Diary – 16 February 2008

This week I have been prey to a prolonged bout of insomnia induced, I suspect, by the fact that I stay up to watch the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight and, invariably, one or the other contains an item which so disturbs me that my brain continues churning into the small hours. Despair at the way the country now seems to be heading lies just below the surface of our everyday lives like the herpes simplex virus, ready to erupt at any given moment. For insomniacs it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, as Scott Fitzgerald put it at his most manic, and I finally resort to breaking a 10mg Temazepam tablet in half and then have a panic wondering if this is the start of a new addiction (I gave up a lifelong love of cigarettes two years, two months and five days ago).

The plus side is that my sleepless nights have given me a belated opportunity to make the acquaintance of the late James Lees-Milne’s diaries.