NINE BELLS morning routines

Everyone seems fascinated by morning routines. So here’s mine.

940am. Woken by phone alarm or occasionally by a cat. Current alarm tone:

Up, check phone notifications to get a quick sense of the overnight but do nothing about them unless it’s a family emergency, do a minute or two of movement or bodyweight exercise, put on yesterday’s clothes.

945am. Put the juice of one lemon into a pint of water and drink it down in one.

Drink two ristretto coffees while sitting in the back garden under shelter. Daylight as soon as possible is required. Amazon Echo Buds are in the ears because they have halfway decent noise cancelling. I need ambient music and a slow start.

I read the papers on my phone, which these days are: BBC News, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Politico, City AM, New York Times, Le Monde and Deutsche Welle. A few of those are going to get taken out of rotation this winter. I’ll also look at the top of my RSS feed. Feed chickens afterwards. Take a photo of the outdoors.

1020am. Clean up, get changed into fresh clothes, pick a watch and accessories and maybe a fragrance.

Why bother, if you’re going to be indoors writing all day? Because you’re setting a tone. You’re telling yourself that you’re going to be the best available version of yourself that’s sitting in that chair today.

At this time of year, it’s generally workwear. Carhartt and Dickie’s make warm clothes that so far appear to be indestructible – I have Carhartt shirts I bought a dozen years ago that are still solid. Generally a long sleeve Henley underneath, or one of the boat-neck long-sleeves I sourced on a military surplus site a while back. I have some two-pocket denim shirts in black and dark indigo that get cycled in at this time of year, too. I started wearing two pocket shirts during an extended stay in the US in the early 2010s and now I can’t do without them.

(When my daughter was 16 she turned to me during a walk to a restaurant and told me she’d uncovered the secret of the patriarchy: “Pockets! All you bastards have pockets and we don’t!” She wore a tailored tweed suit to her university graduation.)

Protein shake: One scoop of Vivolife Perform and half a scoop of cacao powder poured into approx 150 ml of pea milk and consumed through a steel straw.

Power up the office, start drinking water, attack the email and open WordPress to start the daily noon post on LTD.

I have a notebook in the office which is reserved for the list of everything I need to get done today, which i wrote the previous night before bed. I open that up and groan.

I put on a podcast or whatever I recorded on BBC Sounds the previous night. Now I’m reading my RSS reader, planning out LTD posts, picking at the newsletter, warming up.

1050am. Try and get a ten or fifteen minute walk in. I cover about a mile. I have some cheap open-ear earbuds to wear that allow me to listen to something without getting run over.

Shoes are important. If it was warmer, I’d be using the Merrell barefoot shoe or a mesh-top slip-on, but at this time of year it’s a Skechers, a Merrell chukka boot or the Jungle Moc. On a bad day if I’m feeling intrepid it’s the Merrell MOAB and the Iswear Icelandic wool heavy hoodie. Clothes are important to me and always have been. I got it in my genes from my dad, who was from the time when even working class kids like him saved up to hire their own tailor. I am a more eccentric dresser than my dad was, and my kid is a little more eccentric than me, but I like to think that’s because her mother is batshit.

(Full disclosure- my daughter thinks we’re both batshit)

1105am. Berries with six almonds and a spoon of good honey. One Liposomal Nicotinamide Riboside 2000mg with TMG and Pterostilbene, two Vitamin D3 & K2. Drink more bloody water.

I am awful at drinking enough water. I even gave up on stealing water out of herself’s Brita filter jug and just pour tap water into this stainless steel drinking bottle. I have recently taken to buying water in BPA-free PET or rPET bottles. This is an absolutely terrible thing to do. But I tell myself that actually buying the water will make me drink it and if I get back into the habit of drinking two litres a day I can go back to tap water. (UK tap water is among the safest in the world but is probably full of forever-chemicals anyway)

I will also try to fit in five minutes of sitting in Zazen meditation, which I am very bad at. I remain in the intermediate phase where I simply observe breath for five minutes. (When I should be doing twenty, yes) I know it’s working if my shoulders drop during the five.

Anyway, at this point I’m already thinking about what I’m doing today, I’ve triaged the email, reviewed the list, and deciding what I need to get into. If there’s something really badly pressing, that’s where I’m going, otherwise I’m just going to see what I’m in the mood for.

Now. How many times a week do you think all that happens? How many of the morning-routine online boys do their elaborate, anxious and faintly demented morning routines every damn day? How many of them have a full staff that takes care of real-life things while they go through their weird checklist? How many of them fake having a full staff?

I didn’t eat breakfast until half past noon. Just the way the day shook out. Elaborate morning routines are at best an aspiration, and at heart a fiction.