Mark has, since time immemorial, had a weird sleep pattern. Some days he would get up at 7am; some times he would be up at 2ish; some days he would go to bed at about 10am and get up just in time to see the sunset. Pick a time, any time of day, and chances are that at least once a week he would be up at that time.
Until October 1996, this was just a source of amusement and cause for laughter. (Or alternatively, cause for irritation as Mark is asleep, even though he'd promised to be up, and refuses to do anything other than make small groaning noises he thinks are cute.) But on that fateful month, though, Mark decided that his sleep patterns were way too erratic, and announced he was going to see a doctor about them. He was going to get up at 9am the following day, go and see a doctor, who would give him Prozac or something, and everything would be All Right.
Mark was still in bed when I came back to the flat at about 4 in the afternoon.
Mark worked out that his problem was he just couldn't be bothered getting up at a regular time, because he was living a slacker student life-style. Having been convinced that drugs weren't going to work, he announced that from now on, he was going to live a middle-class life style.
The problem is, Mark has no idea what a middle-class life style actually is. His mother's side of the family is lower-class, his father's side is upper-class. Far from being an attempt to tackle his sleep pattern weirdness problem, Mark's attempt at becoming middle-class was, in fact, merely delayed teenage rebellion.
In the mean time, though, Mark pretended to be middle-class by
Since then, Mark still eats pizzas, but has stopped moaning about people being slobs. (One of those pot and kettle situations, I would imagine.) Instead, he's got a job which requires him to have a weird sleeping pattern - he now works in a newspaper cuttings agency, which means he starts work at 5am as soon as the papers are delivered, and finishes at 11am.
Last updated 9th April 1998
Page maintained by Sam Kington
(
sam@illuminated.co.uk)