what's under there?

I'm not a morning person, by anyone's definition. If you were to only ever encounter me in the morning, you'd be convinced I was the meanest, surliest, grumpiest, quietest person you'd ever met (when I'm actually the nicest, happiest, loudest person you've ever met). I don't say a lot in the mornings. I don't even really think a lot in the mornings other than how badly I want to go back to bed.

However sometimes circumstances conspire to get me up early, like, really early, and when they do, I find that, while I wouldn't want to make a habit out of it, those days when I wake up early are usually pretty good ones. Last week was pretty mad at work, I worked three 16-hour days in a row. The first of these ended at 1am on Tuesday, and things ended quite stressfully, partially because I hadn't fully appreciated quite how much there was to do. I got to bed by 2.00, tossed and turned fitfully for two hours, stared at the ceiling for an hour, then realized I wasn't getting back to sleep and I should just go back into work and make sure everything got done.

So I strapped on my blades and started heading down Finchley Road just as dawn broke over London. And I saw all those things I usually don't see- the streetsweepers collecting all the refuse from the previous day, the tube guys opening all the barriers and rolling out their signs, folks putting out a fresh days papers- all the machinery behind the day that keeps the rest of us running when it's time for us to get up. And it just kind of wowed me, y'know? All these thousands of little cogs all interlocking into each other so that the rest of the cogs can slowly grind into action a few hours later.

And I'm not the best cog, I appreciate that. I've got a couple of spokes missing and I need some fresh oil. I stick sometimes. I miss a few rotations now and then. It's really a miracle I haven't been popped out of the machine and replaced with a fresh new sprocket. But the real miracle is that we've all got a few spokes missing, yet somehow, bizarrely and byzantinely, the machine keeps going, day after day, and we take it for granted that it'll all be up-and-running by the time we get out there, and the paper-guy and the bus driver and last night's janitors and the dude we get our printers ink from will all be there, all thrusters firing.

And it's good that we take it for granted, I mean, we can't exactly go around thinking: "Woah! It all fits together!" all the time and still have time to worry about whether Ginger Spice was responsible for the failure of Fat Slags, The Movie or not. But it's also good that, occasionally, we can.

d