"I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- the White Queen (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland).
It is Lewis Carroll's White Queen who is that enviable creature, the believer in impossible things. I've spent the last week thinking it was one of Oscar Wilde's louche degenerates who said that. I only checked it out this morning, and I'm glad I did.
Otherwise I'd get another public scorning from you, like the time I mixed up Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman in a column, and I got 112 letters of complaint. I did once write that VS Naipaul was dead though, and nobody emailed to pull me up on that.
Say what you like about about Nobel Laureates, is my rule. Nobody cares.
But mix up American presidents at your peril. The History Channel has a lot to answer for.
Anyway, that quote of the White Queen's has been going around in my head all week, because I, like the Queen, have found myself thinking all sorts of things before breakfast lately.
That's because I've been up before breakfast, which is of itself a miraculous thing. I am no stranger to the purgatory of early morning starts. I've done breakfast radio, and somehow lived to tell the tale.
It helped that I was young and keen at the time, not to mention ambitious, still-drunk and/or in love, variously, for a lot of it. It made me as ugly, hungry and euphoric as everybody else who does it, and I'm sure if the time ever comes to go back, I'll jump at it, but, work aside, in all my life, I have never once made a decision to get up early by choice before now.
I have loved a lie-in since I was a very small girl. Around the age of 11 or 12, my favourite thing was to get up, put on my school uniform and go back into bed.
My mother, who had a pathological fear of me missing my bus, would find me there, laid out like a plank, dead to the world in pinafore, blazer and shoes, and shriek like a banshee until she'd woken both me and the dead, and [made sure] the 10 past eight from Hollyhill would not pull off untenanted.
I got an education, thanks to her keening, but its been a lifelong effort on my part to be mentally present at anything that starts before 10am.
Reading the news on bFM only worked for me because Mikey Havoc made so loud and varied a cacophony every morning, I was kept in the cat-like state of readiness usually only seen in recent victims of a violent assault.
I look back on those days with great fondness now, and immense gratitude that I no longer have to be sentient at 6am. The irony, of course is that I could probably do it a whole lot better now, and get a whole lot more out of it, now that I'm no longer spending every penny I earn on old-fashioneds at Crow Bar, or talking to my own reflection in the mirrors of Pony Club until 4am, but hey, si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait, which is both very true, and the only French I know.
I reacquainted myself with mornings this summer, with a civilised regime which doesn't require me to stir before 7. I've discovered the pleasure of the leisurely shower, (that's usually where the six impossible things come in) and having enough time to assemble my various knick knacks and gewgaws for the day ahead.
I stand by my kitchen sink and I look out at a toytown Auckland, the Harbour Bridge spun in sparkling steel over a crayon blue sea. I smile every morning when I say hello to Auckland, mindlessly, instinctively, like you have to when a very pretty girl goes by.
I walk to work listening to something Dylan-y with a harmonica, or The Buzzcocks if I want a spring in my step. Some days have a bumpy start, and there are Dunhill Finecuts for that.
Lately, I'm surprised at the number of things that can infuriate me before 8am, people being awful and the world so constantly falling short as it does. On those mornings, it's difficult to believe that it can get better, but that's where a queenly insistence on the impossible gets you through the day.
