red squirrel in the morning....

Whatever happened to lie-ins?

I ask because I was having a conversation with someone this morning who has teenage sons, and she was saying that she finds it almost impossible to get them out of bed. Yesterday, her nineteen year-old didn’t actually surface before 7pm… which is a pretty heroic effort if you ask me. She was remarkably phlegmatic about it too, it has to be said. She just shrugged her shoulders and said they could do what they liked.  He'd been up all night on the internet, apparently.  I bet he had.

I’m not expecting to be able to go back to being a teenager and to just lounge around in bed until lunchtime and beyond… but I don’t really seem to get any kind of a lie-in anymore and that makes me feel a little sad for days gone by. Apart from anything else, those few extra hours sleep at the weekend just help you recharge your batteries for another week at work...and that mostly seems to have disappeared from my life.

It’s all my own fault too. You see, the thing is that I’ve picked up activities at the weekend that require actually getting out of bed and leaving the house. No one's making me get up to do this stuff: they're activities that I volunteered to do, so there's no one to blame but myself.  If you had suggested to the teenage me that I would voluntarily be getting up at 7:15 on a Saturday morning to get up and ready for a 5km run at 9am, then I would have laughed in your face. If you were to then add that I would be doing more or less the same thing on a Sunday morning too, only this time it was a ten mile run, then I probably told myself to get a grip and then burst into tears.

Whisper it quielty, but I suppose it’s actually quite nice to be up early and to have been for a run and still have the best part of the day in front of you…. It’s just that thinking like that is so old, isn’t it? You wouldn’t catch all that many young people thinking like that.

I’m old and I get up early in the morning. If you'll forgive me, I feel like I need to mourn the passing of my youth.