How are your sleep patterns? Perfect, disastrous, or somewhere in between? Mine are somewhere between those two extremes, nearer to “perfect” than “disastrous”. I expect that’s true for most people.

The following 1,360 words are about sleep, leading to a memory about the best hour’s sleep that I have ever had. I’m afraid that the word “sleep” appears rather often, though I have tried to use appropriate synonyms throughout.

Every now and then there’s yet another article in a weekend newspaper along the lines of, “How to get the perfect night’s sleep”, with quotes from “Sleep Experts”. I read it and think, “Can I apply these lessons to my life?” The answer, usually, is no.

Our days and nights do not follow enough of a consistent pattern from month to month to allow for a single, straightforward sleep routine, which seems to be the usual recommendation in those weekend newspaper articles. We are not alone in this. The ideal such routine for an adult male may well be 10pm to 5am. Anyone who is able to follow this is, very simply, not going out at night: no concerts, theatre visits or evening sports events. No open-ended evening meals with friends and family. Anyone who can guarantee an uninterrupted seven hours night after night must be living alone, without family, friends or pets who might disturb their slumber. And that might create a whole different set of issues.

If I have trouble getting to sleep it’s usually because I’m not tired enough. Most nights my wife goes to bed at least an hour before I do and is asleep by the time I turn in. In general I drift off fairly easily. Many years ago my dentist advised me that I grind my teeth in the night. I have a mouth-guard to counteract the effects. Often I doze off before putting my mouth-guard in. Over time this may be endangering the health of my molars, but I wake up knowing that sleep came quickly. Some nights I put the mouth-guard in and I’m still awake 30 minutes later. If it takes me any longer than that, I’ll get up for a while.

I wake in the night, often. My wife gets up to use the loo at least twice a night. I never do. I have a variety of techniques to try and get back to sleep. Sometimes they work. If they don’t, and it’s anytime after 4am, I will get up and spend some time on my laptop. Sometimes that’s the start of my day. Other times I go back to bed an hour or two later, my eyes heavy, and doze until it’s time to get up, 7.30am at the latest on weekdays. In term-time our children, 17 and 19 now, need to be out of the house by 7.45am and 8.30am respectively. Weekends are very different. They will often sleep past noon on Saturday and Sunday, even my daughter. Her days of doing parkruns at 9am are over, for now at least.

I hadn’t planned to give you this biographical detail. Initially I planned just to tell you about the best hour’s sleep that I ever had, but it felt right to put in a bit of context, a summary of where our sleep patterns are right now. In my 20s and 30s they were worse than they are now. This makes the hour that I am about to tell you about so memorable.

It was the weekend of my brother’s wedding. He got married in Spain, as mentioned many times before on these pages, including here. I had just graduated from university. During my final year there I often stayed up all night, at least 12 times during the “Michaelmas Term” (October to December). I was editing a weekly magazine, and no matter how many of us there were at the paste-up, we couldn’t put it to bed before 6am. Most weeks we all ended up back in my rooms for breakfast (porridge, toast, mugs of tea) and I discovered the concept of micro-sleep. If I closed my eyes and drifted off for just a few seconds, blanking out everything around me, I could push on for another 12 hours. Then, around 9pm that evening, I would crash and nothing could keep me awake. I planned my week accordingly.

By the time I got to Spain the following summer I had had enough experience of staying up all night to recognize many of the patterns and feelings, the highs and the lows. We landed at Alicante in the early hours, five of us on the same charter flight from Gatwick. I was the only man in our travelling party. By the time my brother had settled everyone else into their rooms it was getting light. Space was tight at his future in-laws’ apartment. If I wanted to have a kip it would be on the sofa, until one of the beds became free.

My brother and I went for a walk along the seafront and found a late-night or early morning café. We had a coffee. Maybe a brandy too. Neither of us was flagging. He had been in Spain since the previous September, and communication, such as it was, was usually by letter or postcard. I explained why, and how often, I had stayed up through the night during the previous nine months. This was not my first time.

By the time Saturday came around, the day of the wedding, I had not had a decent night’s sleep for at least 96 hours. Most of the people who had travelled from London were in the apartment that my brother had settled the others into on the night of my arrival, including my mother and father. My parents had travelled separately, by car and plane respectively, and had “the master bedroom” to themselves. Everyone else had to make do as best they could. My brother had access to a barely furnished apartment a few streets away from the seafront. It looked and felt like it hadn’t been slept in for months. I spent at least one night there, too tired to worry too much about when the sheets had last been changed.

By 6am on Sunday morning we were still partying, 20 or 30 of us, at a late-night disco. I had no idea where I was going to lay my head. It turned out to be that barely furnished apartment, for a few hours. My brother woke me before 11am. I was sleep-deprived and hungover enough to feel very disoriented. He took me back to his in-laws’ apartment. My need for sleep felt deeper than I had ever known before. I caught up with my parents for the first time since the previous evening.

My father was very keen to get out of the place and have a beer in the bar downstairs. He was flying back to London that evening, after another big celebratory meal at a restaurant about 30 minutes’ drive away. My mother would be driving back separately, with a car full of women. My father didn’t speak any Spanish and didn’t want to go on his own. For once in my life I turned down the offer of a drink with him. I knew that “the master bedroom” was free. I could have an hour or two of deep and possibly uninterrupted sleep. I said something melodramatic, along the lines of, “If I don’t go to sleep in the next few minutes … If I go for a beer now … I will die”. He tried to persuade me otherwise. He was persistent. So was I.

I headed to the bedroom and on this occasion that cliché was appropriate: “I was asleep before my head hit the pillow”. The glass doors out onto the balcony were slightly open. A healthy breeze blew into the room. I slept as deeply as I ever have.

About an hour later my father came into room and woke me. He was overjoyed. He just had to tell me what a great time he had had with a couple of my brother’s friends. They had arrived just in time to accompany him to the bar, and he told me, “It was great. You should have been there”. I knew otherwise. I didn’t need to accompany him. He had had a great time without me. So had my brother’s friends, in his company. He had learnt the Spanish word for “beer”. And I had just had the best hour’s sleep I have ever experienced. I’ll be melodramatic again: it saved my life.

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