I feel a rant brewing …. It’s 6am, I’ve been awake since 4.30am. This is not an unusual scenario though I wish desperately that it was.

6am in Sri Lanka is the equivalent of our 8.30am. People are up and about and going to work, dogs are barking, cars and buses are beeping happily at eachother, exotic birds screech, fervent religious chanting is tannoyed across the neighbourhood, drumming wafts back in response and the old man across the courtyard at exactly 6.10, spends 15 minutes hacking up phlegm. Despite the fact that people generally start work at 8.30/9am, by 6am the entire country is in full swing. Utter Bastards.

Anyway, 6am at the moment sounds like a luxury, I went to bed at 9pm to savour this ‘long lie’ to the max. But no. In many an unlucky household, such as mine, Sri Lanka’s alarm clock is set for 4am.

It’s curry for breakfast (lunch and dinner) and as you can imagine, it doesn’t just pour conveniently out of cereal packet. No, you must go out into the communal courtyard, clatter about washing pans, chopping things and every few days, like today, grind spices. I say grind, it’s more of a pummel. The family have a mortar the size of a saucepan and a five foot long stone pestle. Between 4.30 and 5.30 the old witch monotonously heaves at this thing and it sounds exactly like someone’s head thudding off a stone floor. Mine. Our house is cast entirely out of a single piece of concrete and coated with more tiles than a space shuttle. It has the acoustic properties of a tunnel made from solid china. The guy upstairs once dropped what sounded like a marble and I thought the war had started. So, no matter how tightly I wedge in the earplugs, this druidic death march cannot be muffled.

To ‘normal people’ this does not seem to be an un-thoughtful or inappropriate time to be making such a racket. My family have no ASBOs. I expected Sri Lankans to be a bit more contradictory, like I imagine India, but the uniformity of attitude is, at times, verging on the Japanese. I stayed in a hotel on a work trip last week and at 6am the porter came along the corridor and knocked on every door to deliver ‘bed tea’. No-one thought, die you evil bastard, remove the knuckles from his poisoned hand !! Everyone took the tea and then not a noise was heard until 8.30 when everyone left their rooms at exactly the same time. Bed tea seems to be THE reason people get up extra early. An end in itself. Reminds me of Jim Jarmusch in “Blue in the Face” talking about how he liked smoking so much he’d set his alarm for 2am to have a cigarette. When I arrived at my house I could see the woman calculate my Bed Tea Time – “What time you go to work, 8 o’clock ? …. Bed tea 6’o’clock, it’s OK ?”

Anyway … they’re right and I’m wrong.  And in a Pavlovian way, they are trying to re-educate me, punishing me for my love of night and … punishing me more for my hatred of morning. I don’t think it’s going to work. Anyone who knows me as ‘a morning person’ is most mistaken.