It is 8.07am and I am standing on a tennis court while my 15-year-old yells at me to stop looking at dogs. I take his point, that it is hard to follow the trajectories of two moving things at the same time but, on the other hand, there is a chow chow playing with a dalmatian, and I can’t play tennis. “Let physics do the work,” he is saying, after chasing some ball I had managed to hit, but miles off the court. “Don’t make me do the work.” Why is he pretending to be a coach? Where did he learn to talk like a coach? Was it on Instagram? Much more importantly, why am I here?
This is the long road back to school hours, the week when the summer holidays exact their price. For the first two weeks, the kids went nocturnal and I stayed the same, and this was a golden time, when I was gifted four beautiful morning hours, and I mostly spent those staring out of a window, bored, waiting for everyone else to wake up. By this, the final holiday week in England, we are all keeping junkie hours. Yesterday, the house wasn’t fully awake, dressed and ready to leave until 1.43pm, and that’s when we were going somewhere we actively wanted to go. The reasonable thing would be to claw this back by five minutes a day, but then we would have to go back and start in May.
Nothing works. I don’t have the authority to make everyone go to bed earlier. I don’t even have enough natural command to make myself go to bed earlier. I tried running the house like an 80s B&B with one harried, bad-tempered owner, who would make you toast but only for the five minutes that coincided with Thought for the Day, and everyone said: “Nice try, sunshine, but we have opposable thumbs of our own, and, anyway, Tesco is right next door.” I had a friend whose dad used to make his mornings un-sleepable by drilling holes in the skirting board behind his head, but there are bits missing from that life lesson, such as, what do you do about all those holes in your skirting board?
So now I’m at yes to everything, as long as it’s at 8.07am. Waffles? A ball sport for which I have no aptitude? Uno? Four episodes of Dance Moms? Yes. Meet me at 8.07am.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Zoe Williams will host a Guardian Live event with the author and activist Naomi Klein in Manchester on Wednesday 27 September at 7pm BST. The event will also be livestreamed. Book tickets here
