Bed in Summer

Today

After a jolly week in which we celebrated at several parties, including Paul's 60th, I just about ran out of steam yesterday. I settled down last night to watch CSI and realised that I'd reached an end.

So, after a bath, during which I dozed off twice, I was in bed and snuggling down by 9.00. Outside the sun was still shining, the birds were singing and the normal noises of the evening went on.

Despite that, I fell asleep and, with only a couple of wakeful periods, surfaced at about 8.00 this morning.

In My Day

When I was small bedtime was fairly sacrosanct. In Summertime this meant trotting off to bed by about 7.00 when the day still seemed to be in full swing. Older members of the family were still moving about; outside buses and cars roared up and down the road. I don't remember protesting much about this; it seemed simply to be the natural order of things.

My bedroom curtains weren't particularly light-excluding and I found that I could read my books quite well in the half-light. This I would do until the words were faintly visible and started to jump about in front of my eyes as the dusk deepened.

At the other end of the night, I would often be awake at 5.00 as the first sunshine seeped between the gap in the curtains. I sometime used to get up and go into the garden to play at skipping or playing ball, before the rest of the household awoke.

Of course, in winter, the opposite happened. I'd be rudely jerked out of sleep while it was still dark and dressed in layer upon layer of clothing to keep out the cold. The sleep stuck to my eyes, I shivered in the cold bedroom and was most reluctant to wash.

Learning about people of earlier time, before there was artificial lighting, I realised that we've lost the diurnal rhythms which should govern our sleep. If you can't see a thing, there's no point in staying up; if the light is too bright, there's no point in trying to sleep. This point seems entirely lost on parents.

There's a poem from Robert Louis Stephenson's "Child's Garden of Verses" which I read as a child and entirely understood. "Bed in Summer". "In winter I get up by night/ and dress by yellow candlelight/ In summer quite the other way/ I have to go to bed by day". Quite.

Although I do still feel a little bit tired this morning.