Eva Bradley: When did early night sound so good?

Eva Bradley

It's probably not especially cool to admit this, but I love an early night. In winter especially, nothing quite beats peeling back the flannelette sheets with the electric blanket on high and sliding in between them before 9pm. Even on the weekend.

Once upon a grand old time this sort of attitude would have been the stuff of nightmares to me. I remember (only just) when my night didn't even properly start until after 9pm, and then it was definitely always outside the four walls of my own home.

Growing up (and old?) and especially becoming a parent has dramatically changed those habits. Even if I wanted to hit the town, responsibilities at home mean this requires co-ordination and preplanning disproportionate to the benefits gained (a hangover with a toddler not being one of those).

Needless to say, my social life has changed, but recently with baby-related routines no longer as strict as once was necessary I've discovered a whole new way of going out that really does seem to give me the best of both worlds.

Instead of everything starting late (the socialising, the getting to bed, the getting out of it the next day), we are doing the same things but just at an earlier hour.

The trick is to play a swift mental game with oneself, pretending that you're not actually eating with your young kids in-tow at the dramatically uncool hour of 5.30pm on a Saturday night, and that in fact it's far later. This is, of course, more easily achieved in winter when it gets dark early and seems far later than it is.

The end result is that a night out is wrapped up by 9pm and all the kids have a late-but-not-too-late night out and the parents an early-but-not-too-early curfew.

The same conversations are had, the same amount of wine drunk (depressingly not by me at the moment), the good food is eaten and we still get home in time to indulge that flannelette feeling with a cup of tea and Gingernuts.

The only thing I haven't quite perfected is how to make this new way of living feel honest-to-goodness okay.

I suppose if I were to transpose my feelings around early nights to some sort of grief graph, I'd be at the "acceptance" stage of where my social life is at right now. Shock, anger, depression at how it's had to adjust to new responsibilities are mostly behind me and I've found I rather like the way becoming a mother has turned me into such a nana.

Maybe I've just got that final push over the top of the hill to be made and that's to be accepting enough to admit where I'm at. So maybe this is column therapy - if you tell 100,000 people you love being in bed early on the weekends you're cured, right?

Except I know there's latent denial buried just beneath the surface. Secretly am I hoping that if I just mellow out and embrace where life is at right now, at some mythical point in my life when simply being awake is no longer exhausting, I'll find the party-girl-that-was and dust off my dancing shoes.

Except by the time this happens I will probably be a nana both literally and figuratively, and the only dance floor that will have me is the sort you find on cruise ships catering for ageing American retirees.

I can't imagine there ever being a point in my life when the thought of joining that set wouldn't horrify me.

But there was a time when bed at 9pm on Saturday horrified me, so never say never, right?

-Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.