It is currently 5:40 in the morning. This is not a poetic exaggeration, nor a carefully constructed narrative opening. It is simply a statement of fact. At 5:40 this morning I surrendered, quietly rose from the battlefield that used to be my bed, crept down a set of creaky stairs hoping to avoid the really noisy ones, and shuffled into my office with the slow determination of a man who knows that sleep has abandoned him for the foreseeable future.