Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN As our MPs groan and gripe about the rigours of
Ihe.thought of having to go up to the owners ;AV establishment and say. 'Well, I guess I'd Vr.toddle along to bed.' I'M sure this inhibition is much more wide- re4d than he believed. If you leave early enough, Ili Pan get away with the shortest and most cuttetory of thank-you speeches and no logies .at all. As the hour advances, especially You. are having a ghastly time, the higher you aliSC you will have to mark up the insincerity 0 °tient of your departing hyperbole, and the It 88•You will feel like, saying anything that. could construed as gratitude to these presumptuous 1 Pie who are keeping you vertical. The -tempta- al to solve the dilemma (like all other dilemmas) le.5 ignoring it is irresistible. So on you sit, heavy, Ntting, immobile, almost speechless, and any- ing You do say you feel is being ponderously lleo out across your ankles like sub-titles on tvedish movie. But you've got to come out Me time like the embryo from the womb. !i ventrally, as your host and hostess put out the a tontite notes for,the milkman, fill the hot-water A ttles, and synchronise their watches, you know 1 ss e how of expulsion is upon you. You,wish .to Eel ei„,, ' they would just go to bed and let you steal arCay in stockinged feet. But between you and the sheer, they stand like Cerberus and friend. They he a turnpike, a frontier post, on the road to ! ii ee
P• You must resentfully flash your credentials, and have them even more resentfully accepted, before you can be granted a visa for home. I believe many guests get drunk at parties simply in the hope that they will have passed out before the end and so can be smuggled past the guards without having to say anything.
Under the age of thirty, you tend to stay up all night because you are afraid something fascinating, shocking and unforgettable might happen if you went off before the rest. As the rest also feel this same ,nagging worry, everybody
remains until dawn. Rarely, in my experience, is the expectation justified- even orgies need a fair amount of behind-the-scenes staffwork and can- not be counted upon to erupt quite spontaneously. The result usually is that you inherit a sense of guilt from having rejected sleep without the com- pensating satisfaction of having broken any moral. law. Jtist getting into bed in day-time tends to arouse uneasy associations in the mind—it seems a practice linked mainly with invalids and adulterers. But most, of us still get an obscure, shifty sense of excitement from late nights. Even when our 'own car and our own house have freed us from the tyranny of the last missed bus, and the parentally chained door, and it is nobody's busi- ness when we hit the pillow, being awake at night continues to make us feel adventurous and uncon- ventional. It is probably the cheapest thrill there is. I,am a man who, enjoys sleep. Or, rather, since the stretch between is unconscious, I enji)y waking up and going to sleep. I actually 'get a sensual delight from being roused in the, middle of the night anticipating the later feeling of .sinking slowly through .swansdown clouds, of eddying gently in warm ether like a feather being sneked down some celestial plughole, of being a -vast, complex metropolis in which the lights are gradu- ally being switched off, first in the suburbs, then in the working districts and the pleasare centres, until the last lamp goes out at the dictator's desk in the palace of the brain. I am not an easy riser— though I think many of us slugabeds could get up with less pain if we took the trouble to arrange our bedrooms more sensibly. For the minimum of torture, I recommend open curtains with light streaming in. This makes even one squinting eye an irrevocable gesture. The temperature should be high enough to admit the exposure of a bare foot without agony, and the floor, of course, must be carpeted, preferably with rush matting which gives a warm, natural, outdoor grip to the toes. Cooking and washing facilities should be close at hand so that the damp flannel, the Alka-Seltzer, the cold milk, the purring gas under the kettle, the bowl of fruit are there to tempt you to a commitment to wakefulness, If you can arrange for the newspapers to be delivered op to your pillow, this is another powerful counter-pill to the gravity-strong weight of sleep.
What many late-sleepers do not appreciate (and I, as one, discovered only a few years ago) is that it is easier to get up very early than around eight-to-nine or midday. Once you can be prised out of your pit at dawn by a crying child, or an urgent telephone call, you can start pointing out to yourself how many hours ahead of the rest of the world you are already. You can plan to write all those letters, tidy up that desk, fill in that application form, compose that refer- ence, prune the roses, finish the book you borrowed, sort out some clothes to be dry-cleaned. And when you have done that, lo and behold, it is still only breakfast time and the whole day lies ahead. The fact that none of this works out—for time moves more. quickly between dawn and breakfast than at any other .period,of the day or night—scarcely matters. It is possible to get up and live, even perhaps be moderately happy. That is what we sluggards have to • learn to believe.
But, whether early or late: Waking in itself is one of life's free pleasures. I love the infiltration of familiar noises and phrases into the alien fantasy world of dreams, so illat the crackling of bacon becomes the sound effect of a jewelled badge collapAing,' and a beautiful, naked girl holds' out her arms and says, 'This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for Friday, July ''2 and this is Frank 'Gillard reading it.' I adore that sensation of being tenderly rolled to- wards life like a piece of driftwood surfing towards the share on a series of waves.
The great secret of • controlling 'sleep is to remember (as I have often argued here before) that it is a drug; and the more you take, the more you need. Sleep is a social custom, not a biological necessity. You must cut out of your mind the idea that you will suffer if you miss your ration, and stop wallowing in self-pity and resentment for stolen hours. Night is a reservoir, an• over- draft, of time—draw on it whenever you are short.
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