The routine of it all

This far into the lockdown – I don’t know about you – but it seems to me that for most of us it is establishing a state of equilibrium somewhere between the positive and negative.

Contrast this with the days after I first “retired” (or rather perhaps, my career left me) I used to rant on about how the world clearly assumed that anyone over the age of sixty is going to be sitting by their telephone hoping/waiting for it to ring in order to give them someone to talk to, or else something to do.

You know the sort of thing:

[Your land line phone rings – first time].

It’s someone from the past that I haven’t spoken to for ages – or indeed someone I hardly know who’s perhaps a bit lonely – who has rung up for a chat.

No sense, or thought, in their head(s) that I might be busy engaged upon some fascinating project or another – or, just as important, that if I jolly well wanted to speak to them then I’d have rung them …

And thus twenty minutes of my life goes by that I’ll never get back.

(Pause for half an hour).

[Your phone rings again – second time].

Bugger! Who the hell is phoning me at 10.30am? If I leave my computer in order to answer the call I’ll lose my thread in whatever I am doing. (But hang on, if I don’t answer it I might miss something vital or urgent).

So I go to answer it.

“Hello?”

A familiar female voice responds.

“… I was just wondering, if you weren’t doing anything else, you might go and collect my red dress from the dry cleaners today …”

Go and collect her dry cleaning?!? What on earth does she think I do all day … sit around doing nothing …?

[I should establish at this point that “doing nothing all day” was sometimes – is sometimes – exactly what I do, but that’s by the by … what I resent is the fact that people actually assume that’s the case. Or seem to.]

There’s something in the old adage “If you want something done, give it to a busy person”, of course.

As you surface of a morning and make your porridge, poached egg on toast and mug of coffee – whether your “To Do” list for the day has twenty items on it, or just two – it seems to me that somehow the 12 hours or so one is conscious tends to extend or contract in order to accommodate them.

Well, either that, or I’m gradually losing my marbles!