Alex's Tuppence Worth @ 12th June 2009

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It really is 5:46am. I started writing this at 4:36am. And I've been wide awake since approx 3:30am. According to my Facebook friends list this puts me in the insomniac company of my friend Matthew (film critic who's probably catching up on reviews or enjoying a 'Lost' marathon), Helen Brock (currently living in Korea - who knows what time it is there...) and Duncan (lives in Norwich where they have strange ways). Not to mention Elsie the cat, currently sitting on my desk with a "I know it's not breakfast time yet, but if I stare at you hard enough then who knows" expression on her face. Oh, and she's just sneezed in my face. Charming. Like THAT'S going positively affect my inclination to feed you! Little bugger...

This is a fairly extreme example of my occasional inability to sleep the full standard 8 hours demanded by most humans, although I did get to bed at a fairly unusual 10:30pm last night - I'm normally unable to hit the hay until at least midnight - giving me at least 5 hours of slumber. This was probably helped by the half bottle of wine at Pizza Express where me and Helen met our friends Caz and Pablo for dinner, not to mention the Irish coffee that the lovely waitress forgot to add to our bill, although the Joe is probably what caused me to be up this early. Sod it - Churchill and Thatcher rarely got more than 3 hours of kip each night and still managed to run the country, the former with the aid of cocaine lozenges admittedly.

Late night/early morning internet sessions were not an unusual occurrence for me a few years ago, usually in my frequent bouts of singledom and even more frequent bouts of employment weirdness (jumping from peculiar job to even more peculiar job pretty much typified my life from 2000-2007). This fortunately doesn't make me all that unique - the quantities of interesting people littering the chatrooms, social networking sites, live news blogs and electronic dens of sexual deviancy located in cyberspace in the middle of the night has always brought comfort and reassurance that I'm not too weird.

But it now strikes me that a great many of these people can probably thank their young offspring for their unsociable internet hours; late night sessions of cradling a noisily unhappy baby are, after all, a well documented feature of parenting. This is something that my own mother recalls with a haunted look of pain in her eyes whenever I've asked what I was like as a nipper, and her answers have made me

1. in awe of my parents ability to get by on basically NO sleep until I was about 12 months old, and
2. thankful that I wasn't the victim of what would have probably been fully justifiable infanticide.

My little brother proved to be my complete contrast in terms of undisturbed sleep - the little sod retains to this day the ability to peacefully nod off as, where and when he feels like (a useful talent for a policeman who used to work some pretty horrendous shifts) and I'm hoping our child inherits these characteristics. Preferably leaving out DC Davis's occasional habit of sleep-walking. Sadly this is probably too much to hope for - my Mother will undoubtedly gain some well-earned revenge for her year of insomnia via the strategic, high-volume, tactical biological weapon that will surely be her grandchild.

All I can say is thank heavens for all the practise that my natural insomnia has given me throughout my '20s. And if anyone needs to chat with me about anything important in 2010 then around 3am on MSN is likely to be a good time and place. So long as you show me the respect I deserve for being able to type this well with a cat sitting on one of my hands...

Alex aka Babydaddy