‘What’s this?’ asked Danby.
‘Something I spent half of last night doing when I should’ve been sleeping: brief explanations of how I went about doing everything on the List that I think I’ve ticked off.’ I left the room.
The beer garden was full of shivering smokers who had been banished to this concrete wasteland since the smoking ban had come in over the summer. Amongst them were friends of friends who, unaware of my To-Do-List attempt, provided me with a welcome distraction from what was going on inside.
It was nearly eleven by the time Arthur called me to come back inside so I finished my pint and made my way back to my friends.
‘Okay,’ said Jo. ‘We’re pretty much done with the counting up but we do have a few queries.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Well, Gary has a problem with your explanation of Item 416: “Overcome prison phobia so that you can sit down and watch Season One of
Prison Break
’.”
‘What possible problem could there be? You know I’ve always had a prison phobia and since starting the List I have watched
Papillon, Scum
and
McVicar
on DVD, visited a real prison in Derbyshire and met a real-life murderer. Now if that’s not overcoming a phobia I don’t know what is.’
‘Yeah,’ replied Gary grinning, ‘but my point was more along the lines that it didn’t say you’d actually watched
Prison Break
.’
‘There’s no way that you can disallow that tick.’ I appealed to Jo in her role as adjudicator.
‘Nice try, Gary,’ said Jo, ‘but I think Mike’s definitely earned that one. Now moving on to 833 to 842: “Sew missing buttons back on items of clothing”.’
‘I did that!’ I protested. ‘It took ages to find matching buttons for some of them and where I couldn’t I had to take off all the buttons and replace them with new ones. Have you any idea how long stuff like that takes?’
‘Well, we’d love to give you the tick,’ said Jo, ‘but . . .’
She pointed at my midriff and I looked down to see that yes, indeed there was a button missing from my jacket.
‘Now if you persuade us that it happened since you did the repair work I might be able to allow the tick.’
‘I can’t,’ I replied, cursing both my honesty and my ineptitude. ‘It was in the dry-cleaners when I was tackling the button thing and I completely forgot it.’
‘I see,’ said Jo with mock gravity. ‘Well, that’s one tick gone then.’
On and on they went questioning everything from my green tick (‘How can you say you’ve gone green when you flew to New York just to get a mug?’) through to my second attempt at the ‘learn Italian’ tick (because despite being able to recall pretty much everything that I’d learned from the CD I could barely remember the Italian for ‘goodbye’,) and beyond until Jo announced that we had come to the end of the queries and now needed to readjust the total and work out the final percentage.
‘You can take a quick walk around the block if you like,’ suggested Jo.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here and wait it out.’
And so while my mates got out their pens and began arguing with each other in whispered tones I chatted with the lost members of the Sunday Night Pub Club (who thankfully weren’t involved in the business of adjudication) until my friends were ready.
‘Okay, I think we’re done,’ said Jo. ‘Just to remind you of the rules: we agreed that a ninety-nine per cent tick rate of the 1,277-item total would be considered to be a success and anything below that mark would be considered to be a failure. Agreed?’
‘Agreed. So what is it? What did I get?’
The grin on Jo’s face said it all. ‘You scored 1,269 ticks out of a potential 1,277 tasks which gives you a pass rate of 99.37% which I’m pleased to say means that you’ve made it!’
Chapter 31: ‘Think about what you’ve learned.’
I woke up just after ten on the morning following my supremely successful To-Do-List audit. The kids were up and washed and appeared to have been fed too.
‘I got your text that you’d passed your audit,’ said Claire. ‘Well done, babe! What time did you get in?’
‘Sometime after four,’ I yawned. ‘Celebrations sort of carried on at Arthur’s. I think there may have been some karaoke involved.’
‘Not Motorhead I hope?’
‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’
‘So, what’s the first thing you’re going to do with your week of freedom? Have you got any plans?’
‘If it’s okay with you I’m going to spend the week doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
My week of doing nothing turned out to be short lived. If I had only looked at my diary I’d have seen that I had a pretty busy week ahead involving a meeting with my accountant, a library event in Sheffield and an appearance on Radio Four. On the Thursday just as I was preparing to go out to meet my accountant I got a call from Simon.
‘Mike!’ he boomed. ‘Long time no whatsit! How are you, mate? How’s this list thing of yours? It must be nearly done, surely?’
‘A couple of nights ago,’ I replied, ‘I passed. 1,269 things fully ticked off out of 1,277 which isn’t bad going I reckon.’
‘That’s brilliant, Mike! Absolutely brilliant! Well done you! Are you ready to write a book about it?’
This was a good question. Did I really need a thing as huge as another book to add to my To-Do List so soon after I had just ticked everything off?
‘Do you know what, Simon?’ I began, ‘I think I really am. I had a problem with it before because I thought it would end up just being about a bloke ticking things off a list. I can see now that it will actually be about lots of other stuff too like family and friendship, overcoming obstacles, growing up, taking risks and learning about the things you’re really capable of.’
There was a long pause, the sound of Simon thinking.
‘I can see where you’re going with this, Mike, and I like it. One man attempts to overcome a set of extreme adversities and in the process learns a number of life lessons along the way? Kind of like Bridget Jones meets Andy McNab by way of J.K.Rowling?’
I hoped Simon’s tongue was firmly lodged in his cheek.
