46 The Times Magazinetimes, it was the calm before the storm.
A space for making tea, talking to the cats,
reading the papers and rooting myself in the
security of home, before heading out into the
mad activity of the day. Now, when the whole
damn day is so rooted in domesticity that my
life is no more exotic than the life of a kettle
or a slotted spoon, the morning has become
my party time, the mysterious, exotic hour of
my life that nobody knows about. Reading The
Times with a cat on my lap is the new 48-hour
Amsterdam sex and drugs binge, whose main
purpose is to make you appreciate your family.
And I do, when they finally appear. Just
as long as I have done some work. Rinsed the
papers for column ideas and radio and podcast
talking points – neat squares cut from all
the news sections and notes made in brown
felt tip on the back of the nearest children’s
drawing (“Possible small item on how much
I fancy Priti Patel?”) – and sent off a dozen
emails to people that will put them on the
back foot all day, while I am already tearing
the arse out of it. The great thing about the
early morning, you see, is that you’re not yet
depressed because you squandered the day. If
I get to 10am without having written most of
a piece, I am already too miserable about the
time wasted to start anything. But an hour’s
work done before the sun gets up and you’ve
won the day already. Nobody can touch you.
And that’s when I’m ready for my son
to arrive downstairs, clutching Big Bunny
and a cricket bat and apparently in mid
conversation: “...and did you know that Virat
Kohli has an average of a million and three...
but only if you count in sixes... Dad, who is
Virat Kohli? Dad, where’s Mum? Have you seen
my Beano annual? I want some Cheerios...”
And my daughter: silent, deadly,
unresponsive to my first three tries at “Good
morning!”, a thick novel pinned open under
her skinny right arm, left thumb in mouth, to
take up her position in the soft chair by the
window and wait for breakfast.Giles
The moment I wake, I get up and go downstairs.
Because for as long as I’m in bed, it’s still
night-time. And night-time is for lying
awake and worrying about work, sex, physical
decline, money, climate change, sex, war, death,
schools, sex, intensive farming, the death of
newspapers and whether Matt Hancock will
ever let us go to the beach again. So I leap up
like a trout in spring and start getting on with
stuff, because otherwise I’d lie there silently
crying until Christmas. But I go quietly,
slippers and jumper prepared by the bed
the night before, to avoid noisy rummaging,
because Esther, left undisturbed, will sleep on
for hours, which is how she likes it.
We’ve got a serious blackout arrangement
on the bedroom window, dating from the
peak of her baby sleep neurosis, that involves
six layers of increasingly light-impermeable
material from Colefax and Fowler linen drapes
to a 5mm lead blast curtain that could keep
out the light and noise from a medium-sized
nuclear explosion. Camden could be bombed
to a crater overnight but Esther still wouldn’t
wake up till I brought her a cup of strong PG
Tips at 7.30, with a splash of milk and a fifth of
a teaspoon of some ghastly shit she keeps in a
jar by the tea and thinks doesn’t count as sugar.
Esther claims to be a “lark”, not an “owl”,
and thus goes to bed around 8pm (usually
while I’m still washing up after dinner, as
I have complained in this space quite recently)
and is asleep by nine. But then she sleeps for
at least 11 hours until long after actual larks
have sung the crap out of the dawn, had three
breakfasts and got down to work on their little
lark novels. For, in truth, she is neither owl
nor lark, but hedgehog: she doesn’t sleep, she
hibernates. And my job is to let her. You don’t
want to be around Esther in the morning,
when she’s only had ten hours’ kip.
And, anyway, I live for my hour or two of
solitude in the dark kitchen. In pre-lockdownThe morning is the best part of the
day. It’s all downhill after that
STAYING IN WITH THE CORENS
GILES & ESTHER’S LOCKDOWN 3 LIFE
And, finally, Esther, with the empty mug
I brought her tea in, half an hour ago, wondering
where the second cup is. I move in for a kiss
and she shies away like a racehorse startled
by a firecracker. As far as she’s concerned, it’s
much too early for that sort of thing. Whereas
for me, the day is basically over.Esther
Now that my children are seven and ten,
the early morning hour is my bliss. If it could
be distilled and bottled, I believe it would do
wonderful things to my face.
When my children were tiny, the day
would start at anything from 5.30am onwards,
my son bellowing baby profanities from bed
before arriving at my nose like a tiny, furious
council official commanding me “downdairs”.
Oh I beg you, not downdairs. Not yet.
Even now that I am awake at a leisurely
7, sometimes a full hour before the first child
has uttered its opening complaint, downdairs
still means work, effort, possible peril. My
early morning bed, on the other hand, is a
luxurious limbo between asleep and awake
when the day holds the potential to be perfect.
Or at least not terrible.
Giles thinks I am asleep up here, because he
hates being awake in bed and doesn’t have the
patience to consider why anyone wouldn’t. But
I am not asleep, like some teenager stunned
by hormones. I am merely lying undisturbed,
unbruised by the reality of downdairs.
It’s a reality that will immediately contain
questions from Giles, ranging from a sadistic
query about a tax return and what time
I would like to have dinner on the third night
of a hypothetical stay in a hotel in August, to
whether or not he ought to have a shower.
There may be other things. Perhaps a cat
has been sick or I will detect in the air that
blueish dead-mouse smell, which indicates
TOM JACKSON that a rodent has been helpfully dispatched