Are you awake, nodding off or perhaps just woke? I only ask after seeing a silly headline on – checks for loose slates – the GB News website.
This read: “UK goes woke as average Briton ditches late nights for early mornings by going to sleep 20 minutes earlier than 2020.”
It caught my eye for a number of reasons.
Although happy to be called ‘woke’, I am also often awake when sleep would be desirable. It’s a long-running problem. When our now fully grown children were young, I kept a rolled-up futon mattress and a sleeping bag behind the sofa in the front room. When slumber was but a cruel tease, I would trudge downstairs and lie on my makeshift bed.
During one run of bad sleep, I re-read Ulysses by James Joyce. Even that mighty task sometimes failed to untick those little boxes in the head.
I don’t go looking for things on the GB News website but someone on X/Twitter mocked that headline, bringing it to my attention. As is now known, Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a bin bursting with right-wing detritus. That stink you discover when pulling a bulging bag from the dustbin? Yup, that’s what X/Twitter smells like on a bad day.
I should have left long ago. My still being there is mostly down to stubbornness: why should I go just because it’s been taken over by thugs? But I have found other places and will probably soon be gone.
Musk is the world’s richest man, and the most annoying. He owns many things, including the once and future president of the US, having bought himself a role in Trump’s new administration.
Frankly this is appalling, but I have enough mental traffic keeping me awake at night already. Mostly matters of little significance, but in the small hours these loom boulder-large, only to shrink to a pea by the ruffled sheet of morning.
Still, at least the Trump/Musk circus has the potential to go horribly wrong, with the lions eating each other, the jugglers dropping everything, the fire-eaters swallowing their flames and dying from scalding indigestion. And the head clown making an even bigger fool of himself than anyone imagined.
That GB News headline was mocked for suggesting that going to bed early was woke. If so, my being awake late is actually anti-woke, but honestly I’d rather be asleep any night. Instead I am awake and woke, as discussed here in earlier blogs.
Summoning a sigh, I read the story. A thin dull piece of work. They must have spent all the dosh on hiring Nigel Farage, a man much skilled at taking other people’s money.
Some of those commenting beneath that tweet suggested that ‘woke’ in that headline was being used as a pun. This stirred up a sluggish debate about whether GB News would even know what pun might be. As far as I can tell, mostly they are engaged in bigging up Nigel Farage and sticking the word woke on passersby.
The story in question, such as it was, seemed to be based on a press release from Virgin Media O2 suggesting people were switching off their devices 20 minutes earlier than in 2020.
A tale as scrawny as that mattress I used to pull from behind the sofa. Nowadays we have a spare room for my spare hours.
As this is my last ledge of the year, have a good Christmas and sleep well at night. If insomnia strikes, feel free to borrow my ancient copy of Ulysses, held together with Sellotape and filled with callow observations written long ago in biro by a onetime student of English literature who slept at night but didn’t know much about life.