In the wee small hours of the morning when the whole wide world is fast asleep I get up and go and sit downstairs and listen to the cars go racing by (sung to the tune of “Wee small hours of the morning”). Who is about at 4.50am? Where are they off to? It’s a bit early for a shift to start or finish. They can’t all be bakers or milkmen – folk known to keep anti social hours.

It is Friday, one of the days the milkman comes but I’m not sure I’ve heard him yet. When he arrives you hear footsteps in on the drive and the sound of a milk crate being plonked down in the porch. You don’t usually hear his float because it is electric. Perhaps the soft whoosh of his tyres as he pulls up and then moves on.

When I was at University I knew a baker called Ray. He made great wholemeal bread. Really tasty, solid loaves. One or two slices were the equivalent of a meal. After finishing the baking, at around 11am, he would nip round to the nearby Globe pub for a couple of swift ones, before going to bed. Who’d be a baker?

The birds have just woken up. Must be starting to get light out. I can’t see because the curtains are closed. I am surrounded by books and the noise of the birds. It’s almost as if the books are reading out loud the words written on the spines of the books.

At this time of the night, or morning, there is the company of the internet to while away the hours. On my Twitter or Facebook timelines most of the posts in the night are from people in the USA. I get the odd British insomniac. One just now reads “Starting your day at 4.45am cos you’re bloody bat shit crAAAzy.#NightShiftProblems#WhyAmIAwake#SaveTheSquirrels “.

Looks like some people must schedule tweets for overnight posting. Who reads them?  Twitter is a fleeting¹ medium at the best of times. You might catch a tweet but probably not. There are some events (eg #trefbash) that I promote like crazy in Twitter and other social media destinations and after weeks of doing so have still had people asking me when it’s on this year and why haven’t they been invited? Huh!

On Facebook a friend who has moved to India says “8.30 in the morning, driving to work and it’s 98 degrees outside and sunny. (36.6). Some days don’t you just wish it would be cold, wet and windy…………Nah. I love India.”

98degrees doesn’t do it for me. All I’d be able to do would be to sit in the shade in a pool, perhaps at the wet bar, drinking cool ones. I used to travel to the USA a lot and I recall sitting around a pool in Arizona in July. The water was like tepid tea and the pool surround was constantly sprayed with water mist which was supposed to keep the temperature 10 degrees lower. July is tourist low season in Arizona. The same is true for popular destinations such as Florida where Brits migrate in masses during UK summer holidays. The natives avoid the place in the summer.

I’ve been writing for just over half an hour. Not fast for me. It’s another hour before it will be time to take the tea up. The working day has started. Today must be an “early” which is good because as it happens I am playing golf this afternoon. Good timing that, insomnia.

The clock ticks away on the wall, the only noise when the road outside is quiet. That and the unseen touch-tapping of my Chromebook keyboard. The TV is switched off at the wall, powerless to communicate. All the actors have gone home or are sat in an all night bar somewhere in a place where only actors and insomniacs go.

We have had a few posts in overnight from guests contributing to next week’s VoIP themed week. Some of them need a bit of an edit, the wave of the magic wordprocessing wand. That’s ok. One or two guest posts look like blatant sales pitches. There will be changes. People should realise that a professional, authoritative post is a far better sales pitch than something that just says “buy my stuff”.

As I get older I notice that I seem to need less sleep. This is good although I do tend to go to bed earlier than most – 10 – 10.30pm. It’s a hangover from years of having small kids around the house. They aren’t small any more and the early morning antisocial demands for attention are things of the past. Even on Christmas Day, a time when kids have historically stretched the definition of “time to get up ” to a point where the parents haven’t even gone to bed yet, they now have a lie in which is a real result.

The getting up early to make a cup of tea has real advantages. Going back upstairs with the tea tray makes the lie in to a normal getting up time feel longer and more luxurious.

I’ve drawn the curtains and it is definitely light now. Time to do other things. See you in the morning Catch you later…

¹ I’m even tempted to say fly by night 🙂

I had a series of messages a couple of weeks ago from different social media contacts informing me of the death of a mutual friend. He became ill a month or so ago and whilst at one time they thought he might be recovering he went into a sudden decline and sadly passed away. This came as a shock but I guess these things happen and life moves on.

Yesterday I was trawling through my contacts database looking for people to invite to write guest posts for the trefor.net VoIP week next week and I came across his name. This gave me a genuine problem. Not whether to invite him to write a post but whether to delete his contact details. It didn’t seem right that he should be wiped from my virtual hard drive like that but what was the point of keeping his email address?

Obviously everybody dies and we all hope to reach a decent old age before it happens to us. He was 58. At 75 or 80 we consider someone to have had a good innings and don’t grieve so much but when it happens to a younger person it hits us more.

A school classmate of mine went in her twenties. I last saw her in a pub in the Isle of Man where she tried to persuade me to come to a reunion. It was timed for the day after our ferry home was booked so I couldn’t go. I found out a few month later that she had died of leukaemia and the reunion was planned as her last farewell. That made me pause for reflection.

An old university friend died four years ago in tragic circumstances. She was my age, around 47/48 at the time. It was a great shock and I wrote her a poem¹ which I posted on her Facebook timeline and which was read by her family and friends. The timeline began to fill with spammy trivia and invitations to play games automatically broadcast by people to all their friends. I stopped looking because I didn’t want her memory tainted by such rubbish. I’m sure social media platforms have processes for dealing with such circumstances though the notion of there being a process doesn’t quite feel appropriate here.

In the long run none of us matter.  We are all mere blips in an incomprehensibly long universal timeline.  But as people and communities in the here and now we have to recognise that we are all that matters and the fact that someone is no longer with us is deserving of some consideration.

My friend who just died was Simon Gwatkin. I first met him when I was developing VoIP chips at Mitel Semiconductor. He ran marketing at Mitel Telecom. We kept bumping into each other in exotic bars around the world. Singapore and Geneva spring to mind. When Terry Matthews² bought back Mitel Telecom. I crossed over to work with Simon developing SIP handsets and then systems.

Our ways eventually parted. Simon ended up working for Sir Terry at his VC arm Wesley Clover but we still contrived to “bump into each other” on different occasions and he came to one of the trefor.net UC Executive Dinners in London last year.  Simon also invited me to watch the Wales Open Golf at the Celtic Manor Resort – he is the guy in the cream linen jacket sat in front of me on my right in the fourth photo in this post. As I recall in the pic we are drinking Gwatkin cider at the Clytha Arms cider festival.

This is a difficult time for his family but they should take some comfort from the fact that everyone who came into contact with Simon loved him and thought him a great bloke. He will be missed by many. I’m going to leave him in my contacts list. What’s the hurry?

RIP Simon Gwatkin. A lovely bloke…

¹ You can read the poem on my creative writing site philospherontap.com here.
² Terry together with Mike Copeland was one of the original founders of Mitel – the Terry in MIke and TErry’s Lawnmowers.