Sleeping in..

I'm presently on a little getaway in the greater Cape Town area. I'm generally an early riser and CV's... um... well lets say there's times he'd like to be the spokesman for Slumberland. Anyway, when the dawn throws the first slivers of light through the curtains of a room, my body reacts like a good farmers should and I wake up. Six hours is about all I need to feel fresh and ready for just about anything.

Make no mistake there're times I regret that. There have been times I'd rather lie in and let the day slowly pass by - alas, I can't. My back gets a little sore, and I'll toss and turn and then in the interests of preserving our relationship and his good nature, I'll have to get out of bed so he can carry on sleeping.

Right now is a case in point. I'm perched precariously on the top of the bunk bed, merrily typing up this post in the second room of our suite, whilst he tops up on his good nature in the king size next door.

I mean how many people can there be in life that have perfectly synched body clocks that they'll wake up within seconds of each other both looking and feeling like a million bucks. Life is not a Sealy advert after all! When you're in your own home, you can plan around the sounds you know you'd make, oil the hinges and pad the door frames, wear your sheepskin pantoffels inside out - so you can glide over just about anything. But in a hotel suite it's different. You're in a foreign space and they never seem to take the potential for wildly differing sleep patterns into consideration into the design brief.

So there I was at 6:20 a.m. padding as quietly as I could around the room looking for a way to quietly sneak outside for a cigarette and find a place to write. Desperately trying not to wake my slumbering partner seemed to be a fruitless plan. My feet sounded like stone crushers on the carpets, the tumblers on the door lock like a jackhammer and the door handles creaked with the intensity of a rushing train of an action sequence presented 5.1 Dolby digital surround. So when I made it back into the room and he asked me why I'm waking him up a sheepish; 'Sorry' had to suffice.

I'm not complaining of course - I don't regret being an early riser. My creative energies are at their peak and I do my best writing and music production early Sundays. And anyway there's far more to relationships than sleep. It's just that when I'm out of my personal space, I notice these things far more acutely, 'cause I don't have any plans laid out and my coffee machine a good few walls aways from the bed unlike this suite.

As a bachelor, it's easy: wake up, get out of bed, do breakfast and get on with whatever I'd like to. But the moment there're other body clocks involved in the same time and space, a special effort needs to be made to make to preserve. That of course means the sanity of those slumbering around me and of course myself - from grievous bodily harm.

Well, that's not entirely true, I suppose. My friends with young kids would be laughing at me talking about the wonders of sleeping in - 'cause young kids show very little mercy for their parents need for sleep.

This terrible misfortune of not being able to sleep in has 'plagued' me for years. I recall being on a school camp a million years ago and promptly waking up the the crack of dawn, declaring the wonder of the morning to my fellow campers. Without digressing too much, let's say I was on the receiving end of a bit of schoolboy abuse. So from that day all those years ago, I learnt that my zest for life in the early part of the day is shared by few and I should never ever aim to include the sleepers in my early morning routines.

It's now nearly three hours after sunrise and the pumping wind of the past few days seems to have died ever so slightly. The sun's shining and I'm starting to itch to get going. I lie, the need for another smoke is already starting to gnaw at me. I think it's time to try to gently raise a sleeping beauty from his slumber...