Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Daisy Has a Very Big Sense of Hearing

I find it hard to believe it's a week since I added anything to the blog. A whole week. That's seven days - unless they've been metricated since I last looked - which is possible, I wouldn't put it past Blair to ensure his place in history by lumbering us with a ten day Euroweek. I'm all for the metric system but there are limits. Mind you the surreptitious introduction of the ten day week could be one reason I permanently have no idea when I'm supposed to be doing anything at all, and how I have managed to miss Dr Who not just once, but three times a week for the past month. (Is David Tennant still the doctor? I have no idea).

I also have no idea what I have been doing for the past week. Which means either nothing happened, or I have forgotten, which is why I need to update this blog more often that I do. The meaningless trivia of my life need recording before they evaporate.

(Insert a vast Swathe of Googletime here as I try and find out what the singular of 'Trivia' is - if there is one. What is one trivial item called when it's surrounded by lots of non trivial stuff? Wikipedia says it's a 'Trivium' - but I'm not convinced. The only way I can even start to convince myself that's true, is if I imagine Stephen Fry saying it: "Here's an interesting little trivium, did you know that frogs only mate on a tuesday?")

Yesterday I started work on a job I've been promising to do for my parents for ages: building a raised bed from blocks in their back garden. Yesterday was a nice summer sunny day, the few midges that were around, were flitting about under the trees happily playing chicken with the vastly expensive but under performing Midge machine which - when it is working at full speed - sucks the little buggers up by the horrifying bucketful. The chickens were just playing at being chickens; scratching holes in the dirt, having dust baths, and stalking very small things in the shrubs. Daisy was happy playing with her sand in the sit-ooterie. A good day to be working in the garden.

I set to work. After masterfully measuring the space where The Bed was going to be three times and then pounding sticks into the earth at the corners of where it was going to be, and running strings to mark out the edges of where I had to dig, and measuring them all again just to make sure, then asking my mum to come and look and make sure that everything was going to go where she wanted it - Did she realise it was going to be as big as that? Was she sure it wasn't too big? I mean I could make it smaller if you wanted? Please? - I set to with mattock, spade, and wheel barrow. Two hours later, drenched in sweat I had managed to scratch out a long, thin, shallow hole that might do as the start of the job. But only down one side. The chickens could have done better. I was bushed as soon as I started digging, and quickly rationalised a whole raft of reasons why it would be simpler and easier to only dig one side of the ditch, build the first course of the wall and then start on the other side. Some of the reasons actually made sense when I said them out loud - which is always comes as a surprise when I start trying to justify putting things off.

I was so depressed by the discovery that I am getting, fat, old, and out of condition that I went and flopped on the sofa and ate a half a litre of high octane ice cream while watching a Bela Lugosi movie. The Ben & Jerry workout.

Today I relinquished my post as the Secretary of the Rainbow Parents and Toddlers Pre-School Playgroup and Plastic Dinosaur Sanctuary - or whatever the organisation I have been Secretary for over the last year is actually called. I'm not too sure what it's called because over the past year I have done bugger all in the way of secretarying except to not read the vast folder of stuff that was handed over to me when I took on the role, pass every letter I have received addressed to the Playgroup over to the treasurer who lives just over the road, and, in return, sign every cheque she has pushed in front of me. (Luckily none of them were from my own chequebooks but I doubt if I would have noticed).The hardest thing thing of the whole gig will be typing up the minutes of the AGM we held this morning in which I gave up the job. I might just get round to it by next week. However long that is.


2 comments:

NickLuft said...

Perhaps that is the purpose of blogging. They give us a reason to do something so that we have something to write about.

And it is better if we do it badly, inefficiently too.

Junk Monkey said...

Inefficiency. A vastly underrated facet of British life and something we do so well, that and mediocrity. We're dead good at mediocrity too - well, not maybe 'good'. Adequate perhaps. We're dead adequate at mediocrity.

I see myself in long tradition of Britons who have spent a lifetime not doing stuff very well (cf British Tennis Players and Eurovision entries). A tradition that, alas, seems to be dying. People in Britain are catching the horrible American idea that winning is important - and worse still, achievable!

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