Last week something rather surprising happened to me: I discovered I'd become a morning person.

Normally my natural inclination on any given day is to stay in bed until absolutely forced to get up by the oppressive tyranny of regular employment, or failing that the lure of breakfast. Eventually, after a decent run-up, I become able to concentrate on doing useful things.

However, for about a week now, this has no longer been my pattern. I've been consistently finding myself wide awake and raring to go about half an hour before my usual alarm time; moreover, when I do get up I then find I'm filled with energy and alertness and enthusiasm and do lots of useful productive work. Then, some time around four in the afternoon, it wears off and I begin to feel less like manically doing work and more like sitting on a sofa and not moving much.

So I've just spent most of the Bank Holiday weekend getting up early and doing real PuTTY development, which I think is the first time I've done anything more to PuTTY than occasional bug fixing for about a year and a half. This is a very, very satisfying feeling.

But at the same time, I'm filled with a sense of ‘yikes, what's happened to me?’. It's often said that people are divided into larks and owls, but it's news to me that somebody can spontaneously mutate from one into the other!