They say 3am is the darkest hour or the witching hour as it’s also known. Some people think it’s 12am, but I can tell you from experience, it’s definitely 3am when the world is dead asleep.
Remember what a big deal it was to stay awake until this time when you were a kid? Or how crazy it felt the first time you stayed awake all night and watched the sun rise the next day?
Thinking back, those were my first few experiences of the darkest hour, it was all excitement and this feeling like I was getting away with something.
Of course, after that, once I hit my teenage years my experiences of 3am were a different story altogether. Instead of being all hyped up at the thrill of doing something forbidden, I’d be blind drunk and stumbling lost through the thick fog of alcohol oblivion.
The witching hour remained in that same thick fog for a long time. In fact, from when I was 13 until my late 20s, if I’d made it through to 3am, I was definitely in a drastically altered state which guaranteed that the day to follow would be a complete write-off.
But, as I got older I began to experience a much, much more terrifying kind of witching hour – the one where you make it to 3am because you’re still fucking working.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those guys always shouting from the roof-tops about how hardcore his work ethic is (also known as WANKERS). Those guys take this weird satisfaction from the fact that they have no lives outside work, that’s not me.
And yet here I am. Eyes burning from lack of sleep, head spinning from too much coffee and heart sinking at the thought of a future of more and more mornings like these.
The world is unforgiving and there are too damn many of us in it. To make a mark you have to either be very lucky or willing to make big sacrifices to get ahead.
Me, I just want to be curled up with J-Rab right now, listening to the tiny muffled snores of my baby girl in the cot next to the bed and enjoying the simple pleasure of being close to the people I love.
Swear to God, December can’t come soon enough. It’s been a good year, but I am done.
I’m sure we can all agree, it’s high time for a little R&R.
Any minute now… 
-ST
