Tasha Dhanraj on her nights of sleep deprivation

I am utterly exhausted. I have not slept for more than five hours for over a week. Add this to my already heightened stress due to my impending exams and you have got one quivering wreck of a person.

My hair seems to be rebelling against this sleep deprivation by refusing to style into the effortless chic that I usually master, despite how much V05 I rub in it. It looks like I’ve been at a really loud rock concert, decided to join in with the head-banging and then have someone accidentally spill a pint of lager onto my hair.

Basically – I look awful, I feel awful and my concentration is awful.

I am trying so desperately to get to sleep. I’m even going to bed before 11pm, which for the swishy socialite that I am is very difficult. I’ve been smothering my pillows in lavender oil. I’ve been playing Keane to bore myself into an unconscious stupor. Nothing helps.

Worst than that, nature seems to be solidly against my mind getting some rest. I thought that my troubles might be because it was too hot in my room, so I was opening my window at night to let some air in. Instead, I just found stupid birds with a grudge against a lie-in would start twittering and chirping at 5am. I swear, I saw them intentionally swooping repeatedly past my room just to make sure I really got the message.

“I look awful, I feel awful and my concentration is awful”

The birds aren’t the worst of it. At 2am last night, I heard a scratchy noise coming from above me, as if there was a rat in the attic or something. This carried on for a few minutes before I heard a thump and the distinctive feeling of something landing on my pillow. I immediately turned on the light and a massive spider was there- grinning. I’m not being a stereotypical girl about this – the spider was huge. Huge enough to make a thump! By anyone’s standards that is massive. I managed to trap it in an empty Pringles tube and throw it out of my breezily open window, but I was certainly not going to sleep that night at all.

Failure to sleep is failure to perform an instinctual bodily function. Normally I am a master of sleep, but with the highest pressure and most important few weeks of potentially my life relying on my ability to think clearly and be at my optimum levels of awesome, this could not have come at a worse time.