I so much bloody hate mornings.
I set my alarm for six-thirty. I didn't get to work until after a quarter-past eleven. I haven't had breakfast, I haven't had a cup of tea, I haven't even had a proper crap. I haven't properly woken up yet and I'm knackered already. I haven't done anything, except have a bath. Up nearly five totally unproductive hours. If I'd have got up three hours later I'd be better able to get started at work. If I was still in bed and didn't come in till the afternoon I'd work better. Mornings are fucking useless. Impossible to get anything done at all. No-one should be permitted by law to talk to any person in their presence till after noon. I hate meeting people I know on the train to work because life is such shit at that time of day I don't even want to talk to friends. There is nothing to say
Alarms at 6.30, first the clockwork clock which woke me up. Of course I remember it going off and thinking "I am already awake" because the sort of moving window of short-term memory never goes away in sleep so you can never remember waking up, only realising that you have been awake for some time, so the alarm rang and I later can remember the songs playing on the radio before it went off or the dream I was having at the time - which is why dreams are easiest to remember and lucid dreams easiest to have in long lie-ins when you drift in and out of sleep for hour after hour. Then the radio alarm, Not the one that's been playing all night (well, for the five hours or so since I went to bed) but the other one at the other side of the room beyond arm's reach with the really intrusive bleeper that sounds like the smoke alarm. Half get out of bed (one smooth movement) hit the snooze button. Lying in bed with radio on. Wondering if I need to get up to wake A. up because sometimes she sleeps through her alarms (which are loud enough to wake me in another room). But she gets up anyway. So lie back this the snooze times out nine minutes later, get up and turn if off again, and lie down again. Do this for about an hour, falling back to sleep (more or less) each time. If it wasn't for that alarm and having to get up for work this can be one of the best times of day, its when the dreaming gets done, this phasing in and out of sleep, fuging through repeated thoughts. But not on a work day. Once manage to get to bathroom to piss and clean teeth, and go back to bedroom.
A. leaves for work about five to eight, so this has been going on for an hour and a half nearly. Really ought to get up. Aim for 0930 train. Not very ambitious but realistic. Get out of bed finally just after a quarter past eight. Get into bath about ten to nine. What am I doing for the missing half hour? I have no idea. I tried to remember it on the bus a little later and couldn't. I must have still basically been asleep. Walking and capable of talking but not really awake. Aimless, ineffectual, pottering about and whinging. I suppose I must have spent it walking between different ends of the flat forgetting things and going back to fetch them. Or something like that. I didn't make a cup of tea (I wish I had now, my brain would be working better). I didn't make sandwiches for lunch (cos I remember did that later). I didn't have any breakfast. I didn't even have a crap (deliberately not to save time because I was in a hurry. Hah!)
Bath, read a few pages of a book about cosmology, realise something about Einstein I want to post online somewhere later today. The wordy part of my brain works fine. I can listen, read, talk, type, spout bullshit. Its just the part of my brain that remembers where I put my shoes or manages to stay awake that doesn't work. I get out of bath in a hurry when I realise that I have no memory from the previous ten minutes and the radio is now on Desert Island Discs and I can't even remember who is being interviewed so I must have fallen asleep again. It is possible to fall asleep with my eyes open while looking at a book and to not drop the book. I know that is so because if it wasn't then many more of my books would get soaked.
Out of bath about a quarter past nine. Make sandwiches for lunch, get dried and dressed, leave at 09:45. So I must technically have woken up by now. Sometimes its hard to tell. I can often tell when I am asleep because when I dream my visual imagination turns on and imaginary things look like real things, or perhaps like pictures of them, which is not the case when you visualise things when awake. Or not for me anyway. Maybe artists can see imaginary pictures at will. Maybe that's why I am not very good at drawing. Maybe skilled artists actually spend a lot of their waking time in what I would think of as a dream state. Its certainly possible to dream when awake because its happened to me a few times, and I've seen people and things who aren't there. Though I never mistake them for real things. (Though the skeptic in me says "how can you tell?" or "how do you know that the things you think are real are not just dreams?" but that way lies sixth-from pop-philosophising so I Don't Want to Go There) On the other hand it is Jill Balcon on DID and she chooses a decent buit of Vaughan Williams and Lets do it and Charles Trenet's La Mer which encouragies fantasies of singing it in a truly decisive song-and-dance routine with silly hats and twirly canes which is unlikely seeing as I can't sing and couldn't dance even before I got arthritis and can't speak French. But as ear-worms go it is in the top half. On the other other hand her description of her relationship with Cecil Day Lewis is so weird as to be in a different universe. In the real world women don't fall for men like that, so hard they don't seem to care what they do. Or if they do they never do it near me. The other way round is rare but believable. But this is something from outer space. And did she really not think he'd have affairs after he married her, seeing as he left his wife for another woman and then left that women for her and at one time was seeing all three of them? Leopards and spots come to mind.
Put sandals on again because I am trying to hurry and I can't be arsed to tie up shoe laces even though it is a cold day. In fact it turns out to be a glorious day, not really cold at all, sunshine and birds singing in the trees. Proper autumn day. Once I get out of the flat things are really quite pleasant.
Leave home at 0945, get to station at 0951 or 52. There is a train there on platform 3 that I assume is the Victoria 0951 so I don't run for it, which was silly because it ws in fact the 1045 Charing Cross slightly delayed, which is my backstop train for when I miss the 0935 which is the one I try to catch but often, as today, don't manage to. 0957 on platform 1 says it is delayed to 1001, and once a train is slightly late it often gets later, so I stay on platform 3 for the 1002. And just as the 0957 pulls away late from 1, the indicator on 3 says "delayed". So I should have gone to platform 1 anyway. Why do they DO that? Why no make an announcement and say what is happening so passengers can make choices. We don't HAVE to wait for their train. There are buses, other railway lines nearby (DLR within 50 metres) we have choices we could make were we told what was in fact happening. But nothing except "delayed". Surely they know where their train is? You can't lose anything that big. It has to be on the track somewhere.
The 1005 Cannon Street on 1 is indicated as being late at 1009 and there is no clue as to when the Charing Cross is in fact getting here. So maybe I should cross to the other platform. But while I'm making my mind up it comes in at 1007 so I miss it. In the end I get the 1016 Cannon Street and have to change at London Bridge to Waterloo and end up waiting for a bus at about 1040. So it has taken me 50 minutes to do a rail journey that only takes 20 minutes.
And then the first four or five buses are crowded. And my knees are pretty bad so I want to avoid standing on a moving bus if I can help it. And its too hot inside to sit at the back. So I wait another fifteen minutes for a bus and what with the roadworks at Holborn I don't get to work till 1115.
So an hour late for work. And I've been up for about for and a half hours. During which I've spent about 30 minute in the bath, 20 minutes dressing and getting ready for the day, and 40 minutes on public transport. One and a half hours of useful stuff (and note I am counting sitting on a 59 bus in a traffic jam as "useful") and three hours where I can't even really remember what I was doing. I've read half a chapter of a book, bought a copy of the Economist I haven't yet opened, read one page of an article on the Airbus 380 in last week's scanned the Metro freebie rag, and heard a robin sing in a tree (which was the best bit). I haven't even had a cup of tea though, and I have a headache. [Which later went away with the first cup of tea of the day]
I hate mornings.
And the bloody bastards inflict Summer Time on us just to try to dupe us into getting up earlier because the PE-teachers who pass for legislators think it will do us good. Fuck the lot of them and their ID cards.
I hate mornings.