I blame boarding school.
There, my life was dominated by alarms.
It began with the wake-up bell at 7am.
Alarms to assemble for meals, to go up to the school, to go from class to class, to recess, to lunch, and later to prep (supervised homework sessions after the evening meal).
I am not sure now if the staggered lights-out in dormitories, where different times were mandatory for different year groups, involved bells for each one or just for the third formers at 8.30pm.
I hated being woken by a bell so much I was usually awake and showered by the time it went off.
On one memorable day, there was a fire alarm practice sometime before 7. We were so slow at blearily assembling in our night attire, we were sent back to have another go.
After four years of those clanging intrusions to my daily life, I was sick of alarms.
Alarm clocks or their modern equivalent have not featured in my everyday life since.
For some years I used to tell myself before I went to sleep what time I wanted to wake up and I would.
Sadly, I no longer have that ability.
My companion has the radio organised to burst into life around 6am but I am usually awake by around 5.30 so it does not surprise me.
On rare occasions I might have to catch an early flight, or have to be ready for early child-minding duties, I may set an alarm.
The result is I wake several times in the night beforehand to check I have not slept through it and suffer terrifyingly realistic anxiety dreams about missing the plane or forgetting to turn up for the children.
While I hate wake-up calls of any type, that does not stop me longing for them for everybody else. Call me a hypocrite if you will.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, I hoped it might be the catalyst for us to re-evaluate our reliance on tourism.
There was much talk about a tourism reset, but as soon as we were out of lockdown we were back to hankering for tourism to reach its pre-Covid levels, even though many communities hated those levels, and still do, because infrastructure does not match the demand.
But beyond that, where was/is the consideration of the impact a world moving away from fossil fuels might have on tourism?
After the increasing number of devastating weather events in the last few years, was it time to seriously consider if we, along with the rest of the world, were doing enough to reduce carbon emissions?
Our current government has done its best to push us in the other direction.
It says it wants to balance environmental protection with economic growth. Its idea of balance is a seesaw with the puny undernourished environment child stranded up in the air screaming futilely, while the morbidly obese greedy economic growth kid sits at the other end scoffing junk food, belching and laughing.
It has chosen not to discourage further dairying expansion, encourage the take-up of roof-top solar with batteries or the use of electric vehicles, including bikes, or promote rail over road.
It is trying to convince us that spending up large on a liquefied natural gas terminal will save the day in a dry year, making us beholden to the vagaries of international trade in an increasingly volatile world.
How prudent is that looking now the US and Israel have started a war on Iran, and oil and gas supply chains are at risk and may be for an indefinite time?
This should be a wake-up call for the government on all things climate-change related, including our food security, but we are seeing little evidence of that.
It could be the ideal time to encourage measures to lower use of petrol and diesel, but Finance Minister Nicola Willis preciously does not want to be seen as a school ma’am telling people what to do.
Spoiler alert, Nicola, you always give me school ma’am vibes.
It would not be difficult to stage the campaign I have been promoting for years, encouraging those who have travel options to have a hmmmm before they leap into their cars or double-cab utes for any trip.
Is there an alternative — walking, cycling, e-biking, or taking the bus or train?
If this current predicament tells us anything, it is that we cannot and should not keep going the way we are.
How will this repeatedly hitting the snooze button and pretending it is not time to act end?
My anxiety dream suggests it might be our last jerry cans of petrol and imported frozen corn at a hundred paces at dawn in a polluted flooded street.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
