At 2am yesterday morning Leo came into my room.

“Mummy,” he announced. “Do you know there are people in my class who think Pele is better than Messi?”

Then he got into my bed and fell asleep, leaving me to ponder his question, along with all the other thoughts that helpfully keep mothers awake in the early hour like will your children ever find true love, or learn to spell properly, or be kidnapped by some evil monster.

Regular readers of this blog will know about me and sleep, they will have read about the fraught relationship we have and know all about the international conspiracy to keep me awake. Now of course they have recruited my son.

I have decided that there is no cure for my insomnia (falling asleep is not the issue by the way, I can fall asleep with great ease, the problem is if I get woken up I then can’t get back to sleep) but there are ways to deal with it.

My father’s advice was never to take sleeping pills but to get up and write instead. Maybe his theory is that if anything can send me to sleep, it is my own prose. I have come up with a less prosaic solution – go to the 24-hour supermarket. This morning I was there at 5.45am, grabbing all the best fruit and veg as they were unpacked and roaming the empty aisles planning our weekend’s fodder.

But I still haven’t worked out who was the better footballer….

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2011