The first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning is how much I wish I could sleep for another hour and how much I dread getting up and doing my exercise routine.

First thing I think when I wake up is to put the expensive eyedrops in my right eye so pressure won’t build up and so I won’t lose my sight from what is a congenital defect. After that, I think of a cup of coffee. My wonderful aide Denis Ferrara is usually right there with the latter. 

My first thoughts every morning are: Is my son OK and do I have to wash my hair?

Whether my dream is worth memorizing, because if I don’t do that immediately, it evaporates. What I then keep forgetting is how blankly my family stares at me, waiting for the point, if I repeat even the best of them.

Well, first, like Joan, I think of how much I wish I weren’t awake, and how much I’d really, really like to roll over and go back to sleep, which has been pretty much a morning constant since I was first made to get up and go off to nursery school. And then, like Candice, I think of the dog, since I, too, have been smooshed over to the side in the night while he lolls comfortably pretty much wherever he likes. I also think of him because he is generally moaning to be taken out, fed, etcetera, and my up-and-at-‘em husband is usually long gone, having left both of us among the sheets. I still, rather pathetically at this late stage, aim to happily hop up, take the dog for a bracing walk, have tea and yogurt and fruit, and read all the papers — all by, say, seven o’clock, in preparation for a private yoga instructor whom I have never actually gotten around to hiring. On the occasions when I actually manage to do this (sans the yoga teacher), I feel so virtuous and energized, I am scary, but apparently that payoff ain’t enough to get me going. But there’s always tomorrow …

Well, this morning the first thing I thought of was my friend Hercules Bellville, who died in London two weeks ago at 69. I didn’t go to London for his funeral at the Brompton Oratory, and now I thought that I felt really bad about that. Peter Eyre had organized a High Catholic Mass and high beautiful music. There were 600 people at Hercules’s funeral, and as befits one of the great bachelors, many of them were, apparently, weeping blondes. And I thought of Hercules’s life as a producer, a friend and a pillar of so many of the rest of us, and how he never married until just 48 hours before he died, and how he had no children, and how Peter has no children either, and I have no children, and Clare has no children, and Valerie has no children, and then I thought of the lives of all my friends in London, and of how much they have given and done and cared for others, and then I thought of how little I have given, and then I thought that it was time to give, and then I began to have regrets about everything I had never done, and by then I was so exhausted from all this thinking that I had to get up just to get it to stop.

OK. The first thing I think of is my dog, Phyllis, who has usually shoved me to the edge of the bed where I am hanging, bat-like, trying not to fall off. Then I think of peeing because I’m getting up there — not as old as our Liz, but then, few are.