‘You’ve . . . waarrrggghhhh?’
‘Don’t worry, just go back to sleep.’
At this Claire opened one eye and fixed me with it. ‘Don’t worry about what?’
‘About nothing. Just go back to sleep.’
‘How can I go back to sleep when you’ve just told me there’s nothing to worry about?’ She too sat bolt upright. ‘What is it exactly that I shouldn’t be worrying about?’
‘The To-Do List,’ I replied.
‘Oh that,’ sighed Claire flopping back on the pillow. ‘I thought you were worrying about something important.’
‘It is important. I didn’t tell you this earlier because I was trying to make up my mind, but Simon called yesterday morning and told me that he’s pitched the To-Do List to the publishers as a book idea.’
‘Well, that’s good isn’t it?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’
‘Because if I do it as a book then I’ll have to actually do it, won’t I?’
‘So what are you saying?’ Claire gave me a full-on 360-degree eye roll. ‘That you don’t want to do it? What about all that stuff about how this birthday of yours and Maisie being born and us being married ten years were real milestones that meant that you had to pull your finger out and start being more like Derek and Jessica?’
‘That was before I realised how much work it must take to be Derek and Jessica. Basically I think that you and I need to set our sights a little lower.’
‘Isn’t that what we’re doing already?’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I just can’t see how it’s going to work. I’m three months late with the book I’m writing, I’ve got another novel to write after that and then I have to find the time to do all the stuff on my To-Do List and write a book about it. It’s just not going to happen.’
‘So knock it on the head then,’ said Claire.
‘That’s exactly what I said.’
‘Good, we’re on the same page then. Now, listen, Mike, I love you, you know I do, but right now I really, really, really have to go to sleep. So if you wake me up again with any more revelations I can’t be held responsible for my actions, okay?’
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Okay.’
When Lydia woke up twenty minutes later saying that she couldn’t sleep because her hair ‘felt funny’ I realised that I’d made the right decision in giving up on the To-Do List. There was no time left in my life for anything other than the bare minimum. So when I returned home from dropping Lydia off at pre-school I headed straight upstairs and began working on the book that I was supposed to be writing. I’d barely written a dozen words when I admitted I was simply trying to postpone the inevitable, so I reluctantly picked up the phone and dialled Simon’s number.
‘Hi, Simon, it’s me,’ I said trying to sound jovial. ‘How are things?’
‘Mike, how are you, sir?’ boomed Simon. ‘Cracking on with that list of yours I hope. You must nearly have the whole thing done.’
‘Not quite.’ I laughed nervously. ‘The thing is . . . I’ve been thinking about it all night and well . . . as much as I appreciate everything you’ve done I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to do it.’
‘You don’t want to do it?’
‘No. It’s practically Christmas. Everyone I know is looking forward to a bit of time off and then there’s me trying to finish a book that’s already late while trying to help out at home with a brand-new baby. I can’t afford to be spending time doing stuff on the List when I’ve already got a list of stuff to do as long as my arm.’
‘I understand,’ said Simon. ‘Maybe it’s something you could do another time?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. Another time, definitely.’
But even as the words left my lips I knew that ‘another time’ was never going to happen.
With a heavy heart I composed the following email message:
Dear all,
As you may well remember a while back I sent out an email letting you know that I’d made the decision that it was about time that I joined the world of fully functioning adults and that along with my regular day job I would be undertaking a 1,277-item To-Do List which I planned to have completed by my thirty-seventh birthday. Sadly, for reasons too mundane to go into I have decided to give up the challenge. I feel like a complete and utter buffoon and you should feel free to exercise your right to mock me to within an inch of my life.
Have a great Christmas
Mike x
Within a few minutes I received my first reply, from my friend Cath in London.
Mate! Don’t give up. I was really rooting for you! I’ve got a To-Do List as long as my arm and was hoping that you’d inspire me to pull my finger out a bit and get things sorted!
Have a great Christmas
Cath xxx
An email from Jackie quickly followed.
Mikey baby! Say it ain’t so! I was so in love with your To-Do-List idea. I even drew up a list of my own but then I lost it for ages and by the time I picked it up again the moment was gone! You should definitely carry on. If not for your sake then for mine. Otherwise how will I ever get around to finding the time to do any of the things on my list without you as an inspiration?
Finally, from my friend Chris:
Waster! I knew you’d give up! Let’s meet up sometime over Christmas for a drink so that I can mock you in person.
Chris was right. He’d said that I would give up on my list and sure enough I had. Part of me would like to prove him wrong, show that I could complete my To-Do List in the allotted time but I genuinely didn’t think I could. At least not without something else giving way in the meantime. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and all of mine were double-booked already.
Chapter 7: ‘Go to a ridiculously glamorous woman’s house and find inspiration.’
A week into my new list-less life I received an email from my friend Nadine asking me when I was next going to be in London because she hadn’t seen me in ages. I started a reply suggesting a date in January once the Christmas rush was out of the way but halfway through I changed my mind and deleted the lot: Nadine was a really good friend and rather than fobbing her off with some distant date in the future I knew I should make an effort, so I asked her what she was up to the following Tuesday. A reply came back within a few minutes: she had a few bits of work to do but was free for lunch and instead of braving the crowds of Christmas shoppers currently clogging up the West End she suggested that I should come over to her house in Chiswick and she would make lunch for the two of us.
