Waking up is hard to do

 

Until a few months ago, I used a little wallet-sized alarm clock that politely bleeped for about ten seconds on and after the exact time you would set it for before stopping. This worked for me and I always woke up with the third beep. After the battery ran out I began using one that my mother had given me which wails like a police siren in hysterics for ten minutes before the time you set it for and for another ten minutes after that. This is an alarm clock that I can hear from the kitchen when I am cooking and have the extractor fan at full blast, and my niece and nephew are standing next to me screaming and both the kitchen door and my bedroom door are shut. But when I am asleep, on occasion, the whole twenty minutes of noise loud enough to wake the dead in this and every other Mediterranean country (and give them all hearing problems) sound to me like a distant car backing up in my dreams and I sleep right through the mayhem.

 

What I really need is a watch with an electric buzzer that delivers a tremendous shock to its lethargic wearer or a clock equipped with a mallet that can hit me over the head if I sleep through the ringing for more than a few minutes.

 

No, I’m joking. It needn’t hit me with a mallet. Whacking me in the face with a heavy stuffed pillow would probably do.

 

But the truth is that waking up to the sound of an alarm drilling through one’s ear is a very unpleasant experience. This is why some people prefer to use a clock radio and wake up to their favourite station. When I was a student in the UK I had mine set to Classic FM (which, as you probably do not need me to explain, is a classical music station; but, there, I have explained it anyway). It would be quite pleasant to wake up to Delibes’ Flower Duet or Pachelbel’s Canon. But the sound of Wagner at full blast first thing in the morning is something I can do without, and after the Ride of the Valkyries nearly gave me a heart attack, I started using an old-fashioned alarm clock.

 

The truth is that I am a night person, more comfortable working when everybody else is tucked in and sound asleep than at any time in the morning. There are people who are happy to wake up at six in the morning, have a quick coffee, get in their car and be at work by seven. I am more happy waking up at nine-thirty or thereabouts, reading a little in bed, then taking my shower, before going downstairs to sip my cup of tea or coffee ever so slowly along with some toast and the company of a daily newspaper, preferably while basking in the summer sun.  At around eleven I am happy to finally get around to doing some work.

 

Unfortunately the world doesn’t work this way and this is why I need to have an alarm clock at the side of my bed. And until I can find a woman to marry who will wake me up with soft kisses, I will have to keep on using and hating my alarm clock.

 

Perhaps one day I will find her. Maybe she will wake me up with a gentle massage while talking dirty to me. I am a heavy sleeper; she will probably have to shout.

 

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