my family could never grasp this. Now, when they wake me up, I can bellow, 'You're giving me cancer. If I don't get another hour I'll develop a tumour.' In any case when people say 'get up' in that whimpering-simpering tone that makes you want to knock their teeth out, what is there to get up for? There is far too much point- less activity in the world — what Dr John- son called getting on horseback on a ship. Bertrand Russell had a good take on this in In Praise of Idleness — the book, natural- ly, that has illumined my life. Why, for instance, get out of bed, bleary-eyed, to wipe the kitchen table for the umpteenth time, when, refreshed by a decent amount of sleep, you could ponder the great ques- tions of life, or at least write a best-selling novel?
Getting up because 'it's time you did' is just another Victorian bourgeois conven- tion, showing the lack of imagination that began to lose us our grip on the Empire. Cabinet Mission officials in India rose at 7 while Gandhi stayed in bed until 11. They were too tired to talk to him with any sense. Pitt the Younger didn't get up till noon and he was the pilot who weathered the storm.
Besides, stuff your wrinkle cream, your sunblocks and your Botox injections. Sleep is the true preventative of wrinkles. If Sleeping Beauty had stayed awake she would have looked like an old hag and the prince would have eloped with his male page. There is only one snag in all this good advice. A Scottish report urging the English to go to sleep? I smell a spat.
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