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Snooze through an English Summer
[ 8 minute read ]
Pressing 'Snooze' on your alarm clock means you miss out on English Summers.
Going on holiday to hot countries, I suggest, unless the heat there is oppressive and hated, makes British people indifferent to their homeland. I think it is a bit like pressing 'SNOOZE' on our alarm clocks, every morning. There is a moment at waking when many of us think to ourselves, 'Not yet, just a few minutes more.’ There follows this thought, a wonderful feeling of warmth and comfort, an unfelt feeling when we first lay down to sleep. Many of us consider this to be a prime moment in our lives. I suggest that we are no more rested after those wonderful five minutes than we were before we pressed SNOOZE. Except it isn't five minutes of wonder or perceived comfort, it is more likely to be between three and seven seconds before we are asleep again.
I read somewhere that if we press SNOOZE each morning we are not allowing our body-clocks to set a routine or schedule for sleeping and rising. Simply, the idea is that the brain would eventually settle into a routine process of restoring itself and the body with a 'recognition' that it must accomplish this within a set time. I suppose it is constantly measuring enzymes, hormones, and blood sugar levels, among other things, to know when it should wake up. But what if there is never enough time for the brain to do what it needs to?
My understanding is that the brain can 'micro-sleep' for between 0.3 seconds and a whole three seconds. It does this even when we are driving at any time of the day (or night).
Some numbers
According to the RAC, the thinking time, if we need to do an emergency stop, at 50mph is 49ft (15m) and the braking distance is 125ft (38m); so the overall stopping distance is 174ft (53m). At 70mph the overall stopping distance is 96m or 315ft.
The internet gives us: 1 mile is 5280 feet or 1609.3 metres, so 3 seconds of inattention or micro-sleep is 220ft (67m) travelled at 50mph before the braking time for an emergency stop even starts.
With a micro-sleep of 3 seconds the overall stopping distance at 50mph is 125m. The overall stopping time for an alert and wide-awake person driving at 90 mph is 122m. Poor sleep that results in three seconds of micro-sleeping could be the same as driving unchecked at 90 miles per hour in a 50mph zone.
In case you need to think about that a bit more (extraneous numbers)
With 0.7 seconds delay (the average reaction time) the thinking distance at 50mph is 15.6m, with an extra 0.3 seconds (micro-sleep) the thinking distance is 22.3m at 50mph.
The whole stopping distance with a reaction time of 0.7 seconds, thinking and braking distances, at 27mph is 22.7m. This means in a 30mph zone an alert drive will have stopped before someone micro-sleeping for only 0.3 seconds will not have even started braking.
But this isn't about about safety, it is about quality of life. By driving around in much of Europe I have seen a whole bunch of beautiful places, countryside, rivers, valleys, mountains, cathedrals and castles, cobbled streets and animals. If I had never seen any of it, I might be more interested in the Muntjac deer that eat the shrubs in my garden. No, to me they are pests, not at all like the magical creatures in Europe that live alongside snakes, wolves and bears.
'What's your point, Martin?’
Tanned and with skin still fizzing from the UV light of cloudless skies over pristine dry beaches, we look back at the days of fun and easy relaxation; there was no work to think about; there were no school uniforms to sort out, or gym kits to wash. There was no cast-iron budget to adhere to – that was covered by our judicious savings over the year. Now, at the airport, there is a little sand in our shoes and some fragile souvenirs in our luggage. The kids need to be verbally corralled, quietened and shepherded, and we are starting to put ourselves back into our own boxes; the places we need to be in to marry ourselves to our home environment. Along with this airport experience the knowledge of how an English Summer is not reliably hot or dry is beginning to bubble up from our memory. On the plane we are already nostalgic for the warm Spanish, Jamaican or Thai evenings and the exciting scents that come from our fellow diners that mix, sometimes incongruently, with the spicy foods. Again, we look forward in time to when the plane alights (lands) and we may need to put that sweater on over our holiday tops and T-shirts; that sweater that we have in our hand luggage or on our laps. Before we have even gotten into British air-space we have written off any hope of joy and frivolity in our English Summer; at least with any realistic consideration for its possibilities and futures and predictability.
'The one predictable thing about English weather is it's unpredictability.' A twangy voice from a few rows away reminds us.
It is done; we are no longer on holiday. We are constrained to making only sketches of plans with no contingency plans written in. Perhaps we can visit a ruined castle, but if it rains on the day we will just stare at each other in our homes until we separate; the kids upstairs and the adults periodically commenting on the weather from the window.
'It's still raining.' Even the sound of the ice-cream van is still discordant and cannot lift us from our disappointment, but we expected all this all along.