‘Just a bit higher.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, a bit lower.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, a bit higher than that but lower than it was before.’
It was just after six a.m. on Maisie’s first birthday and Claire and I, rather than being in bed like any normal parents who had been up half the night administering Calpol to the troops, were downstairs in the living room making it suitably birthday like. We were currently standing on chairs trying to hang a banner across the bookshelf that proclaimed to anyone who cared to read it (which excluded both Lydia and Maisie): ‘Happy Birthday! You are 1!’
Life had been good these past few weeks. I was reasonably confident that I was going to make my self-imposed Christmas deadline for the novel I had been working on all year, I’d managed to clear some of the backlog of my work-related To-Do List that had been neglected and the week before last I had had a call from Simon saying that my publishers had loved the new direction that I was thinking of taking the To-Do List book.
Deciding that enough was enough, I climbed off the chair and surveyed our handiwork: three banners, sixteen balloons, and some twizzly glittery things hanging from the lampshade.
‘You do realise that you’re insane, don’t you?’
Claire nodded.
‘You do realise that because I’m here helping you I’m as insane as you are?’
Claire nodded again.
‘Good,’ I proclaimed. ‘Just so long as we both know that it’s completely insane to get up at six in the morning to decorate a room for a child that hasn’t the faintest clue what month it is let alone what day.’
‘You’re right, we are insane and though it would have been marginally less insane to have done it last night before we went to bed it wouldn’t have been quite as much fun. Anyway, it’s all for a good cause.’ Her bottom lip started to tremble. ‘It’s for our little girl.’ The lip was now in full quiver mode. ‘She’s one today, Mike. This is her first birthday and I just want her to know . . . I want her to know . . .’ Claire’s lips were now quivering nineteen to the dozen and joined by sniffing and then real lady tears, ‘. . . how special we think she is.’
‘I know, babe.’ I gave her a big hug as I felt a small lip-quiver of my own.
Still holding Claire I joked that as we’d done so well with the first two perhaps we ought to try to make a third. Claire didn’t even crack a smile.
‘I love them, you know I do, but that’s one part of our own personal To-Do List that you can consider having been fully ticked off.’
Returning wearily upstairs in the hope of getting a few moments to ourselves before the day kicked in, we were met by a delighted giggle coming from the birthday girl’s room. Not only was she sitting up but somehow she had managed to pull every last one of her soft toys (from Baloo the Bear to Shaun the Sheep) off the chair into her cot and was now babbling avidly as though they were long-lost friends. When she noticed us she let out an extra loud squeal, pushed Baloo out of the way and waved both hands in the air, demanding in the way that only the cutest of tiny dictators can do, to be picked up.
Collecting Lydia along the way we headed back to our bedroom, took all of Maisie’s presents out from their hiding place in the wardrobe and proceeded to deliver our very best rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, before handing her the first item from her present payload. Maisie, though mildly interested in the wrapping paper, reached present fatigue very quickly and it was left to the three of us who knew what was going on to help her out.
‘It’s like it’s our birthday too, isn’t it, Daddy?’ observed Lydia as she tore into the wrapping on the largest of the presents.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I suppose it is.’
Later, when things were in full swing at Maisie’s birthday party, I found myself thinking about the day, getting older and the To-Do List. I concluded that much of my initial impetus in undertaking the To-Do List was about trying to be something that I wasn’t: some stereotypical version of an adult that I was never going to conform to. I was never going to have a house that was always tidy and, try as I might, I couldn’t see the day coming when I wouldn’t look like an overgrown student. Though I could hold my own in a conversation about the state of the nation, I was more confident talking about the state of the couple on last night’s
Property Ladder
. As lamentable as that might sound, I was fine with it. And if one day (more likely than not on the eve of a birthday) I reached the point again where I’d got so sick of everything (the untidy house, the unsuitable clothes, the over-reliance on property programmes for entertainment) that I ended up writing yet another list, I was fine with that too because at least this time I’d be more aware of what I was letting myself in for.
Afterword
And what of the List? Well the List itself is in the top right-hand drawer of my desk in the office and from day to day it sits there unopened with its crumpled,barely-hanging-together-cover loosened at the staples. Occasionally when I’m looking for something else (stamps, paperclips, bank statements or lost bars of chocolate) I’ll think about opening it but I never do because I feel as though that part of my life is over now. As for the ticks I achieved that were ongoing, some are ticking over and others have fallen by the wayside. Yes, I try to be as green as possible, and the wormery is still going a treat, but beyond being a bit more rigorous about rejecting needless plastic bags and recycling, everything else has ground to a halt. A few of the old friends I caught up with still exchange emails and leave comments on Facebook, and I’m planning to head up to Leeds to see Sam sometime over the summer. Yes, I’m still making an effort to see more of my parents; no, the drawer by the back door isn’t quite as tidy as it was and, as for the attempts to lose weight . . . well let’s just say it’s an ongoing battle.
So as I begin typing, I feel I ought to be saying something wise and clever that will make you reflect on everything you’ve read and fire you up about life, no mean feat. Having mulled over the problem, this is what I’ve decided to leave you with:
1. Make a list
2. Do it.
Go on, you know it makes sense.
Appendix
1. Eat more salad.
2. Frame print bought for my birthday.
3. Spend more time with number-one child.
4. Back up hard drive.