Whenever I have had to get up for an early start, I have always taken care not to wake The Current Mrs Masher™ – she’s not at her best, first thing, and being woken before it’s actually time to get up, adds a whole extra level of misery to her morning.  And if she’s miserable then…

When I was a call-out engineer, I would sometimes get up at  2 or 3 in the morning to attend an outage. I would quietly dress and leave the house, returning a couple of hours later and slipping back into bed.  When Mrs M got up at 7, she would be completely unaware that I had even been anywhere and would often ask if I’d had a good night’s sleep!

And even now, if I have to get up early, I wash and clean my teeth in the dark, so that the light from the bathroom doesn’t wake her and I’ll gather up my clothes and get dressed in the spare bedroom, so that the noise of me dressing doesn’t rouse her from her slumber.

However, it’s very different when the roles are reversed.  Sometimes, Mrs M has to get up early for work.  The alarm clock will go off at 04:30 and will then be snoozed. It will then go off again 8 mins later, when it will be snoozed again.  I’ll kick her out of bed when it goes off for the third time. She then goes in the bathroom and bright white light will flood into the bedroom, forcing me to hide beneath the covers.  Then the bedroom light will go on whilst she rummages vociferously through her wardrobe, coathangers clattering loudly on the rail as she tries to figure out which one of her twenty or so tops goes best with the black trousers she plans on wearing.  Drawers will be noisily opened and closed as various undergarments are selected and then she’ll sit on the side of the bed and start drying her mop with the hairdryer.

After fifteen minutes listening to this racket, I am wide awake, which is when she then comes round to my side of the bed and whispers (yes, WHISPERS!) that she’s off to work now.

Jeez.