Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) Page 3

What shall we chat about now, as the clock ticks its way past nine o’clock?

  Time.

  Let’s talk about time.

  It’s a fantastic subject, especially as it plays such an important part in this great undertaking we are in.

  People say money rules the world, or love makes it go round, but I reckon what governs our lives more than anything else is that blasted ticking sound that marks off the minutes and seconds.

  The clock is up there on the wall, working its malevolent magic. Putting time in a cage and locking you in there with it.

  I’m a clock watcher.

  One of those people who tends to look at his watch at least two or three times an hour to check how long I’ve got to a) keep working b) sit on this plane c) wait in this queue d) watch this terrible romantic comedy.

  And I’m a stickler for having the right time on that watch as well.

  There’s nothing worse than it running slow or fast. It cocks up my equilibrium completely.

  There are people - I’m sure you know them - who say things like:

  ‘I always have my alarm clock running fast so I’ve got a bit of extra time in the morning!’

  Utter bastards.

  If you’re so insistent on having extra time in the morning, why not just set your alarm earlier?

  Invariably, these people are always late for everything anyway - which just goes to show, doesn’t it?

  Our lives are beholden to the clock on the wall as it ticks off the seconds, minutes and hours.

  We wake up to it, sleep to it, work to it and eat to it.

  Hell, some of the time we even have sex or go to the toilet to it.

  Most of the stress caused in the twenty first century is down to that horrible clock:

  If you’re at work and have a deadline to meet.

  If you’re going on a first date and have to be at that small, intimate bistro on the high street at seven thirty.

  If you’re waiting in line to get a new tyre, knowing your lunch break has twenty minutes left and the queue in front looks like a forty minute wait.

  You’re a complete slave to the clock and the ulcer it’s forming in your stomach lining.

  But not to worry!

  You’ll eventually reach a point where the clock ceases to have a huge impact on your life.

  It's called retirement.

  No longer will your days be controlled by Seiko, Timex or Tag Heuer.

  You’ll still have lots to do with any luck - even if it’s only a shuffleboard tournament and a spot of light reminiscing - but it’ll be according to your own schedule.

  It’s been said before but I’ll say it again:

  How deeply ironic is it that the present given to people retiring from fifty years of work is usually a gold clock? At the time of life when the last thing you want to do is ever look at one of the bastards again.

  Time flies when you’re having fun.

  Why?

  You’re not looking at the bloody clock all the time, that’s why!

  You’ve got something occupying you that you’re actually enjoying - putting the clock completely out of your head. And when you’re not looking at it, the sneaky git goes round at break-neck speed, with no consideration for your feelings at all.

  Three hours pass in what feels like three minutes…

  On the opposite side of the fence, when you’re bored out of your tiny mind and would like nothing more than to spread your wings and fly away, the clock gets slower and slower. This is because you are looking at it.

  Every five fucking minutes, it seems.

  (Six thousand words in and we get the first use of the f-word - which is surprising, as I use it all the time. Anyone who says swearing is a sign of a small vocabulary needs kick in the head… a kick in the fucking head, that is.)

  Can you sense my frustration with time keeping here? I’m sure you probably can.

  I hate living according to a little round white face with numbers on and I’m sure if you think about it, you probably do too.

  9.31 pm

  6430 Words

  See what I did there?

  Here I am moaning about time governing our lives and that we’re all reliant on the clock - and I cheekily pop in a time-check to underline my point, contradicting myself in the process.

  My English tutor always said I contradicted myself too much when I wrote an opinion piece, and here I am proving him right once more.

  His name was Professor Wrigley and he always considered me to be something of a hack.

  This was fine by me as it was the hacks who earned all the money, while the writing elite lived in misery - permanently half-way through a bottle of scotch, moaning incessantly about the work to anyone in earshot.

  I bet they never spent their time glancing up at the nearest Timex though, seeing how long it was until lunch break.

  No, for them I expect it was all about wandering through quaint street bazaars in Morocco, chatting up the local girls and writing down spurious observations on the nature of man’s soul.

  …I may have just alienated all the Hemingway fans with that little observation.

  So the clock is our natural enemy. An evil deity controlling our lives on a day to day basis.

  We even build bloody monuments to it, like the Tower of Westminster in London (and I do love the fact Big Ben is part of a building where the art of wasting time has really been perfected over the centuries).

  Strange then, that the clock’s nearest time monitoring relative, the calendar, makes us feel good about ourselves.

  I’ll grant you there are some things we put in a calendar that cause us heartache and stress. Dentist appointments for instance, or birthdays for relatives we hate but must buy a present for, otherwise our mothers will be cross with us for rocking the family boat.

  How about the return to school date, after the long, lazy months of summer with nothing to do but watch TV, worry old people and vandalise bus shelters?

  The whole point of looking at a calendar though, is that things tend to be quite far off and not looming round the corner, like a psychopath wearing a hockey mask.

