I have of late, for the most cheerful of reasons*, been getting up early to work. All well and good — deadlines have been met — but now I can’t break the worm-catching habit. Long before dawn the eyelids flutter open and the brain begins its spinning machine whirl. I force myself to stay in bed until five o’clock, the point at which I consider a late night to be baptised as an early morning — or in other words, the earliest acceptable moment to switch on radio and kettle. As the World Service gives way to the Shipping Forecast I sit down at my desk, wondering whether I would be better employed as a postman or dairymaid, or perhaps as a teasmaid at the Today programme. Mark Twain (and this is my favourite quote about the business of writing) said that ‘the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair’. I hope he wasn’t particular about whether the pants belonged to a suit of pyjamas or trousers.
To wake so early without the aid of an alarm may be odd but the truth is, I love it. The violet plush of the trees; the promising glimmer of the sky; the ashen quiet of the street. I like seeing the paper boy, lit fag clenched between front teeth, bowl the FT overarm into next door’s porch. A particular pleasure is to witness a chance encounter between the earliest commuters and the latest of the night owls. One rainy morning a man on his bike was almost floored by the remnants of a hen party tottering across the road. As the cyclist slalomed between them the hens started up a tremendous clucking: ‘Where are you going, gorgeous?’ ‘What’s the rush?’ ‘Ooh, hasn’t he got lovely legs…’ At dawn an early start feels like a gift of free time — ‘I’m getting so much done!’ — but of course those three hours of brain activity are simply shaved off the end of the day.
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