SOME of the albums in this corridor of old discs are duplicated in the CD collection. Others slump in the vinyl queue, waiting to be rediscovered. Chappo hasn’t been listened to in years but proves a rewarding rediscovery.

Roger Chapman was the vocalist with Family, usually described as a progressive rock band, and probably now remembered only by a few fans. Known for their manic intensity, the band were around from 1967 until 1973 – ancient history, I know – and Chapman then span off into Streetwalkers. Chappo was Chapman’s first solo album, released in 1979 (slightly less ancient history).

What quickly becomes apparent again, crackling back over the years, is that Roger Chapman has a striking voice, as idiosyncratic as his famed stage performances with Family. It’s a strong vocal instrument marked by what you might call a gravelly vibrato. He sounds as if he carried on drinking whatever harsh liquids Joe Cocker rejected as being too risky for the throat. He has a touch of Feargal Sharkey about him, too.

Chapman himself has said: “I thought I was just singing like Little Richard or Ray Charles” – something that would have been news to both gentlemen, at a guess.

Chappo has ten tracks and is therefore a game of musical five-a-side, and two of the songs feature the word “night” unfortunately rendered as “nite”. Many of the songs are written by Chapman, some are collaborations, and one is a rock’n’roll classic, a fantastic rendition of the Leiber and Stoller song I Keep Forgettin’ – complete with a sterling saxophone solo by Ron Asprey (a founding member of the Yorkshire fusion duo Back Door and a jazz name in his day).

First up is Midnite Child which shows Chapman’s commanding gravel-truck voice off to great effect, as does Moth To A Flame. Shape Of Things opens with the enjoyably preposterous lyric “Crazy night bordello’s in the heart of town/Me in my tuxedo you a pretty gown…”

Side two opens with another rearranged night in Who Pulled The Nite Down, followed by Always Gotta Pay In The End – the strongest flipside songs, as everything trails off slightly after that.

I’d almost forgotten this album but feel happy to have met up again. Chapman sounds great, the songs are nearly all good, and the musicians are hard-working, old-school rock and jazz players.

Roger Chapman carried on recording and releasing solo material after Chappo, and is still singing today, aged 76. On the cover of Chappo, as you can see above, he is wearing an absurd red boiler suit, with matching red shoes, and looks to me like a cut-price and rather self-conscious Phil Collins impersonator.

The John Wayne stance… or is it more Blackadder

THIS morning I am caught between House of Lords reform and the John Wayne stance.

Let’s start with the serious, non-cowboy bit. The Brexit-besotted newspapers are flapping their arms about the Upper House, after Brexit defeats in the House of Lords. The Daily Mail turns the gas to full beneath its steamy kettle of a headline generator – “House of unelected wreckers.”

Above that is one of those shouty narrative sub-headings: “Make no mistake, the Remainer elite – in cahoots with Brussels – is fighting a guerrilla war against Brexit using any weapon it can.”

The Sun declares that unelected peers have become “a cancer eating away at our democracy” while a headline in the Express accuses peers of “Brexit sabotage”.

As it happens, the Brexit-bonkers press are right about this, but for the wrong reason. The trouble lies in the bulging eyes of their stare. They’re only shouting now about the unelected second chamber because the Lords are being obstructive about Brexit. Most of the time they couldn’t care less; and if the Lords are obediently nodding through policies of which they approve, they are happy to leave the unelected alone.

Imagine for a moment that the Lords had been reformed long ago and that the members of the second chamber had all been elected. It is possible that such a democratic body could still be asking awkward questions about Brexit. For there are many awkward questions to ask.

It is worth remembering, not that it gets us anywhere, that the referendum result was a narrow squeak of a victory for leave; and that ever since, a small majority has been over-sold as “the voice of the people” and other such blatant exaggerations.

Allied to this, the believers swallowed their own propaganda about how easy Brexit would be. And then promptly fell into the real world to discover that it was and is going to be an endlessly complicated slog with unforeseeable outcomes.

