For the sake of our sanity, it’s time to ditch the 9-to-5
However you try to domesticate a night owl, we remain nocturnal animals
Simon Cowell has been gracing the tabloids with the winning declaration: “I’ve been living like a vampire.” Well, you and me both, friend, you and me both, and I wasn’t even trying to work with Little Mix, or break bread with Sir Philip Green.
Moreover, I even look like one: wan, raven-haired, a little glassy in delivery, liable to get followed around by children clicking along to The Addams
Family theme. Truly, this has happened. My late Father Christmas resembling father was wont to be given present requests; I am more likely to be greeted with holy water and a stake through the heart.
For I am a night owl, as is Cowell. And a night owl he will remain, despite his decision to cease late-night business deals and remove toxicity from his life in the form of Sir Philip. However you try to domesticate us, we owls are nocturnal animals, statistically likely to be novelty seeking, risk-taking by way of booze and cigarettes, and more sexually successful than those conformist larks, who are distinguished merely by procrastinating less and being more persistent (yawn). Attempt to morph owls into upright early birds and our bodies buckle.
I know this, because the fates are currently attempting to make me conform in the guise of a puppy who larks about from 6am. Usually, my dawn-loving beloved gets up with her, delighted to have someone to hang out with, used as he was to spending several hours on his own. Alas, he is away, meaning I am obliged to rise and shine or face the inevitable dirty protest.
Thus far, this has caused no little injury – physical and mental – from walking into walls to chronic brain fog. As I type, I am in exquisite agony from a charred right hand. Yesterday’s decision that, were I up, I might as well create a hairstyle resulted in me picking up a curling tong by the wrong end; not a policy I recommend. And I’m not even an extreme case like the crepuscular Cowell, or the woman I once came across who also worked through the night to 8am. She was even more sepulchrally pale than I am, a white at once bright and unnerving. We were in southern Italy at the time and teak-hued youths stalked us about town chanting “alba” and the word for “leukaemia”. Next to her, I am positively functional. I begin to feel human from 6pm. My first and only wind occurs at 10pm. Left to my own devices, I would go to bed at 2 and rise at 9, by which I obviously mean 10.30.
According to Dr Paul Kelley’s new book, Body Clocks, which identifies five different types of circadian rhythm, this puts me in the “definitely evening” category of creatures of the night. Dr Kelley, the Tyneside headmaster who famously moved his school’s starting slot to 10am so as not to damage his pupils’ late-firing reptile brains, is calling upon workplaces to ditch the old 9-to-5 – and not before time.
He maintains that the majority of employees should begin grafting at 10am, some staggered as late as noon, otherwise their health may be at risk. Indeed, given the increasing research linking sleep deprivation with obesity, mental illness, cancer and early death, he foresees a situation in which employers could end up being sued should they fail to offer flexibility. Meanwhile, he argues that a collective start of 10am would reduce the nation’s sleep deficit to an average 36 minutes a day, from its current ninetysomething.
A 10am start, with an 8ish sign-off, is also what is known as “the journalistic day”. Indeed, on my first morning in hackery, some 20 years ago, one of the old boys took me aside and said: “The only thing you need to know is that if they ever try to get you to be anywhere before 10am, just say: ‘I didn’t go into f------ journalism for this’.” It is an axiom that has served me well. Indeed, all my life choices have consciously or unconsciously been dictated by my lack of any sort of consciousness before noon, be it my early days in academia, my socalled current life, or decision to remain childless.
Until puppygate, of course. Plus decorator gate. For blue-collar workers persist in clocking on before 8am. The traditional reasons for this – the need for daylight, the old “working man’s ticket” on public transport, the empty roads – surely no longer apply? And, yet, still, manual labour types seem to associate early birdness with a virtuousness that slugs such as myself can never aspire to.
I recently worked until 3.15am, only to be met four hours later, while still in my pyjamas, by a decorator roaring: “Lady of leisure, are we? That’s the life!” As I write, I am sporting shooting ear defenders, which adds the right touch of psycho. If terms of employment could include not speaking before noon, then I would be all over it.
And, yet, hold on: how can the night owl’s delayed day be in any way disputed? We occupy a notoriously 24/7 society, forever working, consuming, and carousing in some collective, over-stimulated spasm, our streets swollen with activity from dawn ’til dusk as dusk ’til dawn.
Shouldn’t this be the night owl’s great moment, while larks lose their edge as the chirpy dinosaurs they are? Charles Dickens, TS Eliot and Peter Ackroyd all roamed about in the early hours thinking great thoughts. My doctor father used his non-normative sleeping habits to write books and save the world. Why aren’t I curing cancer, running the UN, or handling Brexit negotiations? At the very least, I should be delivering the pizza.