Of course we loved our kids and would never have been without them for a single second. But this was a pretty brutal demonstration of the difference between a life with kids and one without. The following night, as we consoled ourselves with a Chinese takeaway Claire said ruefully, ‘Perhaps we are proper grown-ups after all.’
Excerpt from Mike’s To-Do-List Diary (Part 8)
Monday 6 August
1.22 p.m.
I have had enough of driving around with all my childhood belongings in the back of the car. I have to do something.
1.32 p.m.
I have dumped all my old school exercise books in the paper-recycling box.
2.34 p.m.
I have taken my junior microscope to the Cancer Research shop on the High Street. Maybe it will inspire some kid who might have gone into a life of crime to become a doctor or a scientist instead.
Tuesday 7 August
9.01 a.m.
I have taken all my old school exercise books out of the recycling because I can’t bear to part with them. My next stop is the Cancer Research Shop on the High Street to get my microscope back. Claire tells me that I am a hoarder. ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I yell as I close the door.
9.45 p.m.
The microscope is mine although it cost me £4.99 which is roughly £4.98 more than it is worth.
10.00 a.m.
I feel bad about this but have no choice than to move everything that was living in the boot of my car into the boot of Claire’s car on the grounds that she hardly ever uses her car and so won’t miss the space.
Wednesday 8 August
5.50 a.m.
I have got up early in order to tackle Item 120: ‘Print out all the digital photographs that you’ve never got round to printing off.’
6.00 a.m.
I have just opened my computer’s digital photo software to assess the size of the problem. I have a staggering 3,483 pictures of which roughly 94% are of Lydia and Maisie, 3% are pictures of other people’s kids, 2% are of sunsets on holiday and 1% of me and Claire. This is going to be tougher than I thought.
10.32 a.m.
I am in PC World looking for a colour printer. I flirt with the idea of asking one of their staff for advice but quickly give it up when I’m unable to find anyone who actually works there. I end up asking a middle-aged customer lingering in computer cabling because he looks like he knows what he’s doing. He suggests a flash-looking printer that doubles up as a fax machine and a scanner as he’s got one at home. I thank him, grab one from the display and head for the check out.
11.12 a.m.
I have downloaded the latest printer drivers, I have double checked the cartridges and plug and unplugged the USB cable more times than I care to remember and I cannot get the printer to work for love nor money.
11.15 a.m.
I call the printer manufacturer’s helpline and anticipate AOL-style service. The first question is have I set it up correctly and I tell them that I have. The second is if I’m sure that it’s actually switched on and of course I want to curse them for asking such blindingly obvious questions but then I look over at the printer and notice that the little ‘on’ light is actually off.
11.16 a.m.
The printer is working.
12.18 p.m.
It has taken me the best part of an hour to print out a single decent photo. The first one came out looking like an X-ray, the second made my daughter look like a junior version of the Incredible Hulk and the third and fourth ones were ruined because I’d put the paper in the wrong way.
1.34 p.m.
Of the 3,483 photos on my computer I have so far managed to print out six, two of which are of sunsets. This is trying my patience to the extent that I am verbally abusing both the computer and the printer with the threat of violence.
2.02 p.m.
I am wishing that someone would invent a machine that would just do the things that you want it to do without you having to get involved with any of it.
2.05 p.m.
I’ve just repeated my invention wish to Claire. She tells me I’ve already got one: ‘It’s called a wife and it’s how ninety per cent of the things that need doing in our house actually get done.’
2.10 p.m.
I ask Claire if we really need hard copies of the photos of our kids. She doesn’t reply. This can be interpreted as: ‘You already know the answer to that question so don’t even bother trying it on, pal.’
3.10 p.m.
I have filled up five and a half CDs with the best images from my computer (roughly 1,540 pictures) and am taking them down to Boots to get them printed out.
3.42 p.m.
The woman in Boots wants to know how many photos I’ve got to print. I tell her 1,540 and she laughs and tells me to stop joking around. I’m forced to explain that I’m not joking around so she gets out her calculator and does the sums: ‘That’ll be £ 231,’ she says.
4.11 p.m.
In a bid to drive the cost down the lovely woman from Boots and I have gone through all five and a half CDs and picked out what we think are the best images. Given the wealth to choose from and the fact that we’re basically trying to represent the last four years of Gayle history we find it hard to narrow it down to anything fewer than 150 photos which she works out will cost roughly £22.50. A bargain!
Thursday 9 August
4.55 p.m.
I am sitting in a coffee shop on the High Street watching my wife weeping as she looks through the edited version of the last four years of our lives: anniversaries, get togethers, barbecues, birthday parties, family holidays and new babies galore. In a masterstroke I have not only earned this tick but gone some way towards being the best husband in the world. I share my observation with Claire. She just smiles and carries on looking through the photographs.
Chapter 22: ‘Appreciate your mates because without them the highlight of your Sunday nights would probably be Songs of Praise.’
It was the second Sunday in August and I was in the Queen’s with the Sunday Night Pub Club, catching up with each other’s news. Steve and Kaytee were considering a career change and buying the lease on a shop on Moseley High Street; Amanda had won a cruise to the Canary Islands by completing one of those ‘This product is so wonderful because . . .’ competitions promoting a new line of wholemeal bread; Gary had been out two nights on the trot and hadn’t been to sleep for thirty-six hours; Arthur had bought some more Dr Who figures; Jo was going off to Norwich at the weekend to see her old flatmate; and Henshaw and Danby had spent the weekend at various kids’ birthday parties. As well as this we’d also discussed who (sitting around the table) we’d most like to be trapped in a room with; why it would be virtually impossible for Oasis to ever make another decent album; and voted for our top three vegetables to complement the perfect Sunday roast. All in all it was shaping up to be another sterling Sunday Night Pub Club night.
