Jane Shilling: Why get up at the crack of dawn?

Are you an early riser? Photo / 123RF

Opinion

I have never understood the impulse that drives people to do things because they have seen someone famous doing them. But it is hard to resist a twinge of unaccountable satisfaction when you discover that some quite ordinary bit of behaviour that you've been doing for years has now been adopted by a clutch of celebs. Suddenly your dull little habit is transfigured into a Power Thing, and you feel briefly illuminated by its reflected glory.

At any rate, that's how I felt on reading that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gets up at 3.45 each morning. The habit of rising super-early - at what Army types call Oh-Christ-Hundred-Hours - is one Cook shares with a formidable cohort, including Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue and the former US Secretary of State and Ban Bossy campaign spokeswoman, Condoleezza Rice. All three are fond of violent physical exercise first thing. Wintour plays tennis at 5.45am before having her famous bob blow-dried at 6.45. Rice springs out of bed and into the gym at 4.30am, while Cook checks his emails on (naturally!) his Apple watch before hitting the gym at 5am.

Oddly enough, it isn't a fondness for press-ups and baseline volleys at dawn that I share with this august trio. But since I was little girl I have felt there is some secret complicity about starting the day at first light that binds together a fraternity of early risers: farmers, street cleaners, stable lads, songbirds - and me.

As eccentricities go, you'd think a fondness for an early cup of tea is pretty mild. But my larkish habits have caused no end of trouble in my domestic life. My sweetheart is an owl of such resolutely nocturnal tendencies that we almost didn't survive our first date. We met, had a drink and a chat and seemed to be getting on quite well when he suddenly suggested dinner. Now. That minute.

It was 10pm, an hour at which I'd usually be in my nightie. Some inner kind fairy restrained me from saying as much. I dutifully ate dinner at what, for me, felt like the middle of the night, and for the next few months found myself following a grim regime of trying to stay awake while he told me his life story over a single malt at 2am, only to snap briskly awake as usual just after 5am.

Eventually, dizzy with sleep deprivation, I broke down and confessed it all: the longing for a nice early night, the urgent desire to see the dawn, the terrible nostalgia for the 5.20am weather forecast.

He listened sympathetically, but didn't really believe I meant it. And it struck me that the undercurrent of our conversation was a polite version of class struggle. My ancestors were humble shepherds: early to bed and early to rise is bred in the bone. His were merchant princes in the Far East accustomed, no doubt, to mollocking about in silken sheets until all hours. We have inherited our Circadian rhythms from our forbears and there is nothing much we can do about them.

For a while I took a certain satisfaction in repeating to him a report published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, which purported to show that owls are prone to narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathic tendencies. (Larks, by contrast, are conscientious, upstanding types who make admirable accountants. Apparently.)

But there is something even more satisfactory about the auroral enthusiasms of the great and the good. They flip the whole notion of early-rising peasants and late-carousing poshos on its head. It won't last, of course. A year from now, fashion will have changed and getting up late will have become the new getting up early. But in the meantime, I am relishing my own personal peasants' revolt.

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