Humdrum

…It’s more of a trickle really.

You see, I’m trying to be quiet.  My wife is unwell and asleep in bed, so I am trying not to wake her.  This involves sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and watching daytime TV while I count away the hours before I go to pick the grandkids up from school – did I mention that my daughter is also unwell?  After school we have – that is to say they have, although Lord knows I could do with them – swimming lessons, carefully staggered to ensure that the gap between them is insufficient to supervise the getting dried, dressed and ready thing and the watching the swimming thing.  I flit – like an eyeball in REM sleep – between pool and changing room, partially concentrating on both, fully concentrating on neither.  I always miss the “Grandad, did you see me doing the…?” bit in the swimming pool; I always miss the underwear falling into the shower in the changing room.

It is something that drives me mad: not being able to devote my full attention to anything that I am doing.  As I get older I find it increasingly frustrating.  I will give almost anything a go, provided I can give it sufficient time and complete attention.  I have spent my whole life upcycling – except, given the results, perhaps downcycling might be more accurate: start with rubbish and, via the medium of ill-suited, damaged tools and general incompetence, end up with something even worse – much like we all do with self-assembly furniture.

Somewhere in the world there is a factory where the ‘patterns’ are created in a building whose floors slope at an angle of five degrees whilst the walls fall away at a variety of non-matching angles.  I can find no other explanation for it.  I have spent hours putting these things together with millimetric precision and a spaceship grade set-square only to find that they lurch horribly upon completion and fit the corners only where they touch.  The pre-dilled holes appear to have been added by a myopic butcher with a hand-held awl and a defective ruler.  The only way to make them match up is to put the bottom on the side and fit the shelves diagonally.

Afternoon TV, I discover, is full of property programmes, but none of them have kitchen cabinets where the unit doors are propped up on books and can only be opened after taking the hinges off.  This is not real life.  There is a serious dearth of wonky bookcases and shelves that you could ski down.  Moving around the investment opportunities (we won’t call them ‘homes) there are never doors with hinges that squeal like a frightened mouse with a megaphone, that can only be closed by kicking.  Moving from room to room here sounds like you are castrating an orchestra.  It cannot be done without waking up sick spouses… and nobody wants to do that.  The unintended consequences could be too chaotically random to contend with.  Like today’s little stream of consciousness, it could end up anywhere, although it seldom goes far.  It’s more of a trickle really…

I ride a tandem with a random
Things don’t run the way I planned them
In the humdrum… Humdrum – Peter Gabriel