Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’VE read pieces in my time about how people feel anxious when they wake up and dread the day that’s in front of them, prompting them to turn over in ‘the scratcher’ in an effort to stave off the anxiety.

Thankfully, I am not that animal, but the issue does get slightly more complex. When the eyelids open up at some ungodly hour, there is no sense of dread in my mind, but what is present is an absolute feeling of comfort fuelled by a sense of innate laziness.

Out the country, in my younger days, we were always rated on ‘how good of a worker’ you were, whether it be in the ‘finer arts’ like turning hay, footing turf, or pulling out sheep for shearing. Like most of my rustic contemporaries, we always seemed to get decent ratings from our seniors.

One of the key factors in those ratings was how early, departure from the bed occurred in the morning. We were always reminded of a man back the road who would be on the road at 6.30 each morning of the late summer with his horse-and-cart, on his way to the bog to bring home the turf and build up the stock of winter fuel for the colder days and nights.

Despite such inspirational tales of early morning enthusiasm and zeal, I never really developed the ‘instant pop-up’ mentality when it came to leaving the bed in the morning. I always thought about it, considered it for at least 10-seconds, before gently turning around in the bed and pulling the duvet [well blankets in the ‘old days’] a little closer to me, and just feeling . . . well, kind of happy.

As the years passed, a big breakthrough seemed to be old-fashioned alarm clock with the trick being to position it at least three paces away from the bed, which meant that you had to depart the covers to cut if off. The natural progression then should be to stay up and ‘tear into the day’.

With the passing of time [that word again!] and the advances in technology, the iPhone and its compatriot, have given us little escape routes of sorts, most notably the snooze button, which represents the greatest cop-out of all time in terms of a more disciplined approach to departures from ‘the cot’.

Morning after morning the snooze button is pressed and nine minutes more of peace and warmth is accessed before it goes off again, the same procedure is repeated over and over again. I’ve it now down to three presses of the snoozes button – 27 minutes – before making a very begrudging return to the world of the vertical.

There are little tricks and ruses that you can play on yourself. For example, if the real time you want to get is 7am, then set the mobile alarm for 6am, which will then allow you to have six snoozes while still enabling you to get up at your designated time. A kind of a con job on yourself . . . a morning routine of delusion and self-deception.

Pictured: Keep the alarm clock away from the bed!