The main reform of the Lords was the Life Peerages Act of 1958 – until then the Lords was stuffed with hereditary peers placed there purely by privilege. But replacing privilege with patronage brings its own problems. Prime ministers often use elevation to the Lords as a sort of political golden watch for party time-servers who shuffle off to chunter in a higher place.

Mrs Maybe would surely have created a few more Brexit-leaning lords if she wasn’t in such a weak and perilous position.

The last main reform came in 1999 when life peerages were frozen. Wholesale reform of the Lords is needed, but not because the Daily Mail is wetting its Y-fronts.

And now to John Wayne. Or Sajid Javid, the new home secretary. The appointment of a George Osborne acolyte is hardly a sign of strength from Mrs Maybe, but Javid did spend his first day making all the right noises about the Windrush scandal.

His statements were only undone by the way he condemned what had happened while seeming surprised that his party could have had any responsibility at all for such an appalling affair.

Javid was photographed with his legs wide apart. This Tory power stance has been adopted to a pleasing degree of mockery by various ministers, including Osborne in his Treasury days.

The Mail referred to this as Javid’s “John Wayne stance”; it’s a thing, go and Google it. According to the BBC’s round-up of the papers, people on Twitter are instead comparing Javid’s curious gait to that of the vain Prince Regent in Blackadder.

Go compare: I know which version I prefer.

AMBER Rudd has pressed the self-eject button, causing a rash of awful puns in this morning’s newspapers, including “Oh Ruddy hell” from the usually supportive Sun and “Good Ruddance” from the reliably hostile Mirror.

Rudd quit as home secretary after her appearance before the home affairs select committee last week. She told MPs on the committee: “We don’t have targets for removals”. A series of leaks and counterclaims then suggested that there were indeed home office targets for the removal of illegal immigrants – and that Rudd had boasted of in a leaked letter to Theresa May written in 2017. In this letter, uncovered by the Guardian, Rudd said she wished to increase deportations by ten per cent.

In her resignation letter, Rudd says that she “inadvertently misled” the committee when answering questions “on Windrush”.

In writing her goodbye letter, she even remembers to attach the word “scandal” after Windrush. Yes, Amber, it was a scandal and remains a scandal, and a shameful low point in our history and our politics.

But does securing Rudd’s scalp help? Would it have been better for her to have stayed to sort out the heartless mess? Her supporters thought so, including Michael Gove, who valiantly stood up for Rudd on the BBC Today programme. Maybe that was an omen: when Gove sticks up for you, the end is nigh and all that.

What troubles me at times like this is that hunting down a weakened minister is a blood sport much loved by the Opposition and by the newspapers.

To an extent, fair enough – a bloodied muzzle is the nature of the game. But does it make the problems any better; will Rudd’s replacement be someone equally as dire or quite possibly far worse? Mrs Maybe doesn’t exactly have a full pack of cards for a forced reshuffle. Now, to add to those awful puns, she is Rudderless.

Many commentators have observed that Theresa May was using Amber Rudd as a human shield. Now she’s lost that protection and looks weaker. A trail of nasty ideological breadcrumbs leads from the Windrush scandal all the way to Theresa May’s time as home secretary, so if Rudd has had to go, that leaves May fully exposed to take the blame.

While scalp-hunting can be unattractive, we must hand it to the Guardian, and to reporter Amelia Gentleman, for the tireless reporting that exposed the human cost of the Windrush scandal.

Sometimes on a day blowy with cynicism it is possible to wonder at the point of journalism with its squabbles and partialities and in-fighting.

Then you are reminded of the power of reporting – proper, focused and in this case humane reporting that goes after one story until it is properly told and fully exposed. Amelia deserves every award that is coming her way, but I suspect she is more concerned with making sure that the story of the Windrush generation continues to be told, along with other stories wrapped up in our stubborn and unkind attitudes towards immigration.

Oh, and all that complicated stuff about Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook data scandal? That was a Guardian/Observer story too, pursued relentlessly by another single-minded reporter, Carole Cadwalladr. Carole was working away on that knotty tale for a year or more before the fizzing blue fuse really ignited.

How uplifting to be reminded of the power of a good reporter.

