A welcome break from the general pattern of my life through interruptions and distractions

My life is full of interruptions and distractions which are almost always welcomed as a break from my incessant but definitely not Herculean labours…

…It was almost as though Alexa (the Smart Speaker which announces that someone has pressed our doorbell) was unwilling to tell me.  “There is somebody at the door,” she whispered, so huskily that I feared she may have been having an asthma attack.  I’m sure that, if she could have found the breath, she would have added, “Of course, you don’t have to answer it.”  Nevertheless, I did… They came with an attempt to capture all souls and, I presume, the entire demographic (or at least fifty percent of it) with a very young and attractive woman accompanied by a truly ancient one (no less attractive in her day, I’m sure) who appeared to be on the point of collapse throughout our entire – admittedly short – conversation.  She smiled – a lot – I think (although it could have been some kind of rigor) but did not speak.  All conversation was conducted by the younger woman who congratulated me because she came bearing an invitation to ‘a party’ at The Meeting House with ‘no cost and no obligation’ to myself.  “Well, that sounds like fun,” I thought.  I might even have been tempted to go if they’d had a bar.  Instead I politely accepted the gracious offer of a free leaflet and watched them leave, the more able of the duo virtually carrying her elder along the driveway.  I always knew that Methuselah must have had a mother, but it came as a shock to me to find that she’d outlived him.

*

My wife’s phone rings constantly, but never when she is able to answer it.  The pattern is invariable:
1. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
2. Wife: no reply.
3. Attempt to find location of missing wife’s missing phone knowing only that it is never where I found it last time.
4. Answer phone.
5. ‘Yes, I am Mr McQueen.  Yes, you can speak to Mrs McQueen… if I can find her.’
6. Find missing wife who is never where she was last time I found her.
7. Await further instructions.
8. On completion of phone call carry out ‘Two-minute job’ for wife as instructed.
9. Return to previous task-in-hand forty five minutes later to find stiffened brush locked to side of paint pot and paint drip on wall that would look more at home in the Carlsbad Caverns.
10. Phone rings.
11. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
12. Wife: no reply…

*

I do not need to say ‘Open Sesame’ to open my garage door (although I do need to find the missing key) but it is rather like I imagine Ali Baba’s cave would have been if the forty thieves had collected shit.  It has a place for everything, in which I find everything else.  If ever I ask where something is, my wife will answer ‘In the garage’ and I know that I will never find it.  A four hour search in there would be more likely to turn up David Livingstone than whatever it is I need.  Amazingly it does not appear to have mice: I think that they are being eaten by Japanese soldiers who are unaware that the war is over.

*

…And being male and old… and alive I now find myself with the most persistent interrupter of all: the over-inflated prostate gland.  Want to enjoy a meal, a film, an uninterrupted night’s sleep?  Well, in that case you have, it would appear, three options: impotency, incontinence or womanhood.  And don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to claim that life is a bed of roses for women wee-wee wise – I know that I have never had to squeeze a mini human being through my nunny – it’s just that women don’t find themselves peeing on their own slippers anything like so often.  I myself have spent longer staring at the urinal wall whilst people either side of me came and went in watery relief than I would care to mention.  Nervous Bladder I used to think: the inability to pee in close proximity to other urinating men, but I now realise that it is down to the eccentricity of this normally walnut-sized gland, which is now approaching that of a belligerent watermelon.   In truth, most of the time I barely notice that it is there – except when it is inconvenient for it to be so.  Half way through a meal, a concert, a film or, most annoying of all, two minutes after my last toilet visit.  Most testingly the prostate likes to do half a job before reminding me forcefully that it is now in urgent need of finishing what it so reluctantly started just two minutes earlier. 

*

The only blessing – if I’m honest, I actually have many, but let us say for now that it is singular – is my unmatched ability to distract myself.  I am almost permanently distracted.  My brain is so seldom engaged in the same task as my body that they are virtual strangers.  Actual physical distractions serve only to bring me back to a place that I should have been in the first instance and, in the great scheme of things, ensure that, eventually, I get back on with the stuff I was meant to be getting on with and that – providing it doesn’t disturb me – can only be a good thing…