  Calendars can be safely ignored when necessary.

  You may have one hanging in your kitchen - one of those long ones with pictures of slightly worried looking kittens on it - all those nasty appointments scrawled on it in biro, but at least you can avoid looking at the thing if needs be when you go to get a yoghurt out of the fridge.

  When you’re out of the kitchen entirely, it doesn’t exist at all!

  Out of sight, out of mind.

  Not like mister clock however - who's impossible to get away from.

  He’s on your wrist, on the car dashboard, on the wall at work, in the bottom right hand corner of the computer screen.

  Bastard!

  He’s everywhere, and no matter how hard you try, you’ll eventually find yourself staring up and realising with horror that you’ve only got twenty minutes to finish the shopping before the kids get out of school.

  Calendars also have good things written on them frequently. Things you want to remember.

  Like holidays and the birthdays of relatives you do like - or your own, of course.

  We all make sure we write down good things in large black marker pen so they’re easy to see, drawing our attention away from the date of the next rectal exam just below.

  I have a theory that men are bad at remembering things such as anniversaries and special occasions because most of them tend to go for calendars featuring naked women. Staring at a pair of big tits is a great diversion from the mother-in-law’s birthday next Wednesday.

  I have a calendar hanging in this room.

  It’s one of those dull corporate ones from some printing company or other.

  I stole it from work because it has fairly large spaces to write in under the dates and covers up the hole I made during an aborted shelf-making incident.

  Currently, a picture of a speedboat - looking very impressive as it carves i
ts way through the surf - is being used to denote the fact it’s April.

  I have no idea why.

  I guess spring must be a good time for a sixty-knot blow job through the harbour.

  The calendar has only two entries on it for the month:

  The first is my son’s birthday - in large black marker pen - and the second is for a doctor’s appointment - in small blue biro.

  Here’s a piece of advice: never keep a diary. Ever.

  It will plague your existence and cause your sanity to slip from its moorings.

  You start off with the best of intentions, carefully writing in every appointment and occasion in its clean, ordered pages and for a while at least, you’ll stick to it.

  Every appointment will be kept, you’ll turn up on time for all meetings and everyone will think you’re efficient and in control.

  Then you’ll lose the nasty bastard.

  Because you’ve squirreled all that vital information away between the diary’s faux leather cover and not committed any of it to memory, you won’t have a bloody clue what it is you’re supposed to be doing, or where you’re supposed to be going.

  You’ll miss meetings, forget special occasions and everyone will conclude you’ve become addicted to prescription drugs and started to smell funny.

  Years ago, I had one of those diaries with a calculator in it - stuck right next to the page for phone numbers.

  Why it was there, I have no idea.

  Perhaps you were meant to use it to multiply all the phone numbers together and arrive at the meaning of life.

  The calculator worked for a week before leaking liquid crystal all over the diary, perhaps in an effort to highlight the futility of its own existence.

  I got the thing for Christmas one year from an absent-minded uncle, who memorably also once bought me a vegetarian cookery book, along with a cardboard tube that made a mooing noise when you turned it upside down. I think it was some kind of cow calling device. I still have it somewhere, because every so often I need to take it out and have a look, to prove to myself I didn’t dream the whole thing up.

  I think my uncle’s presents are the only ones I truly look forward to at Christmas these days.

  I’ve received some extraordinarily silly presents in my time.

  I seem to have one of those personalities where people think I like quirky and strange gifts, normally purchased from gadget shops.

  Would you believe a friend once bought me a kite? When I was thirty two?

  I’m all for staying young at heart, but do I really need to express it by running round the park on a windy day, trying to get a kite in the air for more than three seconds?

  There I am on my birthday, wondering how long it will be until my hair falls out of my head, grows on my arse and gets thicker in my ears - and I unwrap a gift more suited for a time when I was as hairy as a cue ball and still thought Batman was real.

  The epithet written on the card that came with the kite said:

  ‘For when you want to get high!’

  Stunning.

  The kite went in the shed and I conveniently 'lost' the friend’s phone number for a while.

  My mother suggested I should keep the kite somewhere safe for my son.

  Tom at this point was three months old and crapping himself was a regular and enjoyable activity, so I thought hoarding the kite for ten years was probably a waste of time.

  Because I’m a writer, I tend to get presents related to that pursuit. Nothing useful though, like a new keyboard to replace the one I’ve broken the letter B on, or a book telling me how to write a best seller.

  No, I get bought quirky things.

  Like a pen with a radio in it.

  Yes… a pen with a radio in it.

  How desperate for friends have you got to be before that sounds like something you’d actually want?

  Small earphones extended from the pen on a cable, which was slightly too short to be used without bending your head over to one side, looking like you were a tad mental.

  I gather the person who bought it for me - a relative this time, so no chance of severing ties - thought I might enjoy the chance to write flowing script and listen to the radio at the same time, all from one convenient device.