A post from a Facebook friend complains about those moments in TV dramas when a key plot development is contained in a text message shown too briefly to read.

The example given was in The Split on BBC1, the latest drama from Abi Morgan (writer of, among much else, The Hour – much missed by this viewer).

Morgan’s latest is a six-part series about an emotionally fraught divorce lawyer called Hannah Stern, played by Nicola Walker (above) and her immaculate new hairstyle. Ruthless and fragile in equal measure, Hannah is another compelling turn from Walker, who rarely puts a foot wrong, although she does pick a lot of scripts from the miserable box.

And, yes, that plot device is annoying for those of us who are either getting on a bit or habitually inattentive – “Sorry, what just happened then? What did that say?”

Here are some other televisual annoyances and observations…

ONE: The sudden switch in time of day in a drama. This one really bugs me. One moment it is bright afternoon, the next it is midnight.

A good/bad example arises in the last episode of Come Home, the recent Belfast-based drama on BBC1 in which Christopher Eccleston carries off the local accent to admirable effect, at least to these ears.

At a key point in this good but gloomy drama – no plot spoilers – Eccleston’s character storms off in bright daylight. Moments later he is storming around in darkness.

He hasn’t been gone for hours or anything, it is just that the producer/director/annoying person who makes these decisions presumably thought a night shot would look good.

This happens all the time, believe me, and once you start to look out for it, you’ll be condemned to join me on the grumbly end of the sofa.

TWO: Those silly graphics that pop up every night on the BBC news. As soon as a reporter pauses by a blank wall or whatever, you know the moving hand of the graphics department is about to scrawl all over that space.

The reporter stands there pointing at nothing, and then back in the studio the graphic artists fill in the blanks with surplus information. I never read a word as I am too busy being cross.

THREE: Subtitles. No, not those – I love those BBC4/Walter Presents subtitles. Heavens, what a lot of dramas with subtitles there are to watch. I particularly enjoy the Channel 4 spin-off channel. It might almost be called Walter Presents Just for Julian On His Day Off.

So, not those subtitles but the ones you get on the news or in documentaries when someone has a slight accent, so everything they are saying is also put in subtitles. Apart from anything else, how insulting is that? The inference is that the person is too ‘foreign’ or too ‘regional’ to understand, yet often what they are saying is perfectly easy to follow.

FOUR: The TV Presenter’s Blank Face. This is something you will often see on the local news. I hope I am not being rude here, as there is no way I could do that job, but once spotted, this is hard to put out of your mind.

It usually happens because news magazine shows are presented by two people. You might think that speaking would be the hard part, but my suggestion is that it’s the staying silent that’s difficult.

What are you to do with your face? Do you stare at your fellow presenter or look at the camera? Gazing at your co-host can be awkward in inadvertently suggesting a degree of adoration, while staring at the camera risks the blank face.

Often the answer is that you look serious in the serious items, then crack a smile and an inane remark in the lighter moments, perhaps just before you simper, cross your legs and tease the weather man.

No names and all that, but if you watch you’ll know.

I am sure other things annoy me on television, but that’s your lot for now.

DOES it matter if children have trouble reading a traditional clock? It does if you are the editor of the Sun, who this morning leads his newspaper with a story alleging that schools are removing “old clocks” from exam halls as children “can’t tell the time”.

The front page features a clock face overlaid with the words “THICK TOCK”.

Having spent plenty of time reading and writing headlines, I’d say that one is a classic, but not in a good way. It will have seemed clever at the time, taking tick-tock and adding the letter ‘h’ to produce a punning headline that sums up the story.

So what’s wrong with that? In terms of wordplay, nothing much, I guess. It’s just that the Sun is shouting that our children are thick. I think that’s offensive but, hey, that’s the problem with being a liberal softie – you just fall into the terrible habit of taking these things seriously.

The story, such as it is, is based on a teacher telling a conference that pupils do not have time for analogue watches as they rely on their mobile phones to tell the time. A-level and GCSE students are said to have complained that trying to read the clock wasted valuable time in exams and sometimes caused confusion about how long they had left.

