Even though I've been working nights for over twenty-three years, I'm still figuring out how to come out of it not too worse for wear.

I'm Miles Cole, a registered nurse in the United Kingdom.

I worked ten years in Italy, mostly on night shifts.

I moved to the United Kingdom and — voil? — once again the choice fell on night shifts.

A bit by choice, a bit by fate, I suppose.

I don't think I can give you advice so precious that you'll treasure it, but perhaps I can, through my small personal experience, take you into this world made of many different things: some beautiful, some ugly — very ugly — others simply bizarre.

There's something you don't understand until you do it.

You can read all the books in the world on shift work, on sleep deprivation, on chronobiology — and they exist, trust me, and some are even well written — but nothing truly prepares you for the moment you walk out of the building.

At seven in the morning, the sun hits you in the face like a friendly slap, while the world around you is waking up and you're trying to work out if you're hungry or tired or both, and above all whether that light feeling in your head is just fatigue or something more subtle — a kind of distance, as if you're separated from the rest of humanity by a pane of glass.