Country Mouse
A recent sojourn in my widowed mother’s home on Anglesey offered the opportunity to clear an archive of my father. He was a prolific letter-writer and jotter of the details of the minutiae of his life.
I was reminded of the extraordinary fact that my parents’ marriage seems to have survived any number of extramarital liaisons, on both sides. (Fortunately, there is hardly anyone left alive to take offence at this revelation.) And yet the marriage endured. Puzzlingly.
Was this due simply to the fact that, in their day, the social stigma of divorce was enough to deter them from separating? I think not. As I sifted through the archive, I realised the relationship’s longevity was directly linked to the fact that they didn’t see very much of each other.
My mother was an early riser who would head immediately into the garden, weather permitting, where she stayed throughout most of the hours of daylight.
By contrast, my father, who composed love letters, played the blues and did some of his worst paintings in the middle of the night, rose at two o’clock in the afternoon.
He was also in the habit of taking a siesta between 6pm and 9pm. Their only overlap of consequence was when my mother, a graduate of the Constance Spry Finishing School at Winkfield, would serve them both a 1950s-style dish of something like chicken fricassee at 10pm.
With one ‘identifying’ as a night owl and another as a lark, they had clearly done well by not fighting against these natural propensities, instead turning them to their advantage. Avoidance was clearly the main clue to the success of their marriage.
Given my own natural propensity to finding that the best programmes on TV tend to be shown a long time after midnight, I felt vindication coming from beyond the grave.
Perhaps I too should have no compunction about my own preference to stay up late and rise late – even when it means a vague sense of unease that my drawn curtains will be observed by the master craftsman who has been repairing our shed for seven years, who arrives each morning at 8am. Avoidance may well be a component in the survival of my sinecure as husband to Mary, who is up and about by 7 each morning.
Last month, findings were released from the University of Oulu in Finland, showing that 40 to 50 per cent of people identify as natural night owls.
Night owls are least sleepy, with fastest reaction times, at 8pm. My brain kicks into top gear only at around midnight, the exact moment hard-hitting journalist Stephen Sackur appears on Hardtalk. The other night I was gripped by a fascinating news report about young Moroccan immigrants who vlog their whole illegal journeys towards the UK, mile by mile, to a fascinated audience of their peers back in Morocco.
But night owls are at a disadvantage in conventional, nine-to-five-centric workplaces, where needless to say they perform less well than larks. Moreover, night owls tend to take retirement earlier than larks owing to poorer health.
Other studies show we are more likely to suffer depression, mental-health problems, obesity and cancer than our earlier-rising friends.
In a remarkable example of convergence of ideas, the son of the late Dr Stuttaford (the former Oldie doctor), a man who is professionally involved in personal-growth solutions, is in a telephone relationship with Mary.
Tom Stuttaford Jr has told her he is a believer in respecting what he calls ‘natural work rhythms’.
He opined that, especially during the enforced intimacy of lockdown, rather than trying to coax me out of the Land of Nod, Mary should make the most of the time that I am ‘hulking away in bed’, as her mother used to put it, and turn the mental privacy to profitable use in order to get ahead with her own day.
The Swiss herbalist Dr Vogel was in no doubt that the natural rhythms of life had been ruined by artificial light and television. Indeed, electricity does seem to have been something of an own goal – without it, we would all be rising with the larks.
We don’t need clichés – early to bed, early to rise etc – to show us that early risers are morally superior, especially in England where daylight hours are so few.
This is conventional, age-old wisdom reiterated in 1887 in the drastically under-read novel Amaryllis at the Fair by Richard Jefferies:
‘If you wants to get well, old Dr Butler used to say, “You go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver.” Before the air has been breathed over – inspired and re-inspired by human crowds … and while it retains the sweetness of the morning.’
He had a point. It may not be too late for me to turn from a night owl into a lark. Transitioning is all the rage.
Let the city- and town-dwellers keep the so-called ‘night-time economy’ ticking over, but there is no need for a country mouse to stay up through the night – even if it does suit Mary.
Avoidance of each other was the main clue to the success of their marriage