I note from some of your other posts that you’re a fan of Up All Night. A fellow believer! I’ve been listening to the dulcet tones of Rhod Sharp on Up All Night ever since I can remember – certainly during my university days I was probably listening to an hour or two every night minimum before I was able to get to sleep, and would quite frequently listen to the whole thing – a mixture of the serious, the quirky, and the downright fascinating, but never less than compelling.

It’s a bit like a secret society – no-one I know listens to it, for the obvious reason that they’re all asleep. I shudder to think how many hundreds of hours I’ve listened to, and how many interesting facts, stories and chats with foreign correspondents I’ve heard and forgotten by the next morning.

And so, often (these days) am I. Again for what it’s worth, I found that when I had to get up every morning to go to work, pretty soon my sleeping problems – well, didn’t exactly vanish, but subsided pretty quickly. I’m just too tired to stay up that late these days, certainly most weeknights. I’m still awful in the mornings, and there are still days when I put on the radio, wait to go to sleep, only to find myself still awake at 3am and eyeing the alarm clock nervously.

If you only have to get up early on the odd morning – I don’t know what your circumstances are – then it’s maybe a bit different – your sleep pattern of, say, 6am to lunchtime is pretty ingrained, and getting up early for work is just disruptive and makes you feel like shit. But over the course of 5 days a week, 48-odd weeks a year, staying awake into the small hours is just not sustainable – eventually tiredness kicks in and off you go.

And before you know it, you’re Johnny Punchclock, and you don’t watch films that come on after 11pm because they’ll end too late, and you’ve turned into your grandad and you’re only 25…

Is that the time? Gosh, better turn in – back to work on Thursday…