IF YOU are reading this before eight o'clock in the morning, do yourself a favour - go back to bed. We are apparently not getting enough sleep. According to a new survey, so many of us are groping through our days in a haze of exhaustion that it's reached epidemic proportions and is costing the NHS more than £633m a year.

We're all trying to do too much, using every hour of the day, juggling jobs, home, leisure and then sitting up until the early hours watching mucky films on Channel 5. It can't go on.

I thought that on Monday morning at half past six as I was driving through floods and a snow storm to go swimming. Is this natural? Is this normal behaviour? Is this what human beings were designed to do? Of course not. I should have been home in bed asleep. But somehow we've made ourselves feel guilty if we don't use every hour of the day. We've become 24-hour-a-day people. Work all day, party all night, shop on the way home, go to the gym at dawn and fit in the housework in any available moments. No wonder that at some point during the day we have this overwhelming urge to crash out and grab a little snooze. (Supermarket car parks are my downfall. One sight of the trolley and the checkout queue and the thought of schlepping up and down those aisles just makes me want to put my head down on the steering wheel and have a little kip.)

I'm sure people used to get lots more sleep in the olden days, especially in the winter. What else was there to do? Oh I know, we have all these folk tales of people having sing-songs round the piano and stitching samplers or engraving the Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice, but I bet most of the time, when it was dark and cold and they were fed up of warming their hands round the solitary candle, they just gave up and went to bed. And quite right too. And when TV ended with the Epilogue and the national anthem at 10.30pm, that was as good as a cup of cocoa for a nation which would obediently turn in for its regulation eight hours.

Sleep deprivation makes us lethargic and irritable. It makes us careless at our jobs and ratty with other people. It adds enormously to the increasing stress of everyday modern life. Therefore - purely in the interest of the greater good, you understand - we owe it to everyone else to get more sleep. Early nights, lie-ins and maybe - just to be sure - a little siesta after lunch. With luck, by the time we wake up it'll be spring.

ONE of the arguments in favour of releasing Jamie Bulger's killers is that if they were to continue their sentences in a Young Offenders' Institution, it would undo all the substantial progress the boys have already made. YOIs are said to be little more than finishing schools for hardened young criminals, 77 per cent of whom re-offend within two years of their release. Never mind Venables and Thompson, with a record like that surely we should be asking why ANYONE is sent there.

IT HAS now been revealed that Winston Churchill didn't make those great rousing wartime speeches after all. He wrote them, yes, and spoke them in the House of Commons, but they were actually recorded for broadcast by actor Norman Shelley, who did a very passable imitation of the great man. Norman Shelley in later years was Colonel Danby in The Archers. But long before that he was Captain Brass in Toytown (you know, the one with Larry the Lamb and Good Morning Mr Ma-a-a-yor). But perhaps his greatest role was that of Winnie the Pooh. He was so convincing, apparently, that colleagues even began to confuse him with the character he played. Reassuring, isn't it, that it was a Bear of Very Little Brain who broadcast those stirring speeches? No wonder we won the war.

Flooded roads usually mean that most sensible and polite people take it in turns to drive in the centre of the road where the water's at its shallowest. So why is there always one idiot - usually in a 4x4 complete with bull bars - who jumps the queue, speeds through the deepest bit and sends a tidal wave over the rest of us. One day that water's going to be deeper than they thought and the rest of us will creep carefully past the stalled bully chortling our revenge at last. I live in hope.

A FRIEND in Texas, where the legal age for drinking alcohol is 21, rang to say that her son, aged 20, had been done for underage drinking. This being the Land of the Free, he appeared in court in shackles. A bit drastic, admittedly, and heartbreaking for a mother to watch.

But I can't help thinking it would sort out a few town centres in this country on a Friday night.