I woke to an eruption of Cockney profanity that would embarrass your average hip hop artist

I couldn’t sleep. Too much garlic in the falafel we had for dinner? Or just an impending sense of doom bubbling to the surface?

Does eating garlic really mess with one’s sleep?

I couldn’t sleep. Too much garlic in the falafel we had for dinner, or in the tahini yoghurt? Maybe it was just an impending sense of doom bubbling to the surface. Either way, it was 4am and I was bolt-upright, my head full of dark, miserable images of poverty-stricken post-WWI East End London. Bread and margarine. Grime and squalor. Filth and bed bugs. Disease and “skilly”, a watery gruel fed to the down-and-out as charity. Violence and fag ends. It was a nightmare, but I was properly awake.

Five hours earlier, I’d put in earbuds, found an audiobook of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and drifted off nicely with the retriever quietly farting beside me on the bed. Past the scene-setting among the urban peasantry of Paris and the “tiny bistros where you could be drunk for a shilling”; past the eccentric characters of the slum that Orwell adopted as home (“I’m trying to describe the people in our quarter,” I heard the narrator intone, “not for the mere curiosity but because they’re all part of the story. Poverty is what I’m writing about.”) Past the disturbing rape of a prostitute by one of Orwell’s menagerie of human oddities, Charlie. Eventually, sleep visited somewhere around the description of the glut in Paris of the late ’20s. “Everywhere there is food,” Orwell wrote, “insulting you in huge wasteful piles. Whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. Snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you and you refrain, from pure funk.” Ah, Paris.

Five hours later – I was asleep by then – Orwell had worked his way through Paris as a plongeur (dishwasher), disparaged Americans (“they would stuff themselves with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs then souse it in Worcester sauce”), and finally swapped the slums of Paris for those of London.

I woke to an eruption of Cockney profanity that would embarrass your average hip hop “artist”, and that was it: awake at 4am and immersed in the depths of the author’s misery.

I flipped open the iPad to Google raw garlic and sleep. “There is no evidence to suggest that raw garlic affects sleep in any meaningful way,” said PlantBasedFAQs.com. “This conclusion was reached after searching through thousands of medical journals and databases.” So much for that theory.

My advice? Eat as much home-made falafel before bed as you like; make it with plenty of garlic. Make sure to put garlic in your yoghurt sauce with tahini and lemon, too. But if you go to sleep to Orwell, I can’t make any promises about how long it will last.