“Parisians rue the end of the good nightlife”, The Age/Telegraph, 20/11. An article dispaying the baffling prevailing attitude that people wanting a good night’s sleep are somehow “uncool” or wowsers.
“Over the past 10 years, Parisian musical venues have paid a heavy price due to Parisians’ growing desire for ever-greater tranquillity,” the petition, initiated by an electronic music collective, said. If nothing was done, Paris would be “relegated from the City of Light to the European capital of sleep”, it said.
Oh, the horror! And this is bad, how…? Last year a similar article was published, focused on Melbourne: “Locking out modern life is not the answer”, The Age, 3/6. Apparently people who think night is for sleeping are lazy and wowsers, according to this article’s writer! Humans didn’t evolve as nocturnal creatures, and the current 24-hour modern lifestyle she espouses contributes toward sleep disorders and health problems (“Is 24-hour lighting putting us on a path to depression?”, DM, 23/10; “Cancer risk prompts call for review of shift work”, SMH, 8/1/2008). There is this curious attitude among many that people who go to bed and arise early (as I do!) are somehow odd, while staying up late, or up all night, is seen as trendy and cool. It’s time this ridiculous antipathy towards sleep was challenged. (And I liked Melbourne when it was a “dreary, unexciting provincial city” with “an empty, useless city centre” – it wasn’t plagued by the drunken violence that is endemic now.)
I am usually in bed around 10:30-11:00 p.m., and arise around 4:30 a.m. or so; I guess that makes me really odd :-). And I have been keeping this schedule since the early 1990s!
