It felt right, so I did it

One of the great joys to be had as an oldie – no, make that at any stage of life – is to have possessed strange opinions or habits that for years others have either regarded as bonkers and/or worthy of inducing them to roll about on the floor fighting for breath amidst their hysterical, scoffing, laughter … and then come across evidence that proves conclusively that you were right all along.

Or at least just about as normal as everyone else.

For at least the past six decades I’ve felt that I had the misfortune to have born in the wrong time and place. I’ve been convinced at different times that I’d had been perfectly suited to being a Egyptian pharaoh in about 3000BC, an emperor in ancient Rome, or even that I was a reincarnation of one of my all-time heroes Charlemagne, sometime Holy Roman Emperor.

Now – thanks to Dr Michael Mosley who has made something of a name for himself fronting populist serious documentaries for the BBC about the human body – I discovered this morning that in fact I am a throwback to the Victorian age.

Overnight I came across what appears to be the second of two articles Dr Mosley has written for the Mail On Sunday – I missed the first – about how to live healthily. In it he reports that getting up in the middle of the night – or having a sleep pattern of two sleeps per day, not one – was completely ‘normal’ in the pre-Industrial Revolution era and indeed Victorian times.

See here, on the website of the – DAILY MAIL