Ian McMillan: How I woke up to the joys of being a morning person

When I was a lad, this was always the time of day that my mam would start getting the tea ready. The kitchen would be brightly lit against the dark outside and it would slowly fill up with steam as the pans rattled and the kettle boiled. Radio 4 would be murmuring in the background and there would be the sense that at this time there would be one more burst of activity before the day settled down for the evening like a dog turning a few times in its basket before nodding off.

There would have been less cars zooming by in those days, and it can't just be my imagination that I remember the streetlights being less bright, and certainly less orange. The clocks would have gone back recently, of course, and everybody would be suffering from what psychologists should call Sudden Dark Syndrome.

Last week at this time you were playing in the garden and this week it feels like winter and you're in the back room watching Blue Peter on a black and white television. The fire is on, of course, and the smoke is snaking up the chimney and hanging about in the evening air.

I guess that, depending on my age, I might have had some homework on my knee, or a comic by the side of the chair. Evening felt like, still feels like, a good time for reading, and I would have had one eye on whatever it was that Christopher Trace was making, and one eye on the exploits of Cap'n Hurricane in The Valiant. Whatever else was happening in the world, some things were constant: Christopher Trace would always be making something out of cardboard and sticky-back plastic and Cap'n Hurricane would always be two frames away from his trademark Ragin' Fury, when he ran up and down going Grrrr and giving his enemies a good hiding. And the kitchen would be full of steam and my mam would have her pinny on.

The tea is cooking as I write this, and it's dark and windy and rainy outside, and we're just waiting for my eldest daughter to come home before I set the table. Waiting for my dad was the big thing in our house at this time, particularly in the autumn and the winter. If my daughter is going to be late, she'll text us. If my dad was going to be late, in those faraway days, we would never know. He couldn't phone us because we didn't have a phone. He was a creature of habit, always leaving the house at the same time in the morning, always walking into the steam at the same time every night.

He'd been in the Navy for years, where everything was built around routine, and so routine was still a major part of his life even though he worked in an office in Sheffield. He would leave work at the same time every night, after he'd let the cleaners in. He would drive exquisitely slowly, not because the traffic was bad but because he always drove exquisitely slowly. He would sing Andy Stewart songs as he trundled past Hillsborough and up through Grenoside towards Hoyland Common and my mother would leave the steaming pans and go upstairs to get changed. It seems like an impossibly old-fashioned thing to do now, but she always put a nice dress on and sometimes some pearls for when my dad came home.

If he was a little late she'd get anxious; she'd look out of the window for the lights of his car coming up the short drive, fingering her pearls like worry beads. Maybe that's why I'm always worried if anybody's late, and why I'm always stupidly early if I'm going anywhere.

Then we'd see the headlights of his Ford Corsair trundling up the drive. We'd hear him opening the garage door with its rhythmic squeak. We'd hear the car drive in and as it did my ma would be doling out the spuds and the veg and the meat.

The door would open and there'd be a sudden rush of cold air. Not just cold air, but evening air; I just had to pause from writing and take something out to the bin and there it was, that same night-time coldness, a coldness that's different to morning coldness. A coldness of a day spent and done, rather than the morning coldness of a day gearing up to happen.

Yep, I prefer mornings. Time to wash up, now, like my dad did, with a pinny on, singing and looking out of the kitchen window at the autumn moon.