A strange thing’s happened to me, chaps: I’m so desperate for reminders that comedy, irony, make-believe, etc still exist in the world that I awake bolt upright in bed at 6am and rush to my computer to read your blog posts. But prior to this I was slug no. 1. When I lived in Denmark somebody told me that humanity divides into A-People and B-People: the former like the morning, and get up early with Mr Dickie Blackbird so they can enjoy even more of it; the latter are normal people who don’t wish to be alive, let alone awake, at any time before 10:00am. The Danish person then explained that A-People run the world: simply by getting up early they can seize the levers of power before their snoozy cousins have even seized their genitals. They can therefore dictate that in order to go to work, earn money, buy things, get wives and produce offspring (yeah? you see the chain reaction here?) you have to get up at 6:00am, which of course they already do. I think this is called “positive feedback” in Control Engineering terminology, or "a self-reinforcing and unbreakable tyranny".
Though morning itself is not the problem. Even hard B-People accept – and why wouldn’t they, they’re not unreasonable - that mornings have a right to exist. Reminds me of comedian Phill Jupitus’s session on BBC TV programme Room 101. He’s arachnophobic. But, very reasonably, I think you’ll agree, he accepts that spiders have a right to exist, the same as any other species. What he can’t stand is people that annoy him with spiders, concealing them in matchboxes etc and then letting them out in his face knowing that he hates them. And it’s the same with mornings because, left alone, mornings will simply go away and not bother us. The problem is the people who say “Oh, what a lovely morning!”, “Rise and shine!” and, yeah, worst of all “Come on, you’re missing the best part of the day!!” Tra la la. These people rule not by merit but by lucky biometabolic coincidence. Now it seems I’m one of them and I suppose this should feel like a triumph; but it doesn’t, because being awake in the morning is supposed to feel crap.
