For me, a balanced diet means having both lamb chops and pork sausages in the mixed grill, my regular weightlifting routine involves heaving the unwanted sections of The Sunday Times into the recycling bin and a sensible drinking plan is primarily about making sure I buy enough to take advantage of the mixed-case discount at Oddbins. But in one respect I am a health nut, a willing disciple of the medical profession only too happy to do as I am bidden by the docs.

And that’s when it comes to sleep.

Writing in times2 earlier this week, Penny Wark explained that a good night’s sleep was the best health tonic anyone could be prescribed. And it’s one that I’d willingly take daily. If only I were allowed to, by the females I try to sleep with.

The reason why I suffer, along with so many others, from chronic sleep deprivation also appeared in The Times this week, on the Alpha Mummy blog, where one of the women who shares my bed let rip about the outrageous behaviour of the other female I now regularly sleep with.

My wife has given vent to her concerns about our daughter’s habit of climbing into our bed after we retire, manoeuvring herself into place between us, and then lying at right angles to us so that her head, with every dream, hits my wife slap in the middle of her back while her feet, at random moments, wallop me in the stomach. As nocturnal arrangements go, it’s fractionally less restful than bunking up with Ozzy Osbourne after his tenth Red Bull.

Efforts to persuade our daughter to sleep in her own bed are ongoing at the moment. I’m not saying these are difficult negotiations with a party ruthlessly determined on her own way but, believe me, after dealing with Beatrice, Kim Jong Il would be a pussycat.

Even if we do manage our own equivalent breakthrough, though, the effects of recent events are still being felt. And while our daughter’s invasion of our physical sleeping space is only a relatively recent phenomenon, her incursions into the diminishing space we have in our lifestyles for sleeping appear to have been going on for years now.

I dimly recall what it was like to have an uninterrupted night’s sleep – just as I sort of remember what it was like to undertake a train journey without immediately nodding off, to spend time in a library without finding your head hitting the desk, and to sit through a talk without slumping forward, semiconscious, after about 15 minutes, as if hit by an expertly aimed poison dart.

Any situation that involves me being broadly static for any length of time, or even worse, recumbent, automatically leads to slumber. I have fallen asleep in the car (when my wife was driving) more times than I can count – often in mid-sentence. That’s the middle of my own sentence, I should add.

When my wife once, rather romantically, took me to a spa for a “treatment”, I spent the entire hour (or, for all I know, week) while I was being treated sound asleep. It would have been more cost-effective just to have put me in the car boot for 60 minutes – I could have had my hour of pure relaxation just as easily, nestled next to the welly boots in the back of the Skoda, as wrapped in a towelling gown on an upmarket trestle table.

But even with these snatched moments of sleep I’m still not getting my seven hours a day, and I wonder where the figure comes from which suggests that even that quota is enough. Baroness Thatcher may have needed only five hours a night to keep going, but all the truly impressive people I know need far, far more. Alain de Botton, one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever met, confessed to one newspaper that he tumbled into bed before 10 practically every night to make sure he gets around nine hours rest . . . I also recall reading that my colleague Boris Johnson retires every night straight after the 10pm news, on the same principle.

I vividly remember both those snippets from past profiles because they reinforced my feeling that the seven-hour estimate of sleep required for an adult male was, a bit like the 21-unit limit on drinking, a wild underestimate of what a truly healthy individual needed. In my student days nine hours was the bare minimum I felt I needed to avoid nodding off in lectures (and often even that ration wasn’t enough to stave off a snooze in the middle of Milton so I had to take radical steps – and cut down on my poetry intake to keep myself functioning). As I’ve got older the freedom to spend that amount of time in bed has diminished, and with it my general zing.

In her times2 analysis, Penny reported the experts advising those of us who feel rest-deprived to try power-napping, as Winston Churchill did so effectively. Attractive as the idea is, it has its limitations for most busy professionals but, in one respect at least, I do have an advantage as a Member of Parliament. As far as I know, the House of Commons chamber is one of the last places left where it’s socially acceptable to be seen emulating Churchill.

Increasingly, life is imitating art

Reading the Times investigation into the Association of British Drivers, the shadowy group charged with organising the anti-road-pricing petition, I found myself lamenting the passing of Michael Wharton.

Wharton was the journalistic genius responsible for The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, a reactionary fantasy in which all the follies of the modern age were cruelly yet beautifully satirised. The ABD is a wonderful example of life imitating Wharton’s art. He created the immortal figure of J. Bonington Jagworth, leader of the militant Motorists’ Liberation Front and defender of “the basic right of every motorist to drive as fast as he pleases, how he pleases”.

Pondering the difficulties of the Church of England, the modernist platitudes of Wharton’s other creation, Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, appear eerily prescient. And reading Dr Oliver James explain his theory of affluenza, in which our society’s desire to provide for its children is seen as a form of illness, I am irresistibly reminded of Wharton’s own mythical media psychoanalyst, Dr Heinz Kiosk, who ended every lecture with a triumphant declaration of “We are all guilty!”

Unworthy thoughts

Thinking about affluenza prompts more unworthy thoughts. What does the author of a work critical of getting and spending do with his royalties? Did Naomi Klein object to the use of a logo to market her million-selling anticapitalist work No Logo? If Noam Chomsky really believes that the US Government manipulates the media to “manufacture consent” for its proposals why are his books displayed so prominently in Borders, and why is the only mention of Mark Steyn’s pro-Bush work America Alone, allowed in The New York Times in its listing at the top of the bestsellers table?

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