The List ©

Thank goodness for slow drying plaster. It’s given me an excuse to escape the confines of our downstairs toilet/wet room where I have been beavering away sanding, glossing, filling, swearing and almost weeping for the last three days. Wallpapering is next but the aforementioned plaster gives me an opportunity to relax, have a brew and look busy writing this so Jill doesn’t rope me into attempting to cross off another of the jobs on The List ©.

There’s nothing genuinely exciting about a to-do list; they rarely make Hollywood films pivot on the completion of a collection of menial household tasks. Harrison Ford has never been filmed grabbing his hat from the clutches of the descending roller shutters of his nearest Tesco Express, having only just sneaked in before closing to buy a packet of Typhoo, three lemons and a copy of the Sunday Express.

Exciting, no, but there is a joy in putting that tick next to every item you successfully complete. And, yes, you’ll cheat slightly by adding tasks to the top that you’d actually already finished before you wrote the list in order to up the tick-count but you deserve it. You’ve worked hard.

Being able to scrub off the final entry is, of course, the Holy Grail and that, unfortunately, is where The List © differs from a normal to-do list.

The List © is infinite.

Like the Universe there is no end to The List ©; not even Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox and Judith Hann from Tomorrow’s World locked away, working overtime with all the tea and jammy dodgers in the world to fuel their genius could explain how this is possible but every time a job on The List © is complete, five more take its place.

The worrying thing is that these are jobs that we have deemed necessary to complete before the arrival of our firstborn who, at the best estimates of the medical professionals, could be arriving kicking and screaming on the 11th of November. Having seen the shaky ground on which these predictions are made (let’s face it, if they noted down their working-out on an exam paper in our school they’d have been heartily reprimanded by the maths teacher for abject vagueness) we may have more time to try and find the end. Unfortunately that also means there may be even less, perhaps a matter of days…hours even!

It’s got so that I daren’t look at The List © with my own eyes for fear of, at the best, copping sight of how much there is left to do and, at worst, being turned to stone by its Gorgon’s glare (although that may speed up the plaster). I just do a job and despondently ask Jill to assign me another.

I feel like a more domestic version of Dr Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap; hoping each time that the next task completed on The List © will be the last one. Hey…maybe there COULD be a film in this…