No? Stop wasting your time on internet trivia and beg, steal, borrow, or illegally download ‘The Ipcress File’ and don’t come back until you’ve watched it and made thorough notes. Yes? Read on.
Last night I watched it once again. I first saw it many years ago but have returned to it at regular intervals since then and it has never failed to delight me. Michael Caine’s performance as Harry Palmer is so cool you could build a mojito around it, and his enthusiasm for the kitchen was one of the main reasons why, when I was a teenager, I decided that cooking was a good thing for a guy to be able to do; the fact that the mushrooms he made such a fuss over were tinned rather than fresh is something I can accept as a sign of the times, just like his unfortunate tendency to refer to women as ‘birds’. I can forgive him almost anything for that moment when he says that he only takes off his glasses when he’s in bed.
One thing that did amuse me, though, was that when he was cruelly torn from the arms of Morpheus at the start of the film the time his alarm clock showed when he eventually bothered to turn it off, after slowly waking up, getting out of bed, and opening the curtains in a leisurely manner first, was eight o’clock. My immediate reaction was to burst out laughing. My second was to realise that this was another of those moments, like staying up late to watch Lukaš Bauer skiing in the Winter Olympics, when you realise you’ve changed. When I lived in England I too used to regard it as a gross imposition to have to get up at that time of the day and needed the combined ministrations of a strong cup of tea and ‘Today’ on the radio in order to face the world. Now my alarm is set for half past six and more often than not I’m up before it. What went wrong?
This guy, that’s what.
Franz Josef, the last of the Austro-Hungarian emperors and the last Habsburg to rule this country, was an insomniac. Because of that, he adopted a working day that started at six in the morning. He was also an autocrat. Because of that, lots of other people ended up having to do so as well. And in much the same way as the opening hours of pubs in England reflected the opinions of our teetotal leader David Lloyd George on how best to win the First World War until almost the end of the twentieth century, this is something that has persisted here.
And that’s why everything starts and finishes so much earlier. Lessons in school usually start at eight, unless the so-called ‘zero lesson’ is on the menu, in which case it can be seven; a total waste of time for everyone involved. And on the rare occasions I happen to be up really early, for example, to take a morning train to somewhere far away, I am still shocked by just how lively the station is at five in the morning. And unlike me, these people do it every day. And if you want to catch anyone at work on a Friday, forget it if it’s after midday; they’ll all have gone. Me too – early starts are one thing, but I’ve never met anyone I wanted to spend time with who wasn’t into the idea of an early finish. Well, at work, anyway…
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