The weight on the pallet

Nobody admires a pallet. It is the plain wooden thing under the stack, and the only time anyone thinks about it is when a board cracks and a tonne of blocks tilts in the loading bay. Sleep is the pallet under a man's day. He notices it when it fails.

The yard loads by weight, and the first thing a loader checks is not the blocks but what they are going to sit on. A sound pallet carries far more than it looks able to. A pallet with one cracked board carries the same load until the moment it does not. Men in their fifties who write to us describe their sleep in exactly those terms: the night that used to be a formality has become the thing that decides whether the day holds. Seven hours and the stack stands; five hours and something tilts by mid-afternoon, no matter how well the morning was poured.

Why the board cracks more easily now

Sleep changes shape with age; this is well documented in general terms, and we will not pretend to the detail. It tends to get lighter, to break more often in the small hours, and to recover less completely from a late night. A man of twenty-eight who sleeps badly on Tuesday is fine by Thursday. A man of fifty-two carries Tuesday into the weekend. The reserve is thinner, so the pallet is checked more often, or ought to be.

The yard's foreman, who has run the place since before most of the crew were hired, says his closing routine is the one part of the day he will not negotiate. He does not stay late to finish an order, because he learned that the order finished at nine at night costs him the whole of the next day. He would rather load it at six in the morning on a sound pallet.

What the foreman watches for at closing

Three things, and he checks them every evening the way he checks boards. The first is the hour: the gate shuts at the same time whether the day was easy or hard, because the body learns the hour long before it learns the reason. The second is what the last hour before the gate contains: nothing that winds the head up, no pricing, no arguments with suppliers, no bright screens in the shed. The third is the evening meal, which he eats early enough that it is no longer the main event in his body when he lies down. He is not a doctor and would be the first to say so; he is a man who noticed which nights produced which mornings and stopped arguing with the pattern.

Readers who have adopted some version of this tell us the hardest part is the first item, the fixed hour, because the evening is the only part of the day that feels like their own. The ones who kept it say that after some weeks the evenings did not feel shorter, only calmer, and that the mornings paid the difference back with interest.

Observations from a working yard and from readers, not sleep medicine. Snoring that stops the breath, nights that never settle for weeks, or daytime sleepiness that arrives behind the wheel are matters for a doctor, and quickly.