I’ve just got around to writing today. I spent some time talking to my Spanish sister earlier in the day, after which my iPad decided it was almost out of battery and needed recharging before I did anything else. She’s having hot days in southern Spain where she has lived for close to 50 years, and is planning to come and visit family and friends in mid-August. She promises to try and bring the sunshine with her. We shall see.
Here I listened to the rain on the skylight windows as I contemplated getting up. I decided against running and got up and dressed instead. Then I put on my raincoat and walked my running route in the rain, stopping off at the co-op store for a few essentials.
As the day has progressed the weather has improved a little.
I wasn’t up and about at 5.00am. Today I wasn’t even awake at that time today although I have been known to wake briefly then and roll over and go back to sleep for a few hours. But I read that “the cult of 5.00am” is the latest thing, practised by famous people such as Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston and the Kardashians, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech people. Anna Wintour and Michelle Obama also indulge, as does Gwyneth Paltrow, but that last comes as no surprise as she is famous for odd health fads. Apparently she has shared on Instagram how she rises at 5am for a 30-minute tongue scrape and Ayurvedic oil pull (whatever that is), before settling down for 20 minutes of transcendental meditation, followed by a dance workout devised by her friend, the fitness guru Tracy Anderson.
Apparently if you do it properly there is a 20/20/20 formula. From 5am to 5.20am you do some form of vigorous exercise; 5.20am to 5.40am is for meditation and journaling; and from 5.40am to 6am, it is time for reading or learning. Then you can get on with the rest of your day, feeling invigorated! Not everyone is in favour. According to Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University (yes, it seems that there is such a thing), “There’s nothing intrinsically important about getting up at 5am. It’s just the ghastly smugness of the early start. Benjamin Franklin was the one who started it all when he said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ and it’s been going on ever since. It goes back to the Protestant work ethic – work is good and if you can’t or won’t work, that is, by definition, bad. Not sleeping is seen as worthy and productive.”
Think of Margaret Thatcher and her four or five hours sleep a night!
It seems to me to be another of those things for people to beat themselves up about or to boast about, depending on whether or not they achieve it. And while at this time of year, even when it’s raining, it does feel good to be up and about and doing stuff in the dawn light, will these 5.00am people really feel like going for a brisk walk along empty city streets in a few months time when it’s still pitch black at that time of day.
Besides, if you get up at 5.00 surely you must go to bed at about 9.00pm or 9.30pm if you want to get something like the 8 hours of sleep my Fitbit keeps advising me to aim for!
And there’s me feeling virtuous about getting up and about between 8.00 and 8.30am!
Getting back to my earlier conversation with my Spanish sister, one thing we talked about was holiday accommodation and air b&bs. Quite a lot of people in holiday places in Spain and Italy, and Cornwall and wales for that matter, have been trying to restrict the number of properties being converted into air b&bs. In my sister’s experience it changes the nature of a neighbourhood. Neighbours have always been important in Spain. The landing has long been a place where the neighbourhood children meet and play when it’s too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet, too anything in fact, to play in the square.
In Barcelona it seems that local residents have been protesting by squirting tourists with water pistols and telling them to go home! It must be hard to strike a balance: tourism is a main source of income in many such places but local people can’t afford to live there, priced out by the tourists!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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