My 5.35am alarm doesn’t make me better than you — early risers are smug but sadly not superior

I get up at 5.35am every weekday. If you know me you definitely already know this, because I will have found a way to tell you — and relish in your awed horror. With the beatific smile of the martyr I will tell you that “you do get used to it”, and that “I’m not saving lives”, in a way that manages to imply that in some unclear way, I might be.

But whether or not you know me, you will know someone like me: someone who practises the moral superiority of the early riser. It is, after all, one of Western capitalism’s most hardwired myths: the idea that people who get up as dawn breaks are quite simply better than people who do not. This, we are told, is the habit of life’s winners: of CEOs and magazine editors, of actors and millionaires and Silicon Valley billionaires, those Type A doers filling the 6am spin classes.

In fact, this perceived link between early risers and supremacy is not backed by science. Research by University College London, published last week , finds that people who wake up early have a higher risk of dying from a stroke or a heart attack; they are, quite literally, weaker. Is that the sound of a parliament of night owls hooting with schadenfreude?

And yet, despite such evidence, the impression persists, because the mythology of the early riser’s superiority is so potent. Truly, I only qualify for the club on the grounds of a technicality: I hate getting up at 5.35am — I believe it to be the worst of all of my first-world problems — and do it purely out of necessity. By day three of 5.35am starts I feel that I am one missed Circle line away from weeping uncontrollably. But I enjoy showing off, so I tell it differently, thrilled that people could think of me in the same bracket as those corporate ballers whose salaries dwarf mine into insignificance.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and night owls have a similarly potent sense of identity. They are held up as radical creatives, and duly, members of this tribe define themselves proudly in opposition to the neurotic early types. They “do their best work at 3am” and will not be contained by the diktats of the mainstream. The night owl’s lack of moral superiority is their brand.

The tribalism of defining yourself by when your alarm goes off is, of course, ultimately nonsense. Note that the myths are selective and inconsistent. We do not ascribe moral superiority to the street cleaners who get up at 4am to do a job that we don’t want to — only to the CEOs and exercise fanatics. We swallow this myth of the night owl as a poet, even if what they’re actually doing at 2am is watching YouTube videos of cats with their paws stuck in toilet roll tubes.

Your wake-up time gives clues to your social status, perhaps, but none at all about your morality — no matter how convincing my martyr act.

Love Island is leaving me cold this year

Last year, my favourite obnoxious party trick was to join conversations about Love Island — bright-eyed, with opinionated zeal — before nonchalantly revealing that I had not seen a single episode. I wasn’t a total charlatan: I had managed to keep up with the key “storylines” second-hand, through friends and colleagues and lively WhatsApp groups. The internet furnished me with everything else I missed.

This year I’m faring better, or worse, depending on where you stand on people with no experience in an area declaring themselves an expert. I have very little idea what is going on in this series. I know someone was kicked off for doing something crude and someone called Maura enjoys ice lollies but if someone asked me to invent a Love Island plot twist, that would be my first guess, so I don’t think it really counts.

Perhaps I am less popular this year, or I have curbed my idle Twitter habit; perhaps last season, like last summer, was just better? I couldn’t say — though I suppose that wouldn’t have stopped me last time.

Take me back to the sunkissed summer

Summer 2019 would always have struggled to meet the standards set by last year’s exuberant, three-month sabbatical from reality; as difficult second albums go, the brief was intimidating. Indeed, my memories of last year are quite literally rose-tinted, as I wore pink sunglasses every day for three months.

But still, could it be any drearier? Instead of a heatwave, we have deluges, broken only by days of stubborn, grey cloud. Instead of the royal wedding, we got a Trump state visit; instead of Gareth Southgate ’s brave boys we have the Tory leadership campaign, which makes the theatrics of overpaid teenagers diving in the box look dignified. Surely Silicon Valley can’t be far off inventing a time machine?