ARE you getting enough? I know I'm not. Get your minds out of the gutter please, I'm talking about sleep - or rather the lack of it.

As the mum of an extremely active three-year-old (is there any other kind?) who doesn't stop running around and chattering all day and all night, I can honestly say I have probably had about a dozen good nights' sleep in as many months.

After talking to friends and colleagues, usually over a cup of coffee so strong you could use it to power a nuclear missile, I know I am not alone and that a great many of us are going about our daily lives while completely and utterly cream-crackered.

And it is not just bleary-eyed mums and dads who are left stumbling from one day to the next: about one in four Britons are thought to suffer from chronic lack of sleep.

Until recently, tiredness was just seen as an unfortunate side-effect of modern life, but now scientists are putting it on a par with malnutrition in terms of the damage it can do. Shift workers, for instance, who tend to survive on a much lower sleep quota, are three times as likely to suffer from heart disease and have an increased risk of depression, diabetes, obesity and cancer.

So sleep is one of the keys to good health. But if that really is the case, why are teenagers, who seem to sleep just slightly less than your average moggy, such sickly creatures?

Well, it seems that while they are getting more sleep than most, they are still not getting enough.

American sleep researcher Mary Carskadon has discovered that teenagers' body clocks shift forward during puberty. This means that the levels of melatonin - the hormone that makes you feel sleepy - kick in at around 9.30pm in young teens but not until 10.30pm in older ones.

So simply telling them to go to bed early is not the answer. And it certainly won't mean that they emerge from their pits any earlier, because lab tests have found that adolescents need just as much sleep as young children - about nine hours.

If then you pack them off upstairs at 9.30pm (fat chance), their melatonin will make them feel sleepy an hour later, they probably won't drop off until 11pm because they are reading (Heat magazine for the girls, Big & Bouncy - and no, it is not a footie mag - for the boys), and you drag them out of bed kicking and screaming at 7am the next morning, they are actually losing a vital hour of sleep every night.

It's no wonder they stay in bed until the melodic theme tune of Stars In Their Eyes rouses them from their snuffling slumbers of a Saturday. After only eight hours sleep a night during the week, I'm surprised the poor little lambs have the strength to stick two fingers up behind your back when you ask them to turn down their Linkin Park CD because it is rattling granny's dentures.

A measly eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. Don't you just feel sorry for them? No, me neither - and I will feel even less sorry for them when I'm up at 2am tomorrow morning, and 4am and again at 6am...

- DOESN'T it just make your day when a self-proclaimed hard man turns out to be a bit of a big softie? Nothing is more likely to make me smirk with satisfaction than to discover that, for instance, Manchester United's Roy Keane crochets blankets for orphans in his spare time or bonkers boxer Mike Tyson bakes butterfly buns for his ageing granny.

So just imagine the size of my smirk when I caught the testosterone-fuelled chef Gordon Ramsey droning on about his life on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and picking the fluffiest collection of records imaginable.

As I tuned in Kim Wilde's Kids In America was just coming to an end, there was a yawning gap while Gordon whined, and then Blondie's Sunday Girl - his one and only respectable choice - was played.

The next 45 minutes or so were filled with the likes of George Michael's Careless Whisper (first serious girlfriend); Tina Turner's Simply The Best (getting the push from Glasgow Rangers); Bryan Adams' Everything I Do, I Do It For You (getting hitched); and Tom Jones' Sex Bomb (for his four-year-old daughter Megan - huh?).

He might have three Michelin stars for cooking and shouting at spotty underlings, but when it comes to music the Michelin Man probably has more macho tastes.

Gordon Ramsey, you are a big soft pudding.

Updated: 10:02 Tuesday, April 09, 2002