How do you sleep at night? In the current climate, I mean, lying awake in skin that can’t bear to touch itself, feeling the claustrophobia of your own hot blood. You open the window, only for football chants, foxes shagging and couples on the brink of breaking up to invade your ears and brain. Of all the worst aspects of a heatwave, including men wearing flip-flops at urinals and tattoos you don’t want to see, sleepless nights are right up there.
I should be used to it. All my life, I’ve struggled to sleep. “Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact,” Bertrand Russell said, and it’s true that, like vegans and marathon runners, insomniacs will tend to … let you know. Just as I am now.
The motivation for doing so varies. It can be an alibi, the desire to assure others that you’re not usually this uncharismatic. Alternatively, you might be making a covert toast to your tortured genius; your buzzing brain that just won’t quit. I’ve grown out of this, having realised that 30% of my mental activity in the night is pure flotsam: remembering Danny DeVito used to be a hairdresser for corpses; feeling sad about female ferrets, who die after a year of not having sex; or wondering what sleep is even for and why it hates me. The other 70% is the pointless rehashing of regrets. If I had to caption this picture of myself, sweating and swearing in bed every night, it would be: “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Self-Abuse.” What I’m saying is, I’m not romantically attached to the idea of sleeplessness.
I’ve done all the things you’re meant to. Exercising at night. Not exercising at night. Hot cocoa. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time podcast. None of it makes a difference. Turning the lights down from 7pm and refraining from blue-light devices led to me wandering around the flat bored out of my mind, and bumping into things. At least I’m not alone. From Arianna Huffington’s book on the benefits of shut-eye, to cult-like mattress adverts everywhere, to wearables that track our nightly battles, interest in sleep hygiene has exploded. I use SleepCycle, an app that records my breathing during the night, which isn’t creepy at all, then presents me with a percentage score of how crap I am at it. Graphs of REM cycles missed, how many times I woke up for a whizz, how my sleep trend compares to the local average. I’m obsessed with this pointless information. This technology is a new trail to an old frontier: the mystery of what happens when we’re unconscious. The central secret of ourselves, undiscovered as the ocean.
This is why I’m renouncing sleep hygiene and the search for the perfect evening routine. Although insomnia is a strong force, it has an inbuilt perversity. The only thing that invites sleep is giving up on sleep, deciding instead to read, or get some work done, or hauling yourself out of bed to start your day, no matter how mad the hour. You have to really let go, abandon yourself to your insomnia, before it will release its hold on you. It’s maddening. Not to mention that achieving an ambition by giving up on it flies in the face of our driven, goal-setting, self-improvement age. Somewhere in this fact, I feel, is the secret of what sleep is for. The only problem is, I’m too knackered to work it out.
Anti-Trump protests – a chance to show what a great nation we are
Just a few sleeps until the tent-pole event of the summer: the anti-Trump protests. It’s going to be the best party, the best sport, the best TV. Every step of the pantomime villain’s visit will be crowded with boo-ers, but they won’t be behind him, they’ll be everywhere. If he opens his cat’s bum mouth, there will be roars of disapproval. If he looks to the sky, he will see himself, in blimp form. Oh God, I’m worried he is going to love it.
How to ensure he doesn’t? Since the trip is a “working” visit rather than a state one, it should live up to its name. Make him do the work politicians are usually obliged to: meeting every employee in a packing plant, sitting in on council bylaw debates, going into primary schools and having children of every racial stripe bawl in his ear canal while he smiles weakly for the cameras, which aren’t even on.
Or we should play to our national team strengths. The paparazzi can pioneer “Trumpskirting”, whereby, instead of photographing his face, they focus their flashbulbs exclusively on his hands. Gardeners can share resources, to ensure we have a head-level leaf-blower hanging from every lamppost. Any civil servants he encounters could employ the tactic some women use against sexist catcallers, calmly asking him to repeat himself, over and over, for clarification. Train a magnifying glass on his moronic-ness, until it catches fire in the sun.
We like a divisive demagogue in this country, but crucially, this one isn’t ours. Which means he’s the one thing that can pull us together. From Chartism to Cable Street to the Poll Tax riots, we’ve always given good protest, and this will be our chance to prove ourselves again. It’s coming home, lads.
Ewan McGregor still holds Scotland’s record temperature
The Met Office has rejected Scotland’s claim to their hottest ever day, due to a car parked too close to official thermometers. In the meteorological equivalent of VAR, data from neighbouring stations and a site visit uncovered the potential contaminant. No one knows if this is the equivalent of a six-yard miss, or the boldest attempt at match-fixing ever recorded. It doesn’t matter: Balmy Motherwell’s 33.2 degrees have been given the cold shoulder. Scotland’s hottest temperature will now revert to its former record: Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting.
