Mankind Needs Me to Go to Florida

This is the fourth morning in a row I have had to get up at a ridiculously ungodly hour to take my youngest child to school and I'm absolutely knackered. Getting up much before about 4pm has never been good for my soul and as far as I'm concerned, 8.45 am is about the time I should be thinking about going to bed. Not to mention the fact that 8.45 am is not really the time I should be getting up when my son starts school at 8.50.

Theoretically he could go on his own, but there's a road to cross and although it's only a very small road and he's very good at crossing roads of all sizes, there are a lot of idiots about who for some reason are allowed behind the wheels of cars, buses and other assorted vehicles.

It is now 9.54 am and I think I may have to go back to bed for a while. The only problem is that I'll probably not wake-up in time to collect my son from school at 3 o'clock. Once when I went back to bed it was almost 4 o'clock before I collected him. I had to pretend I'd set my clock an hour slow without realising it, so as far as I was concerned I was early and deserved congratulating.

Current research indicates that the average human being has an internal body clock of 24 hours 11 minutes. I am convinced that mine is more like 25 hours and this belief was strengthened when I read that this is often the case with highly intelligent members of the human race. However, it is thought that if we were unaware of the time of day, everyone's body clock would eventually lengthen to 25 hours (does that mean we'd all become cleverer as well?). It would appear that some humans have faulty 'clock' genes, which gives them different sleeping/waking cycles to everyone else.

Having a 25-hour body clock may not sound particularly problematic, but think about it for a minute. It means that if you are forced to go to get up at the same time every morning, you either have to go to bed an hour earlier each night (in theory, not in practice), or stay up an hour later (which means you are actually going to bed at the same time according to your body clock) and end-up never going to bed at all after about a week. It's the same as the average adult starting off by going to bed at (for example) 11pm and rising at 7am, then the following night going to bed at 10 pm, then at 9pm, then at 8 pm ... well, you get my drift. Eventually they'd be going to bed an hour before they got up.

Unfortunately, "I have a 25-hour body clock, live with it" is not considered a good enough reason for tardiness by education authorities, employers and ex-marital partners. It's a waste of time pointing out to these people that arriving at 10.20 for a 9.30 appointment actually means (in theory) that you are 10 minutes early, because they just can't grasp the logic at all.

It takes me several hours and several large mugs of coffee to fully wake-up, which usually doesn't happen until late afternoon/early evening. By about 9pm I am always fully awake, regardless of what time I got up (and this is the case even if I never went to bed) and by the early hours I am absolutely full of beans. I read somewhere (I read a lot of things "somewhere") that everyone is at their peak at the same time they were born, which in my case seems to be true because I always feel at my best around 2-3 am, which fits in nicely with my birth time of 2.30. This is the time when I want to go out and about - I love wandering around in the dark when there's no one else to bother me, but that's probably the Eccentric Bohemian Hermit in me.

I read something on the Internet a while ago about a German professor who spent years trying to work out why certain individuals, usually highly-intelligent ones who appeared to have a lot to offer to humanity, drifted aimlessly through life from job-to-job, partner-to-partner, home-to-home and so on, without ever achieving anything. He finally concluded that it was because they shared one thing in common - they all had 25 hour body clocks. In this case, it does seem very unfair that even though there is a medical condition which causes oversleeping and the subsequent problems arising from it, there isn't even a proper medical term for it. It would be really helpful if I could be late taking my son to school and blame it on some sort of "itis" instead of my faulty alarm clock.

Left to my own devices, I seem to keep the same hours as Americans in the Pacific time zone, which is 8 hours behind the UK. I often wonder whether I would start keeping normal hours if I moved to the West Coast, for instance, or whether I would just revert to type and start dropping behind again. It may be worth approaching the World Health Organisation to see if they would provide me with some sort of research grant to cover my travel costs and provide my friend Betty (who recently moved to Florida) with funds to cover my board and lodging (and hopefully with enough left over to cover a weekly trip to Disneyworld). After all, my experiences could greatly benefit mankind.

An amusing tale I wrote about a particular clock. It won a prize! (The story, not the clock).