Real life | 16 July 2015

Insomnia has a lot to answer for. I have not been sleeping well for years but a few months ago I stopped sleeping at all. By that I don’t mean I sleep a little bit. I mean I sleep never. And since I stopped sleeping, I have been teetering on a knife-edge. It is, I can reveal, barely possible to behave in accordance with the law if you have had no sleep for a significant time. I suspect a large proportion of the prison population just needed a sleeping pill to make them into responsible citizens.

As for women’s prisons, they must be jam-packed with menopausal desperados needing HRT whose GPs wouldn’t stop their night sweats because of a sadistic NHS directive saying that since HRT is linked with an infinitesimally small risk of cancer, doctors should not prescribe it without sending you to an HRT clinic, the waiting list for which is six months.

My doctor has been telling me about this for years. Every time I go in and say, ‘Help me! Please! Give me the patches!’ she reassures me that being menopausal is preferable to getting cancer. And would I like an appointment at the clinic, to assess my options, in six months’ time? ‘Options? Options?’ I gasp. ‘I’m in no fit state to assess my options! I’m probably going to be dead in a ditch in six months’ time!’ And I walk out of the surgery, determined to go private. Then I become indignant about all the tax I’ve paid, and resolve to power on without medication, with dubious results.

The other day, you may remember, I ‘mislaid’ my car key at the stable yard after ‘taking it’ to the car and ‘losing it’ in the boot. Three hours later, with every item in the Volvo laid out on the grass verge as in a crime scene, and at least one of the back seats broken after I’d torn them all off their hinges to search between the gaps, I discovered that I had left the key in a drawer in a storeroom.