About Bed and Alarm Calls.

I have to be somewhere at a certain time tomorrow, and so I have to set the alarm tonight and get up to its call in the morning. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: I hate being woken up by an alarm.

It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t take kindly to the regime at Dartmouth College when I was in the navy. After a physically and mentally exhausting day I would settle into bed at 10 o’clock and the room lights would go out. Sleep came quickly, but just as I was dreaming of the green, green grass of home, the full range of ceiling lights would destroy the sanctity of blessed darkness, a very loud and strident bell would shatter the peace, and I would have twenty minutes to get up, get dressed, perform a few simple ablutions, and then be at the parade ground, a classroom, or the gym in a fully functioning condition. It was 6am. Hateful.

It seems to me that a bed is like the womb: a sanctuary of calmness and warmth, isolated from a world which is often dirty and decrepit, unkind and uncomfortable, cold and callous. In the womb you have only yourself and your thoughts to take trouble over, and so it is with bed. I seem to recall Flann O’Brien’s MC saying something similar in At Swim-Two-Birds. And it’s no surprise that babies cry heartily when they take the dreaded drop.

I think my newly discovered PDA might be playing some sort of a role in this. If so, it’s been with me since childhood because I remember the joy I felt at the prospect of Saturday mornings and the school holidays when the decision to rise was entirely mine. And the reference to Flann O’Brien might suggest that this is another echo of my distant Irish lineage.