Sleepy Summer Time and Memories

Here it is again.  Summer Time.  Someone somewhere, with very little interest in the comfort of their fellow human beings, decided we should put the clocks forward at the end of March and deprive ourselves of an hour's sleep because summer is coming.  Daylight saving.  That was the magical excuse.  Daylight saving.  It sounds great.  Can you save daylight?  If so you are in business.  The whole operation should be termed Sleep Deprivation Mode.

Of course I don't really mean that.  But I used to mean it years ago when I was a working mother and every five minutes extra sleep meant another piece of sanity gained.  Let's face it, we have to get up every week morning since we are tiny.  First there's kindergarten, school, college and then comes the big one:  work. For most of my life I needed 8-10 hours sleep and I very often had to make do on considerably less.  The sound of that alarm at 6 a.m. made me not only moan and groan, it made me positively bad tempered.  Five minutes more pleaded my inner sleepy voice.  But the race for the bathroom was on.  With teenagers in the house who also had to be up and doing, if you missed your bathroom slot you were going to be left behind.

I am sure I never spoke more than five words.  "Bye, see you, got your keys?"  Once at work, I grabbed a coffee and then crouched behind my computer and started into the day's work with only the obligatory "good morning" to those early birds who were already in the office. If no one spoke to me for the first half an hour all was well and my sense of humour - never buried that far down - surfaced and I evolved into a fairly rational human being.  But if someone phoned me before that all important thirty minutes were up, I went straight into "bad mood" mode and it took me a while to get back on an even keel.  Yes, I know, I'm truly a disgrace but that's the way it is.

I'm enjoying the fruits of retirement now and don't have to get up early, I'm not tied to an alarm clock most of the time.  Only thing is, now that I could sleep 10 hours if I wanted to, I can't sleep that long.  In fact, the advent of Summer Time this Sunday isn't going to affect me much as I'll be awake early anyway.  That's life, isn't it? Well, if not life, it's Summer Time. Sleep well everyone.