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Occasional insomniacs would do well to read this.

On occasion in the evenings, I manage to have a coffee a bit later than I normally would, then go to bed earlier because I need to get up for work the next day. The end result being that I find myself lying in bed wide awake trying to get to sleep.

I’m no fan of taking any sort of tablets to sleep, so clearing one’s mind is usually the best bet. However, when you have nothing else to focus on, just the darkness, that can be easier said than done. My mind is usually whizzing along at a million miles an hour, and I can’t ‘unfocus’ to get to sleep.

But I’ve found a foolproof method. And it seems to work EVERY time. I heard it on the radio a few weeks ago, on Chris Evan’s drive time show. As I recall, it was Rebecca Pike who mentioned it.

The method is really simple. Try and come up with a list of things, going from A to Z. For example, a list of band names starting with the letters A – Z. Or perhaps a list of British towns from A – Z (I did that one last night). I found it helps to make it harder too. My list of British towns was only places I thought were actually towns (not cities or villages). So that took a bit of thinking.

You might think it wouldn’t work, but it really does. So if you’re lying in bed getting frustrated, just try and come up with an alphabetical list of something, and you’ll have dozed off in no time!

I redecorated my bedroom a while ago, and painted most things. I didn’t paint the two doors in my room though. One is the main door, the other goes into a little cubbyhole thing I use for a wardrobe.

The doors haven’t been painted in a long time, and as a result look like… well, like they haven’t been painted in a long time!

They really were making everything else look bad, so they needed painting. To do so would mean stripping them down first. I tried a sander, but that didn’t really work, so some sort of chemical stripper seemed like the only option.

We had some stuff somebody bought in Wilkos recently we’d used on another door. It’s quite an unassuming can really. The dire warnings on the back made me think twice though, as it pretty much guarantees certain death if you so much as look at it the wrong way.

I decanted a small amount into an old ice cream container. It looked an awful lot like wallpaper paste, with a slightly thinner consistency. It’s simply painted on with a brush, although you have to be pretty liberal with it.

Within literally seconds of it being applied, the paint instantly begins to bubble up. It honestly looks like the thing is on fire, or like something out of a movie. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The paint was literally bubbling up on the surface and cracking. The can suggest two coats, but I managed to get away with a single coat, leaving it for a while, then scraping.

In doing all this I learned two things.

Firstly, wear gloves. When the can says to wear gloves, you WEAR GLOVES. I’m not entirely sure why I chose to ignore this particular directive, but I learned the hard way. Whilst painting it onto the back of one door, some flew off, and straight down the sleeve of the shirt I was wearing. As I put my arm down to look, it made contact with my wrist, and almost straight away, started to heat up. I made a dash for the bathroom and ran it under the cold tap, which stopped it doing anything. A slight rash came up, but it soon subsided.

The second thing I learned, was whilst cleaning up. I placed the mostly empty container and brush into the sink, and started running hot water into it. As the hot water started to turn to steam, the vapours of this stuff rose with it, and hit me full on in the face. That was a pretty unpleasant experience, I can tell you.

But what was the end result of this DIY-disaster? Well, the doors are now pretty clean, down to primer, and ready to be sanded. If I ever use the stuff again, I’ll make sure to get more on the door, especially down the hinged edge as that’s the worst place to scrape. All in though, I’m impressed.