My doctor has stopped the sleeping pills. When I called in to pick up a repeat prescription, I was ready for the usual cursory interview. "Still not sleeping too well?" "I'm afraid not." "Still kept awake by worries?" "That's right." "Any particular worries?" "Not really. General sort of worries." "But you're still taking some exercise?" "Oh yes. Swimming twice a week." "You realise that you can become dependent on these tablets?" "I only use them in emergencies."

It's a script I've learnt by heart over the past three years. But something went wrong last week: all the usual repartee, but then an unexpected denouement. "I've been glancing at your records," said my doctor, patting a slim brown folder next to his Zeneca calendar, "and I notice that the gap between your prescriptions has been getting shorter. I'd like you to conduct a little experiment. Try managing without the tablets for a month. Cut down on the eating and drinking in the evening. Go to bed early. And when in bed practise a few of these relaxation techniques. They might help you forget your worries." He handed me a small booklet with what looked like a sleeping neonate on the cover, and then indicated with a gesture that he had rather more important patients in the waiting room.

Back home, I gloomily contemplated the small brown bottle containing my last two and a half temazepam. It was difficult to believe that I'd been gobbling them down at a faster rate than usual. My rules about their use are very precise. One whole pill is only permitted if I'm still lying awake engulfed by worries at two o'clock on the morning of an important engagement. Otherwise, I restrict myself to a half pill for all those occasions when I wake up worried at four in the morning and know that I'll never fall asleep again. Even if I have been a little more indulgent in recent months, I can still make a meagre bottle of 30 pills last me for the best part of three months. One every three days;120 tiny pills a year. Hardly addiction, your honour.

But now, all of a sudden, I'm back to fighting insomnia on my own, armed only with familiar weapons of failure: half an hour with the latest edition of VAT News; an hour wrestling with pillows as I try to find the foetal position; half a night pretending I'm not interested in going to sleep in the hope that sleep will be sufficiently tempted to creep up and surprise me. Once again, I'm making tea at ten to three in the morning, listening to travel programmes on the World Service at five, plugging my ears with Boots rubber dildos to drown the noise of early morning traffic.

Like all insomniacs, I'm invariably kept awake by non-specific worries. No sooner has my head touched the pillow than free-floating anxieties rise from the mattress like decongestant vapours. The author of my relaxation book was clearly an amateur in such matters. "Find your most comfortable position," he advised glibly, "and then fix your mind on a relaxing scene. Imagine you're lying on a sunlit beach on a desert island. Then let your worries drift away." Drift? My nocturnal worries have roughly the same capacity to drift as laser bullets.

"But you don't have any real worries," said Geoff when I rang to tell him about my predicament. "You were only telling me the other day in The French that you felt happier than you had for years."

"Let's get this right, for once and for all," I told him. "An insomniac doesn't need real worries." An insomniac is the anguished personification of that old Jewish telegram: "Start worrying. Details follow."

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