According to The Met Office, Summer runs from the 1st of June to the 31st of August, which is thirteen calendar weeks. There are thirteen obvious weekends that may be warm and sunny. I would not wager that a Saturday and the following Sunday would both be warm, clear and sunny. It doesn't matter to me if they do not match. After a long period of no rain, as a teenager, I danced in the street, semi-naked, when it finally rained. I have seen, decades later, teenagers do the same. Both times, the rain was warm and there was no hurry to dry ourselves, and both times, the dancers, including me, were laughing; once when I danced and once when I watched.
It is the unpredictability of English Summers that make them so good. But there is more. There is a lushness to our gardens and the countryside when the weather behaves itself. There is an aroma of newly warmed grass and flowers that, drenched in water freely give off scent-laden moisture. There is the sudden appearance of insects that today, warm and humid, and a bit muggy from the shower yesterday, splat on our windscreens, that yesterday were clear; and then there is the smell of windscreen washer rushing into our open car windows accompanying the little flecks of wetness.
But for those who were in Spain or Jamaica or Thailand earlier, or for those who are planning on going abroad at the very end of the school Summer holidays, none of this will be seen or heard, or felt, in the same way as someone who has never been abroad.
'Huh, it's raining.’
'Not long now, love.’
'Have we got everything we need.’
'Darling, we have been planning this since December.’
'New Sandals!’
'Sandals!’
In a job interview, the employer started to tell me about the mandatory holiday days that we can all expect in England. I foolishly told him that I think the reason we need to take time off work is because we are not happy at work. My statement carries too much baggage with it. There is a train of carriages that are pulled by the engine of those words. There is never enough time to unpack them all. I didn't get the job.
My point? That delicious snooze when we really should be getting up makes us resentful of the beginning of the morning. We nominally drive at up to 90 mph in a 50 mph zone, we missed a few important sentences in the morning meeting and because we failed to make in-roads into setting up a sleep routine that our brains crave. We are going to miss out on the joy of being fully awake again, because just like we compare the whole English Summer with two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, we will press 'snooze' again tomorrow morning because warm and comfortable snoozing, just like tanning on a sunny beach, is preferable, in a sensual way, than good sleep, or a trip to an English field on a wet day.
'Snooze' writes off our perception of good sleep. Two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, I suggest, writes off our appreciation of our home Summers.
Why did they suddenly brake?
All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.
I am not on YouTube or social media
Snooze through an English Summer
[ 8 minute read ]
Pressing 'Snooze' on your alarm clock means you miss out on English Summers.
Going on holiday to hot countries, I suggest, unless the heat there is oppressive and hated, makes British people indifferent to their homeland. I think it is a bit like pressing 'SNOOZE' on our alarm clocks, every morning. There is a moment at waking when many of us think to ourselves, 'Not yet, just a few minutes more.’ There follows this thought, a wonderful feeling of warmth and comfort, an unfelt feeling when we first lay down to sleep. Many of us consider this to be a prime moment in our lives. I suggest that we are no more rested after those wonderful five minutes than we were before we pressed SNOOZE. Except it isn't five minutes of wonder or perceived comfort, it is more likely to be between three and seven seconds before we are asleep again.
I read somewhere that if we press SNOOZE each morning we are not allowing our body-clocks to set a routine or schedule for sleeping and rising. Simply, the idea is that the brain would eventually settle into a routine process of restoring itself and the body with a 'recognition' that it must accomplish this within a set time. I suppose it is constantly measuring enzymes, hormones, and blood sugar levels, among other things, to know when it should wake up. But what if there is never enough time for the brain to do what it needs to?
My understanding is that the brain can 'micro-sleep' for between 0.3 seconds and a whole three seconds. It does this even when we are driving at any time of the day (or night).
Some numbers
According to the RAC, the thinking time, if we need to do an emergency stop, at 50mph is 49ft (15m) and the braking distance is 125ft (38m); so the overall stopping distance is 174ft (53m). At 70mph the overall stopping distance is 96m or 315ft.
The internet gives us: 1 mile is 5280 feet or 1609.3 metres, so 3 seconds of inattention or micro-sleep is 220ft (67m) travelled at 50mph before the braking time for an emergency stop even starts.
With a micro-sleep of 3 seconds the overall stopping distance at 50mph is 125m. The overall stopping time for an alert and wide-awake person driving at 90 mph is 122m. Poor sleep that results in three seconds of micro-sleeping could be the same as driving unchecked at 90 miles per hour in a 50mph zone.
https://cfm-calculator.com/calculator.php?utm_source=/physics/Stopping-Distance-Calculator.php
In case you need to think about that a bit more (extraneous numbers)
With 0.7 seconds delay (the average reaction time) the thinking distance at 50mph is 15.6m, with an extra 0.3 seconds (micro-sleep) the thinking distance is 22.3m at 50mph.