Does it matter if schools replace old clocks with digital clocks? Not one bit is the sensible answer. But the Sun calls on an outraged Tory MP to fume a bit (other fulminating MPs are available).

Rob Halfon, who chairs the Commons Education Committee, chunters: “This should be an alarm call. All children should learn to tell the time traditionally. It’s incredibly important. It teaches them numbers, order and how the world works.”

The thing is, it doesn’t teach them how their world works. If they don’t wear watches and use their mobile phones, a clock face is alien to them.

Now I love a clock face and always wear a traditional watch. I don’t feel properly dressed without it, and it’s true that there is a sort of beauty in the simplicity of the minute hand and the hour hand.

But I’m not sure it’s about numbers so much as shapes. A glance at a traditional clock face lets you know the time because of the way the arms are arranged, and the numbers back that up.

But children who are confused by traditional clock faces aren’t thick; they just see the world differently.

Incidentally, do you think Mr Halfon really said, “This should be an alarm call” or were those words fed to him? People quoted in tabloid newspapers do sometimes end up speaking tabloid-ese.

Front-page headlines can be more offensive than the Sun’s pun about clocks, of course. Yesterday, the editor of the Daily Express told MPs that some of his newspaper’s front pages were “downright offensive”, made him feel “very uncomfortable” and had contributed to an “Islamophobic sentiment” in the media.

The Guardian ran with the headline: “Daily Express editor calls its front pages ‘downright offensive’” – a true reflection of the story, if a little cheeky.

Gary Jones only took over as editor of the Daily and Sunday Express a month ago, and the past front pages he was disparaging had been produced under a different editorial regime.

“Cumulatively, some of the headlines that have appeared in the past have created an Islamophobic sentiment which I find uncomfortable,” said Jones.

“It is my responsibility to ensure content is accurate and newspapers don’t look at stereotypical views that may or may not be around in the general public. I should be held to account and be answerable.”

Heavens, next thing you know the editor of the Mail will be saying that his front pages down the years have been corrosive and hateful. But don’t bet your clock on it.

AMBER Rudd must be thrilled by the arrival of Unnamed Prince Baby (when the solid English name is announced, please feel free to slot it in here).

The latest Windsor arrival is splashed all over the front pages and wrapped up in souvenir supplements – eight pages in the Daily Telegraph, one inky sheet for every royal pound.

So soon out of the womb and duty already being done. Congratulations, young sir. You have swept away nearly all the stories about the hasty climbdown in the Windrush scandal.

Scandal is a word much bandied around by newspapers. Here it is used perfectly correctly. Sorry is a word rarely muttered in politics. Here it is being muttered through clenched teeth, don’t you think?

Even in attempting to wrap up this whole shameful episode, the home secretary still strikes the wrong note. “I want the Windrush generation to get British citizenship,” she said in her Commons statement. She ‘wants’ them to have something they already thought they’d got. Something everyone told them they had, until the rules were changed behind their backs, all in the name of trying to look tough on immigration.

Rudd said in the chamber: “This is a failure by successive governments to ensure these individuals have the documentation they need and this is why we must urgently put it right.”

Oh, Amber – you don’t need to go around blaming ‘successive governments’ as the one you represent will do nicely. The link between this scandal and Mrs Maybe’s hostile environment policy towards immigration is without dispute.

The breadcrumb trail of this scandal leads back to your boss’s days as home secretary – or Go-Home-Secretary, as I like to call her, in honour of those vans she sent around north London bearing posters telling illegal immigrants to do just that.

At this point, I would like to make two apologies. The first is to heartless bureaucracy, as previously blamed for causing this scandal. On reflection, you are not to blame, even if those carrying out your orders clearly lack a heart. But we shouldn’t blame heartless bureaucracy – we should blame the politics behind the bureaucracy, heartless politics if you prefer. That’s what this scandal is about.

I hope that heartless bureaucracy will accept my apology.

The second apology is due to Amber Rudd.

