"It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannised by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible. Parents begin the brainwashing process and then school works yet harder to indoctrinate its charges with the necessity of early rising. My own personal guilt about feeling physically incapable of rising early in the morning continued well into my 20s.

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The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more than 2,000 years, to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

(I would question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones.)

Christianity has promoted bed-guilt ever since. This passage from the Bible is used as a bludgeon by moralists, capitalists and bureaucrats in order to impose upon the people the notion that God hates it when you get up late. It suits the lust for order that characterises the non-idler.

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Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition. In his youth, the great poet of loafing, Walt Whitman, would arrive at the offices of the newspaper where he worked at around 11.30am, and leave at 12.30 for a two-hour lunch break. Another hour's work after lunch and then it was time to hit the town.

The English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid-18th century, work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did "jobs", but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown.

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"Convalescing" is a word one doesn't hear much these days. It's as if we have banished the notion that time is a healer. What happened, I wonder, to the doctors of the turn of the century, who used to recommend long periods of inactivity on the South Coast for minor ailments? When the sickly velvet-coated dandy Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill in 1873, aged 23, the diagnosis was "nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis" and the prescription was a winter on the Riviera, "in complete freedom from anxiety or worry". Once upon a time, we knew how to be ill. Now we have lost the art. Everyone, everywhere, disapproves of being ill.

To demonstrate how our attitudes to illness have grown dramatically less idler-friendly in recent years, we need only look at the recent history of Lemsip's marketing. When I was a child, a mug of Lemsip mixed with honey was one of the pleasures of lying in bed with a heavy cold. It went with being wrapped in a dressing gown and watching Crown Court. It was all part of the fun. Your mother might bring you a steaming cup of the soothing nectar in bed. You would sip it, cough weakly and luxuriate in its fumes. It had some positive effect on the physical symptoms of the illness, to be sure, but it was also a pleasure in itself. Lemsip was part of the delicious and much-needed slow-down that illness can bring into our life.

Not any more. Lemsip has reinvented itself as a "hard-working medicine". It has changed from a friend of the idler to his worst enemy. The implication now is that rather than enjoying your illness and waiting a few days till it has gone away, you should manfully repress the symptoms and carry on as normal, competing, working, consuming. Most appalling of all was their recent ad line, "Stop Snivelling and Get Back to Work"."