Small Bite 005: The Scottish Tradition of Hurkle-Durkle

On staying in bed for maybe a little too long.

This piece was featured as a segment on The Sunday Scaries Podcast and has been reformatted into column form. You can listen to it here:

Likely against my mom’s will, my dad bought me a canopy bed when I was far too young to have a canopy bed. This wasn’t a canopy bed you’d see in a Disney fairytale — it looked more like something you’d see in a hunting lodge. Large thick wood posts with minimal finishing, exposed knots in the wood, and my stuffed animals hanging off of it like I was in — well, an actual hunting lodge. Why a 7-year-old needs a bed like that I’ll never know, but the current version of myself appreciates my dad’s dedication to leisure.

As a kid, I loved nothing more than sprinting downstairs in the morning and posting up in my chair where I’d watch NBC’s entire slate of morning programming. The ideal lineup consisted of some combination of Saved By The Bell, Hang Time, City Guys, and NBA Inside Stuff with Ahmad Rashad. I could eat three consecutive bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios without blinking an eye in front of the television — a proud real-life 90s version of an iPad toddler.

But some time after NBC retired that lineup — or perhaps just when I aged out of it — I found myself doing quite the opposite as I entered my late elementary and middle school years. Simply put, I’d just lie in bed. The house we lived in at that time was set in the woods. Enough trees to feel secluded, but still some houses within sight — especially in the winter when the leaves would remain off the trees. Lying in bed and looking out the window, I could see only the tops of those trees swaying around in the wind. Somewhere between knocking into each other or never moving an inch, you could always tell what Lake Michigan was doing that day solely by their movement.

Never that big of a fan of sleeping in, I’d find myself wide awake at 9 am on weekends — far earlier than a lot of my friends. 9 o’clock would turn into 9:30. I’d smell my dad cooking his eggs and making his bacon. I’d hear our Yorkshire terrier barking downstairs. I’d wonder what time my friends would actually get up so we could go hang out or head to the ski hill. But then 9:30 turned into 10, 10 turned into 10:30. It wasn’t some painful slog I was enduring — if anything, I think I embraced it. I’d say I was practicing early Yutori, but it’s simply too soon to make that reference. But in a time when our phones didn’t rest on our bedside tables, it was likely far easier for us to zone out for 90 minutes in 1997 than it is now. Almost assuredly, I’d say.

Outside of making a remark to my sister-in-law about how I did this almost every weekend as a kid, I never really thought much of it. Until a recent trend popped up on TikTok over the last couple weeks. The Scottish phrase “Hurkle-Durkle,” which you may have heard by now as this program is predictably late to it. With my deep Scottish roots, I had no choice but to dive in and learn more.

Literally meaning “to lie in bed or to lounge after it’s time to get up,” Hurkle Durkle actually dates back to the early 1800s. A Scottish language dictionary from 1809 states, “Hurkle Durkle: Sluggishness in bed, or otherwise.” The poem reads:

Lang after peeping greke o’day, in Hurkle Durkle Habbie lay, Gae tae yer wark, ye dernan murkle, and ly nae there in Hurkle Durkle.

A recent New York Times piece discussed how TikTok has urged a younger generation to “reclaim a bit of leisure time.” The article titled “How Long Is Too Long to Stay in Bed?” reads: Staying in bed after you wake up is appealing because we crave agency, said Eleanor McGlinchey, a sleep psychologist at Manhattan Therapy Collective and associate professor of psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Much like “revenge bedtime procrastination” — the act of staying up too long to make up for the hours you spent working or caring for others during the day — lolling about in the morning is front-loading that “me” time before responsibilities invade. Any parent can attest to how savagely the veil between sleep and packing lunches is torn. Who wouldn’t prefer a cup of coffee and a fluffy pillow to answering “Have you seen my soccer uniform?”

And if my life has taught me anything over the last two years, that “veil” she references feels thinner than ever. And while I’ve only been to Scotland once for a New Year’s celebration that almost required a significant amount of Hurkle Durkle’ing, I now find myself glad to live in a world where my ancestors possibly Hurkle Durkle’d to their hearts desire.

Canopy bed or not.

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