Sleeping in... (From News Shopper)

Sleeping in...

5:08pm Friday 25th January 2008

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I had a reputation with the last paper I worked at. On the day I left, I was presented with a ceremonial front page hailing the departure of 'Ten Past Thom'. I lived a matter of minutes from the office, and, it's fair to say, I took a few liberties with my arrival time in the morning.


Well now I'm paying for that with karmic balance. Thanks to the generosity of the rail companies, I have the pleasure of rolling out of bed at 7.30 every morning, and catching the last train that will get me to Petts Wood in time. I arrive at 8.30, and all my years of being late for work are being cancelled out with uncharacteristic earliness. It's not fair.

I'm not a morning person. It takes me so long to get going in the morning that by the time I'm finally conscious, it's pretty much bedtime. It was always like this. Once I've started to sleep, it's difficult to stop me.

Once, as a student in Manchester, I was sat in a lecture hall looking bleary eyed and desolate when I began to hear a rumbling noise. A lorry, I assumed. That was, until it got louder. And louder. AND LOUDER. And then the room was rumbling, and I had absolutely no way of knowing. Apparently, entirely without my knowledge, Manchester was suffering a series of earthquakes that day (yes, that Manchester, and no, I don't know why), and I was the only person who had slept through the first few, leaving me the only sweating, palpatating, flustered sap in the room who was clinging to the lightshade and screaming "Earthquake" at the top of my voice. My fellow students, as one, seemed to be absolutely unconcerned by the seismic shift which had just near ripped the floor from underneath them, and life carried on as normal.

On another occasion, while staying at an ex-girlfriend's in Moss Side (and what a place to be), I was woken rudely in the middle of the night by my terrified looking ex shaking me awake insisting she had heard gunshots outside the window. With the kind of yawn, stretch, and lip-smacking noises usually the sole reserve of particularly indolent sloths, I turned over, told her it was a car, and went back to snoring and breaking wind for the remainder of the night, while she cowered in the corner, clutching a four-iron and sweating profusely. I'm a real gent.

So I congratulate myself on hardly (hardly) having been late for work since I joined the Shopper just over a month ago. It's certainly a break from the norm. Just don't expect me to look particularly alert before, ooh... about half past five?