Cheating sleep

Actually, that should read, 'was rudely woken up by my damn radio alarm'. Every Monday morning it's the same thing: disbelief. The weekend couldn't have gone that quickly, could it? My problem is that I am a heavy sleeper and having to get up at 7am does shocking things to my state of awakeness during the week. So any chance I get, I just sleep on and on - I can't remember the last time I woke up naturally rather than being woken up by something or someone. (This is one of the good side-effects of being a heavy sleeper; no waking up at 3am and not being able to go back to sleep.) At the weekends I'll sleep until ten or eleven o'clock, result, I have a 12-hour day which means I can't get to sleep, especially on a Sunday. So inevitably, on Monday mornings I'll have had about 6 hours sleep with which to revitalise myself.

My solution? To fool myself into thinking that I get a lie-in. And how do you do that, I hear you ask, when you arise at such an ungodly hour? Simple. I set my alarm for 6.30am, struggle out of bed and into the bathroom, then back to bed for half an hour and get up just as the 7 o'clock news finishes. This may sound mad, but if I wake up at 7.00 and have to leap out of bed and immediately get ready, I just won't be able to do it. I won't even be able to read the paper at breakfast. Whereas this way, firstly, I have an incentive to get up (because the sooner I get up, the sooner I can go back to bed), and secondly, I'm just awake enough to actually get up when my second alarm clock goes off.

So there you go; bent back tulips can solve that age-old problem of how to get out of bed. And you thought I did nothing for you...