The whole stopping distance with a reaction time of 0.7 seconds, thinking and braking distances, at 27mph is 22.7m. This means in a 30mph zone an alert drive will have stopped before someone micro-sleeping for only 0.3 seconds will not have even started braking.
But this isn't about about safety, it is about quality of life. By driving around in much of Europe I have seen a whole bunch of beautiful places, countryside, rivers, valleys, mountains, cathedrals and castles, cobbled streets and animals. If I had never seen any of it, I might be more interested in the Muntjac deer that eat the shrubs in my garden. No, to me they are pests, not at all like the magical creatures in Europe that live alongside snakes, wolves and bears.
'What's your point, Martin?’
Tanned and with skin still fizzing from the UV light of cloudless skies over pristine dry beaches, we look back at the days of fun and easy relaxation; there was no work to think about; there were no school uniforms to sort out, or gym kits to wash. There was no cast-iron budget to adhere to – that was covered by our judicious savings over the year. Now, at the airport, there is a little sand in our shoes and some fragile souvenirs in our luggage. The kids need to be verbally corralled, quietened and shepherded, and we are starting to put ourselves back into our own boxes; the places we need to be in to marry ourselves to our home environment. Along with this airport experience the knowledge of how an English Summer is not reliably hot or dry is beginning to bubble up from our memory. On the plane we are already nostalgic for the warm Spanish, Jamaican or Thai evenings and the exciting scents that come from our fellow diners that mix, sometimes incongruently, with the spicy foods. Again, we look forward in time to when the plane alights (lands) and we may need to put that sweater on over our holiday tops and T-shirts; that sweater that we have in our hand luggage or on our laps. Before we have even gotten into British air-space we have written off any hope of joy and frivolity in our English Summer; at least with any realistic consideration for its possibilities and futures and predictability.
'The one predictable thing about English weather is it's unpredictability.' A twangy voice from a few rows away reminds us.
It is done; we are no longer on holiday. We are constrained to making only sketches of plans with no contingency plans written in. Perhaps we can visit a ruined castle, but if it rains on the day we will just stare at each other in our homes until we separate; the kids upstairs and the adults periodically commenting on the weather from the window.
'It's still raining.' Even the sound of the ice-cream van is still discordant and cannot lift us from our disappointment, but we expected all this all along.
According to The Met Office, Summer runs from the 1st of June to the 31st of August, which is thirteen calendar weeks. There are thirteen obvious weekends that may be warm and sunny. I would not wager that a Saturday and the following Sunday would both be warm, clear and sunny. It doesn't matter to me if they do not match. After a long period of no rain, as a teenager, I danced in the street, semi-naked, when it finally rained. I have seen, decades later, teenagers do the same. Both times, the rain was warm and there was no hurry to dry ourselves, and both times, the dancers, including me, were laughing; once when I danced and once when I watched.
It is the unpredictability of English Summers that make them so good. But there is more. There is a lushness to our gardens and the countryside when the weather behaves itself. There is an aroma of newly warmed grass and flowers that, drenched in water freely give off scent-laden moisture. There is the sudden appearance of insects that today, warm and humid, and a bit muggy from the shower yesterday, splat on our windscreens, that yesterday were clear; and then there is the smell of windscreen washer rushing into our open car windows accompanying the little flecks of wetness.
But for those who were in Spain or Jamaica or Thailand earlier, or for those who are planning on going abroad at the very end of the school Summer holidays, none of this will be seen or heard, or felt, in the same way as someone who has never been abroad.
'Huh, it's raining.’
'Not long now, love.’
'Have we got everything we need.’
'Darling, we have been planning this since December.’
'New Sandals!’
'Sandals!’
In a job interview, the employer started to tell me about the mandatory holiday days that we can all expect in England. I foolishly told him that I think the reason we need to take time off work is because we are not happy at work. My statement carries too much baggage with it. There is a train of carriages that are pulled by the engine of those words. There is never enough time to unpack them all. I didn't get the job.
My point? That delicious snooze when we really should be getting up makes us resentful of the beginning of the morning. We nominally drive at up to 90 mph in a 50 mph zone, we missed a few important sentences in the morning meeting and because we failed to make in-roads into setting up a sleep routine that our brains crave. We are going to miss out on the joy of being fully awake again, because just like we compare the whole English Summer with two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, we will press 'snooze' again tomorrow morning because warm and comfortable snoozing, just like tanning on a sunny beach, is preferable, in a sensual way, than good sleep, or a trip to an English field on a wet day.
'Snooze' writes off our perception of good sleep. Two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, I suggest, writes off our appreciation of our home Summers.