I open the heavy, pale blue doors and slide through the the gap sideways. It is just before 7am and while the sun has barely risen it is still potent enough to shatter the dark of the apartment. This is a reverse burglary, one in which everything must stay intact inside and only I am stealing away. The first morning I’ve clawed back in four months - and the first time was a kind of weird fluke. As I walk the few hundred metres down the hill to the beach - close enough to hear the waves gently breaking from the terrace - I feel almost drunk on having got away with it. They are asleep, should be for a couple of hours. The yolky sunrise, the crescent-shaped cove, the still-pewter water: all of it is mine.

It’s not that I long to escape them - indeed, we’ve come on holiday together - so much that this is my favourite time of day, and it’s a time of day I’ve nearly always spent alone. I anticipated many things when I was pregnant but while I expected the baby to wake early, I couldn’t have predicted how tired I’d be when he did. Tired enough that hauling myself out of bed before 8am feels too early.

It’s a strange transgression for a morning person. I grew up in a happily noisy house but as a child my weekends started with the peculiar dregs of children’s programming that were screened at 6am on terrestrial television in the Nineties. If it was earlier than that, I’d be subject to the Test Card Girl and her bloody puppet, and have to find something else to play with quietly instead before everyone else woke up.

My bodily metronome runs deep and relentless. I have cursed it after late nights or on lazy weekends, when I am awake and furious by 8am even if I’ve only crawled into bed a couple of hours before. But mostly I have come to relish this access to a skeleton key for a part of the day that only some people bear witness to. If other people enjoy taking time off to lie-in, sliding into a new city for leisurely brunches and glinting twilights, I like feeling what happens to my body when it is rested. It wakes up, my head quietly purrs with ideas. I push out, beyond the remits of the bed and its room, and into a world where everyone else is sleeping.

It’s cooler now, we’re back home and somehow it’s nearly November. When we built the hut in the garden, I wondered if I would creep out here in the half-light, shake off the cold through the whisper of the electric heater. Here I am: new place, stolen time. It’s deeply familiar, like visiting somewhere you used to live. I realise that I’ve written so many things this way; books, mostly. The big writing that demands quietude, even if the only way of getting it is by squeezing it in around the rest of the day. It makes me wonder if the time of day begets the work, or the work begets the early starts.

Still, for all the solitude (Brixton is silent, now. The revellers are tucked up, the workers are sullenly starting their day. I await the blackbird couple who used to skirmish their way around the garden) morning people find one another. My sister and I will text one another with links and ideas and dates, knowing that the other will understand that is how her brain works at this time of day. A friend of mine is often awake and at her computer as she watches the sun rise over her garden, and we exchange emails knowing we are in the midst of the same dawn.

Here it comes, the light. Next to the screen is a window, and through it I can see the sky lightening, the clouds drifting, the fuzzy elliptical egg of a waning gibbous moon. No longer night, not quite day. Half-light, full-time, somehow all mine.