Nadine should have been exactly the kind of person I avoided like the plague: compared to her Derek and Jessica were practically messy teenagers. But Nadine is one of those rare things: a really nice person who had a very fabulous life.
Nadine’s house (which I’d never been to before) was like something out of a posh interiors magazine. All the walls in the large hallway, living room and kitchen were painted in an off-white colour that I could tell was not just expensive but hideously expensive. The German-made kitchen units were a gleaming gloss white and there wasn’t a single item of cutlery or crockery out on show on the pristine gleaming black granite work surfaces. The living room, with its untreated ash flooring, the huge leather sofa and expensive looking occasional table; the tastefully decorated bedrooms upstairs and the bathroom that could have come straight out of a designer hotel all had the same opulence about them as the kitchen. I sat down on her posh sofa and Nadine looked at me expectantly awaiting my verdict on her home.
‘You love it don’t you?’
‘Love it?’ I replied. ‘I want to marry it. It’s like . . .’
‘Something out of a posh hotel?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So why the frown?’
I hadn’t been aware that I was frowning but now that she pointed it out . . .
‘Well the thing is, mate . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t understand: where’s all your stuff?’
‘What stuff?’
‘You know, stuff? Where are all your books and CDs? Where’s all your ornaments from tacky holidays and piles of unread newspapers and magazines?’
‘You’re describing your house aren’t you?’
‘I thought I was describing everyone’s house until I saw yours,’ I replied. ‘Everyone in the world has a house full of stuff apart from you. How come?’
Nadine shrugged. ‘We’ve got no CDs because all our music is on our i-Pods, we’ve got no DVDs because we rent them from Blockbuster, we’ve got no books because once I read them I take them down to Oxfam and we’ve got no magazines because if I see an article I’m interested in I rip it out and then recycle the rest. I’ve never been a hoarder. I just can’t see the point.’
Once I got over the shock that my friend of the past decade is a closet non-hoarder we settled into our normal groove of conversation and laughter pausing only to consume the posh lunch she’d prepared. Around five, I decided it was time to leave and, kissing her goodbye, made my way to the tube station. As I walked along Chiswick High Street picking my way through the Christmas shoppers I found myself thinking about Nadine’s pristine home and her comment about having never been a hoarder. How can she never have been a hoarder? Isn’t hoarding what normal people do? And I thought about my house and the hundreds of books and CDs and DVDs in the living room and then I thought about the various bedrooms and all of the stuff in there too but then my mind came to rest at the top of the house and I found myself deciding that tomorrow was going to be the day that I would begin de-stuffing my entire house, starting with the area with the highest concentration of stuff and the number-one plague of my life: the loft.
De-stuffing the loft a week before Christmas wasn’t the smartest move ever, especially as there were plenty of things that were a higher priority like reassembling the cast-iron bed frame in the front bedroom. This was so that when Claire’s mum came to stay over Christmas she wouldn’t be reduced to sharing a bed with her granddaughter the human octopus. Still, mother-in-law or no mother-in-law, my current enthusiasm wasn’t aimed at bed maintenance and was instead focused on the myth that having a loft marginally less filled with crap might somehow make me feel more Zen and less jealous of the lady-with-no-stuff.
I started by taking everything out and doing a kind of inventory, which made for quite a depressing read:
1. Non-working Apple Computer tower and monitor ×1
2. Cast-iron fireplace ×1
3. Large suitcases filled with crap ×4
4. Cardboard boxes filled with crap ×12
5. Non-working video recorders ×2
6. Box of broken Christmas decorations ×1
7. Fake Christmas Tree ×1
8. Thirty-year-old fake Christmas Tree rescued from bin at parents’ house several years earlier ×1
9. Comic books ×345
10. Cardboard boxes filled with books ×3
11. Cardboard boxes filled with CDs that I no longer listen to but don’t want to give away ×2
12. Vinyl albums ×450
13. Vinyl singles ×280
14. Black bin liners filled with Lydia’s old clothes ×8
15. Cardboard box filled with pre-recorded videos ×1
This was a depressing read because I’d once cherished quite a lot of the so-called crap. The comics, records and videos had been amongst my most beloved possessions during my twenties and just seeing them brought back floods of memories from my university days and beyond. Whole evenings spent in darkened rooms listening to The Smiths, lost afternoons re-watching
Betty Blue
, wondering why I couldn’t find a girl mad enough to poke her own eyes out, and whole days lost in the imaginary world of the X-men wondering whether one day I’d discover my own superhuman power. Broken computers and bits of electrical cabling aside, the contents of the loft
was
me.
I called Claire upstairs to ask her advice.
Claire was aghast. ‘What are you doing? You told me you were putting the bed together so that Mum’s got somewhere to sleep next week.’
‘I was but . . . I got distracted.’
‘By a loft filled with rubbish?’
I was about to explain about Nadine’s stuffless life but then I saw her point. ‘I’ll put it all back and sort out the bed, eh?’
Claire leant across to offer me a kiss of consolation that communicated her appreciation of my actions no matter how misguided but before her lips could reach my cheek a familiar tortured-cat scream filled the air.