90 MINUTES

The concreters picked up spades. This is worth establishing before anything else, because on a building site the question of who holds the spade is not practical, it is constitutional. The trades do not dig. The labourers dig. This is understood by everyone present and observed with the consistency of a natural law that nobody wrote down because nobody needed to. These two picked up spades. Before either of them had said a word, you knew what kind of people you were dealing with.

One of them went down the road for the coffees at the break. The other stayed, Italian, unhurried. The particular ease of someone who has done something long enough to have stopped performing it, and started talking about coffee. Not the coffee his mate had gone to fetch. Coffee as a subject. The body and the caffeine and the timing of the whole transaction, which he had thought about with the same practical seriousness he brought to concrete.

Ninety minutes, he said. You shouldn't drink it until ninety minutes after you wake. Let the body come online by itself first, the cortisol does what it's supposed to do, the systems find their level, and then the coffee arrives into a body that is actually ready for it. The jitteriness, the low-grade anxiety of a morning started with caffeine before anything else has happened, that is not the coffee working. That is the coffee arriving before it was invited.

I had been drinking coffee first thing every morning for as long as I had been drinking coffee. The assumption was so embedded it had never presented itself as an assumption. It was just the sequence. Morning, then coffee, the order as fixed as anything.

The next day I tried it. The difference was immediate. Less jittery, calmer, more grounded in the first hour than any first-thing coffee had ever left me. The ninety minutes is now sacred. No screens either, nothing that colonises the mind before the mind has finished waking up. What I put into that window now has changed what the rest of the day feels like, which means a single piece of advice delivered next to a hole in the ground in Blakehurst has altered, in compounding ways, the architecture of every day since.

We go looking for this kind of advice in certain places. The right podcast. The right book. The newsletter from someone who has optimised their morning into a sequence of evidence-based interventions and would like to tell you about it at length. The assumption being that wisdom of this order travels through official channels, arrives credentialed, requires a platform before it qualifies as something worth hearing.

The concreter had none of this. He had a spade and an opinion about cortisol and the easy authority of someone who had arrived at something true through experience rather than research. He said it the way you say something that goes without saying. To someone who happened to be standing nearby.

This came from an Italian concreter, on a building site, in Blakehurst.