Gloomy news is driving some of us to take early refuge under the duvet – meanwhile the debate about wearing pyjamas before bedtime rages
A RECENT survey suggests . . . and you can insert anything you like here. Today we are going to insert the fascinating information that adults are going to bed earlier as a result of the recession. That the average bed time for grown-ups is now 10.30pm.
How do the 3,000 people surveyed manage to stay up so late? Most of us wonder how we’re going to make it through the nine o’clock news. We frequently have to lie the next day about having seen the weather forecast.
It’s part two, isn’t it, that is so difficult to stay awake for, after the emotional violence of part one ? In fact, there is nothing like the nine o’clock news these days to send you running for the duvet.
When you think about it, the television news may be responsible for the fact that adults are going to bed at 10.30 – that is, directly after the main evening bulletins on ITV and BBC, which are both on at 10 o’clock and last 30 minutes if you include the slightly spooky regional news from, in our case, Norn Iron. For those of you who are about to write a letter to the editor pointing out that RTÉ has the Six One news and that Sky has news on all the blooming time, we should add that, indeed, 60 per cent of adults now get straight into their pyjamas when they come home from work. Imagine, all those bankers under their Slankies, watching Bryan Dobson.
As someone who does not have to get out of her pyjamas in order to start work, I am hardly in a position to criticise. But that fictional family, the Royles, was absolutely castigated for sloth, simply for watching television all the time, and they were wearing traditional day-wear.
At least the Royles went round to Denise’s house for Christmas dinner, and are receiving guests on a constant basis. But getting into your pyjamas as soon as you come home from work implies that you’re not going out again. There is a defiance about it.
I wonder whether the people who conducted this survey – the manufacturers of Jockey underwear – are counting tracksuits and sweatpants as pyjamas? Or does any garment become a pyjama simply because one sleeps in it?
There are quite a lot of things to do once you come home from work – in fact, it’s a pretty packed schedule. Making dinner, eating dinner, washing up after dinner, some laundry perhaps, some browsing, or work on the computer. Everything to do with children and their clothes and their baths and their homework and their packed lunches and their sports kit, and you can fill in the rest of the blanks yourselves.
And then there is the drinking of alcohol, unsurprisingly after all of the above, which doesn’t seem quite right in your pyjamas, although people must manage it somehow.
I blame technology, as a matter of fact. Bedtime has always been a fragile concept. It must change now, as the nights get longer and the weather gets warmer.
Or perhaps we will all be gardening in our pyjamas – actually, gardening in your pyjamas is most enjoyable. I imagine that survey was done in the winter time.
The thing is, you’re never really in your pyjamas, and so cut off from the world, as long as you are near a telephone. And now most of us have a personal phone on or about our person, all the time.
A friend of mine used to say, in wonder, that you couldn’t ring a Dublin person’s house after 10 o’clock at night; in response, we used to say that you most certainly could not. Her point was that in a civilised location (ie Wexford), the business of the evening was only starting after 10pm, and that she had some of her best ideas then.
But Dublin houses, she had found, were ring-fenced by rules on privacy. That was 20 years ago. Now you can be phoning and texting until midnight and beyond, even in cautious Dublin. My friend has gone to live in the countryside and what amounts to a telephone silence. Probably in her pyjamas by six.
Our homes have become too comfortable, and above all too warm, to stay awake in. It is so nice to be cosy.
Those of us who have lived without central heating remember when you wore your overcoat until bed time, in order to sit around two smoking sods of turf or, worse still, the bars of an electric fire – it is hard to remember which it was more difficult to light cigarettes off.
Perhaps our bed times were later then because the beds were always so cold. It seems extraordinary to remember that people – respectable,adult people with good jobs – often did not bother heating their homes because they were going to spend the night in the pub.
This is where the box-set comes in, you know, that certain sign of conjugal stability. Hours and hours of one television series and a whole lot of boggle-eyed adults slumped on the sofa in their dressing gowns. Oh, it is addictive.
Now a survey on the uses and abuses of the box-set would be very interesting.