The Early Crowd (2023)
(article originally published by Kathy Bailes in Isle of Thanet News)
Are you sleeping comfortably? Then I’ll begin….
There’s a community in Thanet that you probably don’t know anything about: I say that with some confidence because I’m a member of that community, and there’s only about twenty of us. We’re a mix of ex-teachers, child psychologists, lightning technicians, writers, artists, bikers and builders. We all get up at some point between 3 am and 5.30, we all have some sort of issue that makes us socially avoidant, and we ALL agree on one thing: It’s Too Early.
Sometime before the pandemic, I started to wake up angry. This was a slight improvement for me, as I used to wake up actually crying. Anyway, over time, the insomnia got worse, the hours became actually insane, and the anger grew steadily more intense. To keep this all away from my family, I started to leave the house the second I woke up and run. At first, I ran in my pyjamas, but as they tend to lock you up for that in the small hours of the morning, these eventually became joggers and finally some sexy running gear to go with my amazing body shape (think Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas if he’d missed a few meals).
On the first morning, I ran out, I arrived – puffing and panting – outside a chain coffee shop on Albion Street. It was pitch dark, but a pool of light glowed from the door, and I realised to my absolute amazement that it was open at 6.30 in the morning. I felt really embarrassed pushing the door open until I realised that I wasn’t the first customer. I was about to join the equivalent of Fight Club in Thanet, and the ONE rule was just as simple: you don’t talk about Early Club…you don’t talk at ALL until everybody’s had at least ONE cappuccino. These people get up before you do; some of them rise in the middle of the night and some of them don’t even go to bed.
I had a conversation a few weeks back with a regular early morning friend of mine who told me he’d held up traffic rescuing a hedgehog outside B&Q at THREE o’clock in the morning. I found myself wondering what sort of traffic the road would pick up at that time before I remembered all the ambulances and the hospital run.
You wouldn’t BELIEVE how early some of these places are open. It’s like a series of poker players outdoing each other with really insane hands: Costa in Broadstairs lays down the gauntlet with a 6.30 am opening time, while Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s on Westwood Road can both BEAT that and offer you a different sort of coffee hit. The McDonald’s in the middle of WWX laughs at them all: it’s open 24 hours and serves coffee to people who are either just heading to bed after a long shift or just waking up to go on one. Ideally, we’d all like to support the independents but at this time in the morning they’re all – I guess – sensibly closed.
I’m sleeping less and less these days. I’ve tried pistachio nuts, which are supposed to work on the basis that you’re so knackered after shelling them all that you can’t stay awake. I’ve tried Valerian, the beautiful herbal tablets named after the wife of Conan the Barbarian that make your fingers smell as if you’ve been in a cage at Howletts flinging gorilla turds all day. I’ve tried drinking red wine: to be fair, I’m STILL trying that (I’m not sure it’s getting me to sleep, but I’m no quitter).
I run past some of you in the morning: the dog walkers, the joggers, those people who comb the beach at 6 am with a metal detector looking for the lost treasure of Viking Bay. I even met a BAT HUNTER on Ramsgate beach a few weeks back: when I asked if he’d found one, he simply smirked and tapped his nose…as if we were both in on some sort of national secret.
We ARE the ITE Crowd. We’re not very sociable, and none of us can make eye contact…but at 6 am, we’re the best you’re going to get.
