London never sleeps. There are always lights on somewhere, always steps going down alleys and streets in central London, sometime. Always things happening, parties being held or darker things, like crime, being committed.
Most of London, waking up might have been after a restless sleep, filled with other people´s voices, cars going by outside, or lights playing along your house during the night. Wealth. If you want silence, in central London itself, this will mean wealth.
If you´re in central London, you are surrounded by a sussurus of noise that never stops. For a few hours in early morning, it just draws breath, that´s all. During the Dogwatch, the worst watches of the night for sentries and guards and people who stand guard: 0200-0400. The time when our body tells our mind with the force of a sledgehammer: YOU SHOULD SLEEP NOW. Sleep can have a heavier hand than gravity, and it´s an older hand, weighed down with time.
London has been known for its continual noise all through the ages - it seems to have been even worse, way back when, than now. Standing in Picadilly Circus during the 1800´s meant that you had to shout to even be heard to someone standing next to you, so great was the din of horses and carriages and hawkers and people living their lives in the city.
If you´re in the suburbs, you might have a more quiet life. But even here, movement never quite stops, sirens are usually heard to and fro during the night, cars, the occasional voices.
All this is of course if you are lucky to have some place to sleep. The homeless of London keep increasing, especially with the financial crisis that has seen people become homeless very fast, from having one to losing one.
All this is if you can sleep. Insomnia is one of the worst problems of the industrialized West and something good acupuncture treats very well. And all this is if you want to sleep. If you are a veteran of a war or something else, and went through more than your system can handle, you might not want to. Ever. Again. In Britain´s armed forces the numbers of mental ill-health is rising and rising, with more voices raised and questions asked than they used to be. I guess if the war isn´t just, there is more reason to feel protective of the soldier´s against the goverment who is sending them out. A British military police officer was killed in Afghanistan last week. He had been reposted to a battle posting, which he shouldn´t have, and was shot dead by a British sniper. The man was standing in a watchtower, 20 meters up, had been observed for an hour and was surrounded by infra-red markers on the tower that marked it as Friendly. The sniper who shot him says he thought the MP was standing on the ground. The more senseless waste of life that goes on in all the wars across the globe, the more you see the reason for feeding money into the hungry, slowly chomping maw of the UN.
Waking up in London. It´s early morning now, a grey glimmer on the horizon.
And London waking up, yawning to its inhabitants.
