I DECIDE NOT TO GO BACK TO BED

I’m all kinds of tired at the moment. I think it’s down to late nights and early mornings. That is certainly how I felt as the sunrise lamp glowed in the grey dawn. I threw a corner of the duvet back, and leapt up to silence the digital birdsong that the alarm chirps at us every morning.

The room fell back into silence. My wife was sleeping. I yawned. A quick peek through the Venetian blinds and then it was decision time. Get dressed and start the day? Quietly climb back into the bed and sleep some more?

My body seemed in no doubt about what it wanted. It was as though I hadn’t been flattened out properly, as though I’d been suddenly jolted out of paradise and into the cold. What I needed was warm, horizontal comfort, the smooth folds of the duvet, the soft, sinking pillow and a long, unbroken blink at the ceiling.

I threw on a jumper, pulled on my jeans and slid my feet into a pair of slippers. Then I shuffled myself downstairs through the dark and flicked on the kitchen lights. Before long I was stirring a teaspoon of honey into a mug of boiling water - one for her, and a squelchy teabag for me. There’d be no return to paradise for me this morning.

I suddenly had a Christmassy thought. What if, I wondered, that was something similar to returning from Heaven? Bear with me - the day is good, and so is life. Dreaming is amazing, and so is heaven. If you multiply the goodness over and over and over and over again, what if heaven is so good that it’s like a dream you just never want to wake up from? Even if life is good down here, what if it’s agony by comparison? What if all our loved ones, all our saved ones, are so beautifully wrapped in the dream that they wouldn’t ever really want to come back to the grey Monday morning, not even for a moment. In fact, what if it was so good that to leave it would require strength none of us ever possessed, or a cause so huge that there was no force of love or reason that could make it happen? And what if only One of us, once, ever did it?

Happy Christmas, I smiled, clutching the teaspoon. I was alive to the day now, and the pink sky above the garden would soon burst into sunshine. Some people would probably have thought I’d gone too deep too early. But then others say that kind of thing when it’s too late, or if it’s too Monday, or too Friday, or too weekend for deep thinking. I always wonder what the best time is.

Sammy was stirring but still, asleep. I kissed her on the top of her head as I always do, then left her mug of hot honey-water on top of her ‘how to pray for your husband’ book. Funny, I thought. It’s probably working.