Afterwards, Henshaw and I made our way along Moseley High Street to the minicab office on St Mary’s Row.
Henshaw turned to me. ‘So are you pleased with how your list thing is going?’
‘Yeah really pleased. I feel like I’m finally getting things done.’
‘Good, I’m chuffed for you, mate. So, what do you think you’ve learned so far?’
‘About what?’
‘About your To-Do List. I’m curious to know what insights you’ve had frantically doing all this extra stuff.’
‘I dunno,’ I replied eventually. ‘I haven’t really had the time to do much reflection.’
‘None of us do these days,’ he said laughing. ‘But since you’re doing this and it may at some point turn into a book, don’t you think you ought to?’
In the back of the cab I reflected on Henshaw’s question. He was right, I had been doing the List off and on for some eight months now, which in terms of the time I’d allotted to the project was two thirds of the way to my goal. I should be well on the way to learning a few things about life. What was the point otherwise? A quotation that I’d read when I was seventeen and thought meaningful enough to inscribe in ballpoint pen on my army issue rucksack sprang into my head: ‘The unexamined life isn’t worth living.’
It was late on a Sunday night; I was in the back of a mini-cab listening to an Asian version of Simon Bates’
Our Tune
while quotations from long-dead Greek philosophers randomly popped into my head.
When I reached home all I wanted to do was crawl into bed but my thoughts were urgent enough to make me grab a piece of paper and a pen. I wrote:
Things I have learned from the To-Do List so far
1. I have good friends.
2. I miss some of my old friends.
3. Everything takes longer than you think it should.
4. Some things that you think are going to be hard are pretty easy.
5. Some things that you think are going to be easy are pretty hard.
6. There is no such thing as enough time.
7. Sometimes doing stuff makes life easy.
8. Sometimes doing stuff makes life a lot harder.
9. Seeing my mum’s face when she saw Tony Blair was priceless.
10. As hard as it is, being a dad is the best job in the world.
I looked at the pad in front of me. As lessons acquired over the past eight months they didn’t seem too bad. Yawning, I put down the pen and was about to start getting ready for bed when it occurred to me that I hadn’t made my mind up about what my next big list thing was going to be.
I scanned the entries looking for something to grab my attention but nothing sprang to mind. As a diversionary tactic I opened my laptop and saw that I had an email. A big smile broke out and got bigger as I read the contents of the message.
The email was from Susie Dent, one of the co-stars of Channel Four’s long-running quiz series
Countdown
telling me that, yes, it would be okay if my friend Arthur had his photo taken in front of the show’s
Countdown
Conundrum Board.
My next big tick was here.
All of the Sunday Night Pub Club were on the To-Do List in the form of ‘Do something nice for . . . [insert name of Sunday Night Pub Club member here] and some of them had already been ticked off. Steve had informed us all one night that he’d never had anyone send him flowers so I sent the largest bunch I could find to him at work; Gary had received his in February when during an attempt to come up with a definitive list of ‘the most fanciable female singers of the Nineties Brit Pop era’ Gary confessed to a not inconsiderable crush on a particular female lead singer. A few weeks later, having called in a few favours from some friends of friends who knew her, Gary’s girl indie singer crush very kindly called him on his mobile while he was sitting round at Arthur’s house playing
Vice City
on the PlayStation. And in March, following a discussion about toys we had all wanted when we were young, Jo revealed how she had dreamt of owning a
Girl’s World
. Three days, a hotly contested auction on eBay and a not altogether insignificant amount of money later, and a pristine never-been-out-of-its-box-before
Girl’s World
was winging its way to Jo.
Since then things had gone a bit quiet on the ‘do nice things for the Sunday Night Pub Club’ front. Not for lack of trying. I’d been struggling to find anything for either Kaytee or Henshaw and although Danby did mention something about his love of merino wool underwear I decided that was perhaps a step too far. But Arthur was going to be the most difficult to please as he only ever really got enthusiastic about
Dr Who
and Paul Weller and he already had pretty much every single Dr Who-related toy/DVD and the entire output of Paul Weller (even the really rubbish covers album). Or at least that was what I thought until his new girlfriend Amy revealed that in her spare time she travelled the country being in the audience for TV shows. So far she had ticked off
Trisha
,
The Wright Stuff
,
Dancing On Ice
,
Top of The Pops
,
Question Time
,
Blind Date
,
Play Your Cards Right
,
The Weakest Link
and
Can’t Cook Won’t Cook
. The only one that she hadn’t been on was
Countdown
. Arthur piped up how he’d always wanted to have his photo taken in front of the
Countdown
conundrum in a ‘Sir Edmund Hillary planting a flag on Everest kind of way’ as he had only ever missed two episodes of
Countdown
in the last three years. Suddenly I had a way to make his dream happen and add a little something extra into the bargain.
About a year ago I was invited to be a judge on the Best Novel section of a well-known book award. My fellow judges were Kate Adie and
Countdown
’s Susie Dent and, following a summer of reading, we all met up to discuss who we were going to put forward as the winner of the award. I’d felt a little out of my depth given that Kate was famous for reporting the news while being shot at and Susie was famous for knowing the Oxford English Dictionary inside out. Fortunately both were exceptionally nice people and for a short while they were candidates for Item 364 on my To-Do List: ‘Try to make friends with new and interesting people so that you don’t spend your whole life talking about films, music and last week’s episode of
Dr Who
.’ Just imagining the look of surprise on the Sunday Night Pub Club faces if I turned up at the Queen’s with Kate Adie in tow was enough to make me smile.