Dear LPG,  

When writing about alarms, I suppose we should start with God’s original alarm device, the sun, but I am a child of the 1950s, and when I started to have to get up in the mornings, like many other little ones, mum was the first alarm clock I remember.  She got her children to school on time and taught me how to do the same for my children, although I recall that children have a way of creating an alarm for their parents too.  But in between times, there were those first years of my working life when I have to admit to continuing to rely on my mum to be my real alarm.   

I did have an alarm clock but, as harsh as the sound was, I got really used to subconsciously allowing my right arm to escape the bed sheets and then drop on the top of the clock and shut it up.   I used to be quite cruel to it at times and many is the time that my feet made contact with the floor well after the poor clock did, although not even the sound of it leaving the bedside table and crashing to the floor after my right hand’s blind assault was as effective as my mother’s bang on my bedroom door and verbal alarm call.  I have no doubt even the school children that we were, felt the need to react to that immediately. 

Then there was the electric clock radio.  I remember my siblings and I getting one for my father one Christmas and his first reaction after his thanks was a request for us to set it up so that it was a couple of minutes fast because he would have to plug it out each morning for a bit.  Even though he was an engineer, it took him quite a while to work out that if you plugged it out, it would not just stop for the time it was not connected to the electricity.  It did not occur to him that he would have to reset the timing every time he disconnected it.   I remember having to set mine to come on at a relatively high volume if it was to be effective. 

Not long after that, Casio became the name of my wake-up game.  I remember ditching my mechanical watch for one of those with the digital time as well as the classic clock face.  I bought a progression of those, and by the time I bought the last one I used regularly, it alarmed on your wrist and that worked for a while.  There was the little ‘beep beep’ sound that you could set to go off each hour which was really helpful and being able to check what time it was in other parts of the world was another feature that I used quite a lot.   

I had already retired by the time I caught up with the incarnation of time keeping that I currently use.  In my estimation, that happened when we all got ‘smart’.  Now retired, I have little need to get up before I wake up naturally but there is the odd early morning hospital appointment to be considered.  I have now got Alexa doing the job when I need to be aware of the time, and the combination of soothing music and her really calm voice repeating exactly why I have to get up and get ready for the day does the trick, although I think the fact that I no longer need to use an alarm as a regular occurrence, might make it easier to react to the less frequent occasions when necessity dictates the need for me to leave my bed unnaturally early.   

On the whole, for all these inventions, I think that my body clock has always been the best alarm and the one I have reacted to the most, but how that works is a completely separate story.   

VH, Merton