The end of the evening

The number handles the episodes. This chapter is about the evening they sit in, because the evening is where the alarm at seven gets decided.

An end time. The earlier book in this series on staying up late has this as its method and I'll give the short version. Pick the hour the evening ends, work back from the alarm and the seven to nine hours the NHS says adults need, and treat the hour as fixed, the way the alarm is. If the alarm is seven, the end time is somewhere between ten and half past, and the episode fits inside it or it doesn't.

Count back from the end time to the first episode. If the end time is half past ten and an episode is forty-five minutes, one episode starts at nine forty at the latest and two start before nine. That's the arithmetic that turns the number into a start time, and it means that the sofa at half past nine has room for one.

The last credits are the signal. When the credits of the last planned episode roll, the evening's ending has started. Screen off. Kettle. Whatever the twenty minutes before bed are made of in your house. The credits become the thing that begins the end of the day, which is what they were before the countdown took them.

Something after. A book, ten pages. A bath. The kitchen tidied. A conversation about the brother. The end of the evening needs a thing that isn't a screen, because the earlier book's evidence is that the screen is what pushes the night later, and twenty minutes of something else is the difference between lying there with the lake and falling asleep.

Falling asleep in front of it. Some readers don't overrun. They fall asleep during the second episode and wake at one with the menu on and go to bed cold. That's the same habit with a different ending, and the end time is the fix. If you're asleep by the second episode, the tiredness at ten was right, and the second episode was never going to be watched. Stop at one and go up awake.

Expect the end time to feel early. For a week or two, half past ten will feel like a child's bedtime. That's the second wind talking, and the earlier book is about not trusting it. By the third week, half past ten will feel like the end of an evening, because it will have become one, and the morning will have stopped being a thing you brace for.