Morning Rituals

I do not have a dog, but every autumn my brother drives up with his. What a visiting dog does to my quiet first hour, what helps a pet settle in someone else’s home, and the bag that comes out of the car first.

Someone asked about my morning ritual and I heard how little I had to say. An attempt to work out whether repetition plus a window adds up to the word, and why the word makes me uneasy in the first place.

Three months when the hour disappeared ten minutes at a time and I never once decided to stop. What I learned about which way the causality runs between sleep, mood, and a morning routine, and why I stopped writing.

My sister stayed six weeks in a flat where the kettle is three metres from the spare room door. What broke, what turned out fine, and the piece of information about my own routine that I did not particularly want.

The unhurried morning genre assumes more time makes a better morning. In my kitchen the opposite holds. Forty bounded weekday minutes beat three open Saturday hours, and I have run the comparison most weekends for two years.

I thought the answer was forty five minutes. I timed it for two weeks and the real median was twenty. What actually works, what does not, and the mornings when checking immediately is the right call.

The radiator wakes me before the alarm, and the kettle goes on before I have an opinion about anything. Four years of trimming a morning routine down to its smallest surviving version, plus a note about why I have the hour at all.