Early birds

With a deadline for Letter from Prague’s completion fast approaching, I find myself up at the crack of dawn and in front of a computer. At university, this became something of a weekly ritual, as the dreaded ‘essay crisis’ invariably kicked in. But since graduation, with the exception of a few mornings on which I have set alarms to catch obscenely early, bargain-basement flights, I haven’t really risen to see the world at five.

I always took a sort of bleary-eyed pleasure in early morning Oxford. Waking at five meant you witnessed the hour or so of calm between the night before and the morning after. No more rowdy students shouting, weeping, or singing in the kebab queue across the street, and not yet the constant hum of engines from the bus rank just outside my window. The nigh-on silence was always good for concentration and punctuated only rarely, but nicely, by the clinking of a milk float on its early-morning rounds. In fact, I hadn’t realized that the good old British tradition of the milk round continued until my final year in Oxford, and those painfully early starts.

Waking up in Prague at five is not at all the same. It is not a case of you busying away in an otherwise sleeping city. It has always seemed almost rude to me, on the few mornings of insomnia that I have had, that going out to sit on my balcony at that hour I am far from being alone. I can see a TV flickering in at least one of my neighbour’s windows and indeed several people scurrying off to work down on the street below.

And so similarly writing a Letter from Prague at this early hour, I can’t revel in the idea that I am the only one at work amidst Prague’s slumbering citizens. The bin lorries and street cleaners are yet to come round, yes, but the neighbourhood is far from silent with the day trams two streets away already running. I can even hear some neighbours rushing down the stairwell, keys jangling and at a speed suggesting they are already late for work.

I do miss the solitude of my early morning essay crises, but don’t miss the frequency of this particular phenomenon. And I am quite happy to give an early morning Prague over to its tram-drivers, stressed workers and couch potatoes if it means another couple of hours in bed.