Just as I was sitting down with a coffee outside a London restaurant in the middle of St Martin’s Place, a young man with matted hair and a gaunt face walked into a telephone box, sat down and drifted off to sleep.

“Not a bad place for a nap” I thought, especially when you have no home of your own to go to.  Those bright red phone boxes are just a tourist attraction these days and are also quieter and warmer than where I was sitting.  The city is a tiring place so why shouldn’t he be entitled to a kip in a phone box?

Watching this man search for a peaceful spot in which to catch forty winks without being moved on in our bustling, upright capital indirectly reminded me of somewhere I briefly lived; Ghana, West Africa, a land with its own time frame where impromptu naps are perfectly acceptable.

Over there, unlike London, bouts of narcolepsy are totally justified as ways to get you through the working day.  You don’t have to sneak off to the uncovered depths of the staff room to illicitly put your head down for ten minutes, you can pretty much fall asleep wherever you want.  It’s that easy.

The heat and humidity sends the country into a mid afternoon meltdown as if a fairy godmother has waved her wand over the land and sent the kingdom to sleep.  People pounce on the much coveted spots of shade and pass out until someone needs them.

Ghanaians have truly mastered the “nano nap”.  They can fall asleep on the sides of busy roads, the backs of open top cargo trucks and even up shady trees.  When I worked in the news room on a Ghanaian daily, the main journalists would put their heads on their desks just minutes before a major story deadline.  This would probably invite an immediate firing back at home. 

People out there run on “Ghana time”, a measurement of duration that eludes the concept of sticking to a tight schedule and renders clocks and watches totally redundant.  Their casual attitude to meeting deadlines and appointments means that expecting something to be done requires the addition of double the time you had initially allowed for it.

The funniest nappers are the street vendors who almost resent their customers for waking them up in order to make a purchase.  You start with a faint “hello?” to try and stir the comatosed seller and when that fails you end up rattling their shoulder screaming “WAKE UP! I NEED TO BUY SOME BANANAS!”

Perhaps to us in the Western world where being late to a meeting is deemed some sort of cardinal sin and warrants social exclusion, the whole idea of sleeping at work and being comically tardy (as in days) seems like a recipe for a business disaster.  And yes, it probably would be, our worlds would stop.  We wouldn’t know what to do if the courier failed to deliver that package before twelve or the newspapers left out a day, but somehow in Ghana, things tick on a sort of order of chaos. 

Having just given the impression that Ghanaians are laid back time evaders I must now contradict myself by explaining that when the nation is up and awake, the country is bustling, noisy and hectic with transactions in all spheres of business being thrown about left right and centre.

Ghana, particularly its capital, Accra is in no way a peaceful, quiet place where you would imagine a nation of nappers to reside.  The Ghanaians are full of energy, constantly laughing, chatting and shouting.  I think they get away with living by “Ghana time” because of their ability to communicate.  They know where they stand.  There is no time for small talk in the work place, it’s loud and direct and mercenary with no taboos or discretions getting in the way of a deal.

So perhaps that is the difference between here and there.  Whilst we waste time chatting around the water cooler talking about the new romance between Paul and that girl from HR with the dreadful perm, Ghanaians are getting in some essential zeds so that when they are up they can rocket through their to do list with all that conserved energy.

Hiding away in a phone box just to do something that is so natural and essential to the human condition would seem absolutely hilarious to Ghanaians. As we pump ourselves full of caffeine and kit kats and crawl on through the day to meet deadlines and be out of the office at a reasonable hour, they are taking their time about it, bedding down on their desks or under their stalls when they feel their eyes start to droop.  With all the other health risks in Africa, at least they can rest assured that the Western syndrome of burning out from all the office stress on very little sleep won’t be one of them.