In an earlier blog, I inadvertently suggested that it was tough to carry the can for your boss who caused this whole mess. I now understand, according to a story in Saturday’s Guardian, that you boasted in a private memo to Theresa May that you had ambitious plans to be even tougher on immigration than she was.

I am truly sorry for accidentally showing you in a better light than you deserved. And I will try never again to suggest that you might in any way be the teeniest bit liberal in your thinking.

This should all be natural territory for the Labour Party, if Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t still trying to pull his wellies from the mud of alleged anti-semitism. In fairness, Labour has made all the right noises about the Windrush scandal, but the lingering accusations of anti-semitism stain its moral superiority.

The swell of support for the Windrush generation reflects another side to the endless rows about immigration. Too many Britons oppose immigration when it is represented in the abstract or portrayed merely as a faceless threat, but they soften when faced with an identifiable group of people, such as the ageing and elderly members of the Windrush generation.

But if our policy towards that group was so wrong, doesn’t that suggest that our whole immigration policy is wrong?

There has always been a good liberal case for immigration, and Labour should always make that case.

HERE is one of music’s most precocious calling cards, slapped down by George Ivan Morrison in 1968 when he was 23.

Morrison’s solo debut after his days with Them is mystical, folky, loosely jazzy, and hard to put in a box (apart from the one marked ‘Van having a wander’).

Astral Weeks has a sort of impenetrable strangeness and that is one reason the album has survived to entrance and baffle new generations of listeners.

It was recorded at a time when record companies were becoming wary of albums that cost a fortune and took months. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper was six months in the making at a then-astronomical cost of £40,000.

Warner Bros wanted a brisker return for their buck and Van laid down this enchanting, transcendent and occasionally patchy album in two days in New York’s Century Studios.

The musicians hired for the job were dependable jazz players: drummer Connie Kay from the Modern Jazz Quartet, bassist Richard Davis (ex-Miles Davis) and guitarist Jay Berliner, who had played with Charlie Mingus. The strings and horns were added later.

As for that strangeness, don’t go expecting much in the way of guidance from the man himself.

Van’s comments and thoughts about Astral Weeks have never cleared anything up, either intentionally or because he doesn’t know or doesn’t wish to explain (fair enough: nothing wrong with a spot of mysteriousness).

The title song opens the album and sets the misty scene with the words: “If I venture in the slipstream…” Astral Weeks is one of three great songs on the album that bears its name – “stream of consciousness things”, according to Van. The other two are Cyprus Avenue and Madame George.

Cyprus Avenue was a prosperous, tree-lined road in Belfast down which it is said the young Van used to wander deep in thought; or possibly kicking stones while frowning. It remains a deeply resonant song, a hymn to the past and to a sense of place.

Greatest of them all is Madame George, a brooding trance of a song, as much a mood as anything else. And, again, don’t to Van for clues. He once said the song “was about six or seven different people, who couldn’t find themselves in there if they tried”.

On another occasion he helpfully said the song was “like a Swiss cheese sandwich”; thanks for that, Van.

Listened to again now, through the crackle of badly kept vinyl, Astral Weeks remains a wonder and a conundrum. At times it’s a tricky listen: Morrison may have turned into a great singer, but his voice here can sound harsh and strident.

The Way Young Lovers Do is a cheerful blast that recalls his time with Them, while Ballerina and Slim Slow Rider veer towards being filler songs.

Some critics said this was Morrison’s Blonde On Blonde, but not everyone liked the album on its release. Nick Logan for NME dismissed songs that weren’t “particularly distinguished, apart from the title track, and suffer from being stuck in one groove throughout”.

Oh, I’ve been stuck in that one groove for years now, and still find it a rewarding place to sit and try to puzzle it all out.

This blog was written after a lifetime of listening and with the invaluable help of Patrick Humphries’ little CD-shaped book, The Complete Guide to the Music of Van Morrison, published in 1997 by Omnibus Press.

HERE is an unapologetic apology to Theresa May.

Yesterday’s Man On Ledge suggested in passing, and possibly strongly, that Theresa May as home secretary bore some personal responsible for destroying landing card slips from the Windrush generation immigrants in 2010. These documents dated to the 1950s and 1960s and their destruction removed the last remaining proof of when a person arrived in Britain.

