Larks and Owls

It's said that we're all naturally owls or larks - at our best late in the day or in the early hours of the morning. I always used to be a late night sort of person - long hours out with friends or sitting talking, reading ,writing -marked my school days, my time at university. Starting work as a librarian curbed that a bit, but not as much as having my son. I was just starting out on a serious, concetrated attempt at being published and he was a baby who never slept. It was a lethal combination. I can remember working until 3 in the morning, crawling into bed and being woken at 5.30 - not good!

My mother always said that once you had children you could never sleep past 6am anyway - but then she had five of us so I think she must have been very much conditioned by the time she could choose her own waking time. But it's true - I do wake at six or earlier and can rarely if ever get back to sleep. Perhaps I've transmuted from an owl to a lark .Or perhaps that's because my fictional children - my hero and heroine - need me to wake to deal with them and get to work on making their lives happy ones. Whatever, I've learned to love working in the early hours of the day when no one is around and the world is still. I've been up for an hour now and the rest of the street is just catching up - lights going on and cars starting to move along the road .

I wrote my 1000 words yesterday - in fact I doubled it and added another 200 for good measure. Michelle (Reid) was close behind with her 2000- and we've roped in Anne McAllister to join us. We're still waiting for Anne's report - I just hope Flynn was cooperating. The same target is set for today - with both Michelle and my editor cracking the whip, I daren't slacken the pace. So it looks like I'll be 'up with the lark' for a few days to come. At least the mornings are lighter as spring approaches.

And talking of Spring - this is specially for Anne and for India and her daughter - the Hecks are back! Last night we spotted a hedgehog making his(her?) way across the lawn late at night. This isn't really the best news for a hedgehog as the mild weather earlier has made them think that spring is already here and they've woken from hibernation - but the freezing temperatures of the last few days proves that winter still has some bite left.

So we need to make sure that our little Heck family have plenty food to keep their strength up and so - hopefully - go back to their warm snug hedgehog house to sleep again until the weather is more kind to them. So I shall have to put extra meat and cat crunchies close to the tunnel into Hedgehog Towers so they can get the nourihsment they need without having to venture too far into the freezing night.