On being awake at night
I’m not an insomniac. Sleeping is one of the few things I’m very good at. I’m not even really a night owl. No, the thing with me is that my body clock runs slow. It loses between 15 and 30 minutes every day. Once, during my year out from university, I tested this hypothesis by going to bed and getting up exactly when I felt like it. It took approximately 8 weeks to complete a full cycle, my routine slipping back 20 minutes or so every day, until eventually I got back to where I started, minus one day. It was basically equivalent to circumnavigating the globe in 56 days (in a westwards direction), except there wasn’t so much travelling involved.
I’ve never understood why it is necessary, in a modern society, to have a 24 hour day. Now, you may think that these things are pretty much decided by astronomical phenomena, but think about it. Electric lights and blackout curtains were both invented years ago; there’s no real need for us to be awake at daytime and asleep during the night. And no-one likes getting up in the mornings, so why not just make the day 20 minutes longer? It would mean a 20 minutes lie-in every morning! And it wouldn’t be completely without precedent. We mess about with British Summer time every year, and that’s far more annoying. At least if it happened every day nobody would forget.
Alas, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as it could be, and these days I don’t have the freedom to get up whenever I like. But my extended circadian rhythm still causes me to be bright eyed and bushy tailed at some funny times, especially at weekends and during holidays. Now on the one hand I love the night. It’s quieter, less crowded and more mysterious than daytime, which has always been a little in-your-face. But the night can sometimes be, well, boring. I like to imagine that in big cities, there are bars and cafés where fellow creatures of the night gather to drink, read and - I dunno - listen to Gordon Haskell’s How Wonderful You Are on loop. In my town, there’s just Tesco (handy, but restockers clanging cage trolleys together is not really a pleasant sound, and the place isn’t exactly mood-lit) and, on Fridays and Saturdays only, late showings of films at an out-of-town Showcase cinema. Is there nowhere else I can go?
There’s always the internet, of course.