This information about the 2010 date of the documents being destroyed came from an unreliable source, as reported widely; that unreliable source was the government, which said those were the dates.

Yesterday in PMQs, Mrs Maybe sprung a fast one on Jeremy Corbyn, by claiming that the decision to destroy the documents took place in 2009 under a Labour government. This was news to the Labour leader – and immigration ministers in power at the time.

When asked about the confusion, Mrs Maybe said the 2010 date had been based on the available information at the time, or something. Well, dip me in the cynicism vat, but how’s this for a theory? Could the government spin merchants have known about the two dates all along, and given out the ‘wrong’ date on purpose, so that Corbyn arrived at PMQs armed with a duff deck of cards?

Whatever the case, and whether the decision was indeed taken by Mrs Maybe while she was home secretary or not, as some still maintain, this was a cheap shot when set against the matter being discussed. That British citizens from the Windrush generation who have lived here for 50 years should fear they are about to be deported thanks to heartless immigration bureaucracy is not a matter for political stunts of the you-said-he-said variety. When a prime minister of whatever party stoops to such yah-boo-suckery, politics just looks shabby.

It’s no good making a robotic apology one moment and then using the misery of the mistreated citizens you have just apologised to as a political football in a Westminster playground kick-around.

Anyway, the hostile stance towards immigration has been and remains a hallmark of Theresa May’s since 2010. And the Windrush scandal shows where such heartless intransigence can lead.

As for PMQs, from the snatches seen online and on TV, Theresa May just about pulled victory from the chomping jaws of defeat. That such a hopeless political performer can still derail Jeremy Corbyn, who’s meant to be good at this stuff, is surely a worry for Labour. And Corbyn did make a classic mistake: he asked a firm question (about that 2010 date) to which he did not know the answer.

Schoolboy error, as they say.

MOOD music – that’s what the Windrush scandal is all about. And the tunes have been jarring and horribly discordant, until yesterday’s belated apology from Theresa May.

That’s an apology from the woman who lay the foundations for this heartless mess during her tenure as home secretary; the cold-eyed technocrat who introduced the hostile immigration environment.

This is what lies behind the bureaucratic nightmare that saw long-time British citizens in some cases threatened with being deported ‘back’ to countries they haven’t lived in or possibly even visited in half a century.

Mrs Maybe apologised to leaders of Caribbean heads of government and promised that no one would be deported. Here she is in sorry mode: “I take this issue very seriously. The home secretary apologised in the House of Commons yesterday for any anxiety caused. And I want to apologise to you today. Because we are genuinely sorry for any anxiety that has been caused.”

No mention of genuine sorrow for being the architect of this appalling affair – but a solid mention for the present home secretary. Now I don’t much like Amber Rudd, but she is being forced here to clear up a mess of her boss’s making, and that’s never a fair position to be in.

Along with Mrs Maybe’s belated statement of remorse comes further shaming news. We learn today that in 2010 the decision was taken to destroy the landing card slips that recorded the arrival date of Windrush immigrants, dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. This removed the last remaining proof of when a person arrived.

And who was home secretary at the time? Yes, Theresa May.

Mood music again. The treatment of the Windrush generation – something even the Daily Mail today condemns – is alarming EU citizens who live here and have been feeling fearful ever since the Brexit vote.

The3million campaign group represents EU citizens in the UK. Yesterday it met the immigration minister Caroline Nokes to discuss how the Home Office was going to handle online applications for “settled status” after Brexit. It is reported no reassurance was offered over whether EU citizens would ever find themselves in the same position as the Windrush generation.

Surely mostly people must know someone from the EU who is a long-term resident in Britain; someone who plays a vital role professionally and socially in the fabric of this country; someone who adds to what should be a hopeful, inclusive, outward-looking Britain.

We certainly have a friend who falls into that category. And the anxiety caused to her and other such EU citizens working here is another sort of disgrace caused by the mood music on immigration.

