What's the story?

I have a routine in the morning, it has as time has passed become honed so that not a movement it is the very living personification of efficiency.

I awake at about 4 and consider myself to be well rested and could well get up if the mood so took me, it being about 4 there seems little point. There is not a lot in the way of entertainment in the woods at that hour so I go back to sleep. At 6am the alarm goes off again but not there is a reason to get up I feel strangely reluctant to do so, so the alarm gets put on to snooze. I consider getting up but decline on the basis that it is too cold and wet and I am too tired, I then spend about a minute considering catching a later bus and so giving myself and extra half an hour in bed before falling asleep at 6.03 am the alarm goes off again. This process is repeated until about 6.21. The bus leaves at about 6.45 and it takes me 25 minutes to walk there this gives me -1 minute to get up, shiver, put on my jeans and the fleece that I have been using as a pillow, clean my teeth, roll up my roll mat, and stuff the sleeping bag into my rucksack. This leaves me about 15 minutes for the 20 minute walk to work. Fortunately a lot of my journey to work is down hill; unfortunately it is also rather thickly wooded. You know that feeling when you get up after not enough sleep and you can’t even focus properly because your eyes are still asleep? I know that feeling well. What is interesting when you can’t see clearly is to try to make your way down a rather steep heavily wooded slippery hill side, if we add darkness and fog into the equation then we soon find ourselves virtually blind. Now being the well prepared individual that I am a few months into living in the woods I bought a torch that straps onto my head and so lights up the way ahead. The only problem with this is that when it is foggy all it seems to do is light up the fog. Soon enough I am out of breath and the clouds of warm air that I’m panting out finish off the job of blinding me as they become illuminated by the torch light.

This morning I made it down the hill without falling over; I did walk into a tree, get whipped around the face by a branch and get brought to an amazingly abrupt halt as I bent to duck under a branch but didn’t quite duck enough to allow my rucksack to get through as well. Once at the bottom of the hill a quick check of the watch reveals that I’m going to need to run for a while to make up time. It is not long before I am regretting putting the fleece on and I make a mental note to myself not to wear it tomorrow. Eventually I make it to the bus stop, usually out of breath and quite often covered in mud and bits of tree. This morning I was happy to get to the bus stop at 6.45 but less happy when I then had to wait 10 minutes for the bus to turn up; I could have had an extra 10 minutes in bed!

The journey home is much more sedate as there is none of the rush, last night I even found a new way of removing my rucksack from the luggage rack and straight onto my back. This was a lot easier than my old technique and if I hadn’t torn a muscle in my left shoulder in the process I would use that technique again tonight.