The kettle hour

9 November 2026

Somewhere between one and two the flat stops pretending to be busy. The fridge finishes its sentence, the pipes settle, and the only thing left with an opinion is the kettle.

In daylight I never hear it. It is one noise among twenty, a small task on the way to a larger one. At night it has the room to itself, and it turns out to have a whole arc: the dry tick of the element, a long whisper, then the low roll that means I have about forty seconds to find a clean cup.

I used to treat being awake at this hour as a fault to be corrected. Lately I treat it as a short shift I did not sign up for but may as well work. The job description is modest: boil water, sit down, do not open anything with a feed.

The tea itself is almost beside the point. What I am really making is ten minutes with a beginning and an end, which is more structure than the rest of the night has offered. When the cup is empty I usually find I can go back to bed. When I cannot, at least the kitchen is warm.