I continued to fight my battle against slight insomnia by taking a trip to Sainsburys at about 9.15pm last night and buying some Horlicks. After spending the day sitting on the sofa watching the cricket and barely moving at all, it was clear that I hadn't expended enough energy to convince my body that I deserved another night's sleep so soon after the last one. Shifting weight from one buttock to the other is not a way to exhaust yourself, or burn off calories – not even if you do it in time to “Africa” or “Rosanna” from the album Toto IV which I downloaded in a moment of madness at the weekend. Actually, that moment of madness is lasting a long time, starting as it did with Steely Dan about 5 years ago, and will probably end with REO Speedwagon some time next April.

So, I made for Sainsburys at blistering pace. Horlicks had been recommended to me by a friend as a magnificent aid to restful sleep; this was shortly followed by a ringing endorsement from my mother, who has had a mug of the stuff every night for the last 30-odd years, save for 3 nights when she went on holiday to Prague and there was no kettle in the hotel room. “I missed it,” she said to me, wistfully. Well, if my own mother is willing to admit to an addiction to a malty bedtime drink, I'm happy to take the risks and adopt the habit myself.

I expected to find a jar of the stuff on the supermarket shelf, but no, these days it comes in a blue plastic tub. They also produce a chocolatey version, but I chose to stick to the original “light malt” variety, because hey, I'm an adult, you don't need to tart up magic sleeping powder in a range of ice-cream flavours for me. I got the stuff home, and at about 11.30, when my patience had been severly tested by a downloaded video of Emo Phillips at the Playhouse Theatre in 1990 (not as funny as you remember it) I decided to boil the kettle.

The problem with Horlicks is the instructions for making it. “Place 3 scoops (36g) into a mug,” it says. What's a scoop? They provided no scoop inside the tub. My kitchen isn't equipped with a Horlicks scoop – I've got a rolling pin, a chrome lemon reamer, and egg slicer – hell, I've even got 2 metal circles to keep ones fried eggs perfectly round (doesn't work) – but nothing to measure out Horlicks. So, a scoop – is it a heaped teaspoon? Dessertspoon? Tablespoon? Or what? As someone who even feels uneasy about the use of “cup” as a unit of measurement (surely it should only be used for breasts?) this whole “scoop” thing really tested my nerves. I've got kitchen scales, but they're not sensitive enough to measure out 36g of a substance, because I don't generally don't spend a Sunday afternoon making one extremely tiny cake. There was only one way to set about this problem – trial and error.

But the thing is, i've got no idea what Horlicks is meant to taste like. Maybe it's meant to be thin and insipid? That's certainly how I'd describe my first effort at making it. “This can't be right,” I thought to myself. I slung in another 3 heaped teaspoons, and gave it a stir. This was more palatable – but maybe I was overdoing it? What if I awoke the middle of next week having failed to keep several urgent appointments, or worse, overdosed, my lifeless body slumped on the sofa with a milky residue on my chin, and a brown powdery substance scattered all over the floor?

Anyway, I slept OK.