Commutable: Will Harris

Treasuring time and questioning the
motives of seagulls

An unexpected side effect of sacrificing four hours of each weekday to the commuting gods is that my free time has suddenly become a lot more precious.
Gone are the endless evenings of Netflix and BBC iPlayer, the hours gurgling like bathwater down the plughole of my watch-list. Gone the dead-time of the Saturday supermarket circuit, strategically swapped for a Waitrose delivery slot booked four days in advance from somewhere outside Three Bridges. Gone too is the vacant stare through the kitchen window, hands wrapped around an early morning mug of coffee as I mentally prepare for the day ahead. My vacant stare is now reserved exclusively for the train window, and my mental preparation doesn’t generally kick in until some point north of East Croydon.
In fact, any time that does not fall under the categories of work-time or train-time is now a valuable commodity, not something simply to be treasured (time, after all, is one of the few things in life that can’t be locked away on a high shelf) but invested wisely. Every moment must be used with care. Not a minute is to be wasted.

Hand in hand with this new compulsion to be always moving, always doing, is an almost pathological fixation on how much sleep I’m getting. Time may be my new currency, but time asleep is my gold standard, an aspirational eight hours a night to balance the books and ensure my waking hours can continue to run like clockwork.
Brighton’s seagulls do not want me to have eight hours sleep a night. It is possible they don’t want me to have any at all. On Sunday nights, they clatter across our roof (we live on the top floor), banging and clanging on the metal like an avalanche, or possibly the End of Days. We don’t know what they’re doing up there. My Other Half thinks it’s a turf war, but I maintain it’s some kind of seagull Riverdance (“What do we know of their customs?” I challenge him, as we lie awake, listening to the ceiling).
At times (mainly those times I’m sleep-deprived having been kept awake half the night), I wonder if the seagulls are a manifestation of Brighton itself. A reminder of the four hours a day that have been robbed from my schedule since my flight south, a loss I try not to complain about but feel acutely.
Last Sunday night, I snapped. Wrapping a blanket around myself, I went out on the terrace with a tray of ice cubes and began throwing them, one by one, onto the roof. (The ice cubes, in case you’re wondering, I’d dredged from a half-remembered Agatha Christie story about an icicle being the perfect murder weapon – ice melts, you see; no evidence.) I was halfway through the tray before I realised the roof was deserted, and the seagulls must have flown off when they heard the patio door slide open.
Great, I thought. Another two minutes of my life I’m never getting back.