Friday Morning, 9am
At 6:45am on a weekday our house lurches into life. The heating timer ticks over, and a quiet thunder of hot water rumbles through pipes throughout the house. A few minutes later an alarm clock switches on, filling the silence with news bulletins from the local radio station. One by one mobile phones around the house begin delivering notifications, with quiet chirps, beeps, and whistles. All the while I gaze at the ceiling, gathering thoughts. Moments later a battery powered cat toy erupts into life in our youngest child's bedroom, and fills the house with badly sampled cat noises. Now we are all awake.
“I wish somebody would throw that thing away”
My other half is awake. I smile, and look across at the alarm clock, watching the minutes tick by – contemplating the thought of leaving the warmth of the duvet, and braving the cold morning air.
I have the day off today. On a work day I would wander down for a shower at the last possible moment, a calculation complicated by requirements for breakfasts and packed lunches, complicated further by a mental stock-take of the contents of the kitchen cupboards. On weekends and days off, some kind of supernatural force delivers me to the kitchen half an hour after the alarm – shaved, showered, dressed, and ready to start the day rather than waste it staring at the ceiling.
There will be all manner of cups and plates dotted around the living room and kitchen from the night before. I'm not entirely sure how they come to be there, unless my other half is secretly inviting homeless people in for meals in the early hours. Everything is washed, and put away.
The cats will be stationed on strategic corners throughout the house – awaiting my arrival in the kitchen. They will feign disinterest until the first sounds of biscuits hitting their bowls, at which point all pretences are dropped, and they race to wind through my legs, purring like motorbikes. As soon as they have food, I am dead to them again.
The fish in the lounge will congregate in the nearest corner of the tank to the doorway – swimming determinedly at the glass. They have figured out that if they do this when the sun comes up, food magically appears on the surface of the water above. Or at least it does when I'm around.
Finally, I wander into the junk room and switch the computer monitor on. The computer is never switched off, so a login screen appears moments later – inviting the entry of a password, and the opening of the rabbit hole I have carefully constructed that leads to my upside down – my corner of the internet – to read stories accompanied by faces I have never met, but know better than those I cross paths with every day.