Brexit wasn’t meant to be about immigration, but the issue was dragged centre-stage by the usual suspects. Today the Daily Express, chief warbler for the Brexit besotted, lays into former chancellor George Osborne over ‘project fear’, in other words his warnings about Brexit.

“SO JUST HOW ACCURATE WAS PROJECT FEAR THEN?” shouts a headline heralding a bit of an economic upturn.

Somehow the Express forgets to find space for the Global Future think-tank report – the one finding that each of the government’s four Brexit scenarios will cost British taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds every week.

Sorry to spoil the tattered tea party, but Brexit hasn’t happened yet. In language Express readers may understand, if nothing else Brexit is a wait-and-see pudding. It’s not been plonked on the plate yet. And everyone is still arguing over how to split the bill.

HERE’S something I’ve learned: you don’t want to sleep with Mariella Frostrup.

I am not being indiscreet here, just passing on an under-the-duvet incident Mariella shares in her advice column in the Observer magazine.

“Driven to the edge of sanity by his snoring, I kicked my husband,” she says.

Mariella was answering a dilemma from a reader whose partner has “very different sleeping habits”.

When this flashed up on Facebook, I worried my wife had been writing to Mariella. Turning to the proper paper magazine, I find the letter is from a man who feels his new partner is ruining his sleep. “I need a good, solid, uninterrupted nine hours and an early night, otherwise I get extremely irritable,” he writes.

As a man much interrupted, my first thought was: does any grown-up person sleep for nine hours?

I am in the middle of a rough spell.

This one involves going to bed at around 11pm, reading for a while, and then lying there fidgeting for an hour or so listening to my wife breath (she’s an unreasonable woman), the blinds rattle, the cars go by, and heeding the thoughts that turn on at bedtime or perhaps just following the restless roll of my mind.

After a while I go downstairs to the spare room (checking first that we don’t have an Airbnb guest staying) and read again, then lie awake wondering if I can hear anything, read for a little longer, then with luck fall asleep for a few hours.

Sometimes I stay upstairs and switch on the small clip-on light to read, but that wakes my wife up occasionally, and anyway I have become trapped in this cycle of behaviour: feeling the answer lies in sleeping somewhere else.

Features about insomnia are common in newspapers – as numerous as those useless sheep you are supposed to count.

In today’s Guardian there is a long piece about the business of sleep, not in how to do it, but the people turning sleep into big business. There are apps and gizmos to be bought, technological mattresses, sleep trackers and even hi-tech pyjamas. That’s where I am going wrong: low-tech pyjamas.

The feature kicks off with a man called Rockwell Shah, the CEO of Pzizz, an app that is said to use dynamic audio to get you to “sleep at the push of a button”.

For Rockwell, bedtime is a “sleep experience” – and have you noticed how everything nowadays is a something or other experience. There’s probably an undertaker somewhere right now writing up about the benefits of his company’s “death experience”.

The feature points to a recent study in the US that 30% of Americans want a “sleep divorce” – which is to say their own sleeping space. Isn’t this just a modern label for something that always used to happen, at least for those comfortable enough to have their own bedroom?

Funnily enough, Mariella advises the man greedy for good sleep that he should consider having a spare room.

This separation by sleep is not a cause of pride to me. I’d dearly love to sort myself out, but nothing works, other than waiting for a better sleep pattern – one last lasts for a few nights, before the insomnia nudges back under the covers.

According to Dr Guy Meadows, clinical director of the Sleep School in London, “we are in a sleeplessness epidemic” He tells the Guardian: “Tiredness is the new norm.”

It is certainly my new norm – or, rather, my old norm. Meet the new norm – same as the old norm.

Margaret Thatcher used to boast that she needed very little sleep, and Donald Trump makes a similar claim – “I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours…”

Another US president, Bill Clinton, used to get by on four to six hours of shuteye but now says: “Most of the mistakes I made, I made when I was too tired.”

“I did not have sex with that woman… hang on a minute, maybe I did but can’t remember because I was too knackered…”

Or something like that. Today’s blog was powered by an insufficiency of sleep, so I hope it makes sense.