We've been getting up at 6:30 am again all week (a bit of a drop-off from the 6:15 that we used to do, but not so bad). Anyway, the last couple of days, we've both been so deeply asleep at 6:30 and Steph has been feeling a little ill that we decided we'd give ourselves an extra hour this morning and put our writing session back to this evening. Great idea. As I set the alarm and turned off the light, I said, "We'll probably end up waking up at 5:30 tomorrow." We chortled and went to sleep.

Bad joke.

I woke up, looked at the clock, and found it was, indeed, 5:30. Couldn't get back to sleep so I got up at 6:15. What is it with this masochistic sleep denial?

I surfed around on the net for a while then worked on the webpages I'm going to put up until Steph finally emerged at 8:00. Tomorrow, I'm setting the alarm for 5:30 in the hope I'll sleep till 7:30.

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We listened to the radio over breakfast. This is our compromise. I love having the news on all the time, even though I don't always listen to it. Steph prefers to never have it on. So we just listen during breakfast. Today we were listening to an interview with a sociologist who has written a book saying that the "oiks have taken over". Apart from the fact that I've never heard anyone actually use the word "oik" before, I've also never heard so much rubbish in my life. His main complaint was that people don't know their place in society anymore and that "middle England" (a synonym for the upper-middle class) was now acting like the lower classes and that as result everything was terrible: public displays of, well, anything, were rife. He recalled those rose-tinted days of the past when the upper-middle classes behaved with decorum and reserve.

It seems to me that anyone who talks of these mythical days has done little investigation of history. The middle classes never acted in the way this man was "recalling", not even in those often-quoted, much-spun Victorian years.

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It's a beautiful day outside. Sunny and warm. I've got the window open for the first time this year. The weather forecast is for rain this afternoon, but no sign of it yet. Of course, it makes me want to leave the office, but I can resist a while longer.