  And who could blame them? After all, it’s not like it’s possible to do those things easily and efficiently any other way, right?

  Hmmm…

  Singing socks.

  They were a good one.

  You put the socks on, pressed a button on the side and they warbled a tune at you. The song in question was ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud (which is available on Spotify, I believe).

  The socks had a badly stitched picture of a tiger on them. The small electronic device that controlled the whole thing rubbed irritatingly against your skin.

  I wore them - once - for the delight and edification of my wife, who found the whole thing hilarious.

  I can’t really blame her. There I was, standing in my new socks, with a seventies rock song wafting from around my ankles and a green flannel dressing gown covering my modesty.

  The expression on my face could best be described as perplexed.

  At this point, it’d be nice to launch into a tirade about the companies who produce this crap.

  I’d like nothing more than to vilify the fools who sit in product meetings and decide upon the latest crazes to fill our shops from floor to ceiling and drain our bank accounts with frightening rapidity.

  But I can’t do that because it’s not really their fault.

  It’s ours.

  The simple fact is, if we didn’t keep buying this crap then they wouldn’t keep making it. If we didn’t keep buying pens with radios, singing socks, cardboard moo machines - or any one of a thousand other completely useless items you’ll find in the shops - then these people would stop producing them. They'd then find more constructive things to do with their time, like inventing flasks that keep the contents hot, or office chairs that don’t make your arse numb.

  Have you noticed the kind of stores that sell this stuff only exist for a short period of time before disappearing into the ether?

  They usually spring up at Christmas in otherwise disused shops, promising quality presents at rock bottom prices. They’re generally manned by people who are on day release from minimum security, or haven’t been caught by the police yet.

  They tend to get out of town long before you come back, wanting to complain about how the novelty indoor fountain you bought for your auntie Jenny has stopped working and started making disturbing farting noises in the middle of the night.

  There are many reasons why we keep buying these weird and wonderful gifts, but mainly it’s because they make Christmas shopping a whole lot easier.

  Unless you’re buying for children - who are happy with anything, provided it's plastic, brightly coloured and incredibly expensive - it’s hard to come up with gifts that aren’t as dull as ditch-water.

  I’m as guilty of it as anybody.

  My father is the kind of man who’s always had the money to buy what he wants and the sense to know what he doesn’t. Therefore, purchasing presents that elicit any kind of positive or heart-felt appreciation is next to impossible.

  This makes the Christmas Eve shopping trip even more of a nightmare.

  The amount of time I’ve stood in front of the gifts section at Boots, wondering whether to buy dad a ceramic miniature garden gnome or bathroom set - you know, the ones that invariably contain shower gel, talc, deodorant and an amusingly shaped bar of soap - doesn’t bear thinking about.

  I’ve settled for the fairly stress free option of buying him a bottle of whisky every year. He may not appreciate it, but he’s normally so pissed by the time I talk to him, it sounds like he does.

  A small, guilty part of me thinks I’m turning him into a raging alcoholic. I’m convinced at some point he’s going to decide I’m trying to kill him in order to get my hands on an inheritance.

  I might swap to cigars in th
e next couple of years. Give his liver a rest and his lungs a wake up call.

  My mother, bless her, is grateful for whatever I buy and I love her for it. She keeps everything.

  There’s a dusty box in her bedroom closet that contains Christmas cards written by me at the age of seven.

  I had a look through them once. It disturbed me that my handwriting hasn't improved much.

  Much like my father, I have a distinct inability to show gratitude when I receive an unwanted or ridiculous gift. I have a big problem with what I like to call the post-unwrap pause.

  This is the time when you’ve successfully unwrapped the present enough to see what it is and registered the fact it’s the worst present in history. You then have to fake a look of gratitude at the wizened old carbuncle of a grandmother who bought it for you.

  It’s very difficult.

  I find myself making a rather high-pitched keening noise, accompanied by my face twisting horrendously into something approximating joy and surprise.

  I’ll then come out with a comment along the lines of:

  ‘Oh! Thank you, Gran! I was just thinking the other day it’d be nice to write and listen to the radio at the same time.’

  To me, I sound about as convincing as Hermann Goering’s defence lawyer at the Nuremberg trials, but she seems to take what I’m saying at face value, concludes the festive transaction with a kiss, and a short anecdote about how she was passing The Gadget Shop, saw the offending item in the window and immediately thought of me.

  It’s a lot easier to open presents when the giver isn't in the room with you. You can safely express your feelings about the quality and suitability of your new possession by swearing at it, or burying it at the bottom of the garden beneath the miniature gnome.

  Bearing this in mind, I’ve resolved to open my annual Christmas haul from now on in the toilet with the door locked.

  10.42 pm

  8907 Words

  I tend to find shopping in general to be something of a trial, even if it's for me.