They need something to do, poor idle darlings. They need a to-do list. They can have mine if they like. It’s a beast.
Appealing tasks never reach my to-do list, because I address them as soon as they crop up. Unappealing tasks go straight on to it. It’s a way of diminishing their threat by tidying them away in a place they can await my attention, like Robert Graves’ "letter from abroad that never shall be answered".
The to-do list is limbo. Physically, my to-do list is a reporter’s notebook, 200 or so lined sheets of A5 held together at the top by a spiral of wire so the pages can be torn off one by one, scrumpled into a ball and tossed to miss the bin. And, having missed, they can be collected, carried back to the desk and tossed again.
Anything to avoid facing the tasks on my to-do list.
(It is possible, I suppose, to imagine a scenario in which I missed the basket so many times with a scrumpled paper ball that eventually I gave up on it and left it lying on the carpet, whereupon it would become a task to be added to my to-do list.)
When a to-do is done — calloo, callay, oh frabjous day — I cross it out with a fierce obliterating squiggle. So eventually every page becomes dominated by scribbles. But when I turn to a new page, I know there is no way I will ever refer back to the old one, so the few outstanding to-dos have to be written out anew. In this way, truly durable to-dos can be handed down from page to page for months.
Right now, I don’t need to look at my list to know what is at the head of it. It is "mend spouting".
It’s been there for two years.
The leak in the spouting is unsightly, but it does no harm beyond forming a puddle on the concrete below. In summer, that puddle dries up and turns to algal residue that eventually blows away, whereupon I forget about it until winter returns and the irksome leak resumes.
But in order to fix the leak I need the spouting to be clean and dry, and for that I need to wait till summer again. Thus it remains a to-do.
I have little doubt that the day will come when I am flattened by a stroke or heart attack and the ambulance men arrive to wheel me out through the front door on their natty little gurney and as we pass under the spouting a droplet will fall on my insensate features and the universe will give a little cosmic giggle.
Of course, there are no end of life coaches and other fraudsters who would tell me to man up, identify the three most daunting items on my to-do list and tackle them all right now, the most daunting of them first, because there’s no time like the present.
Such advice ignores a simple truth: daunting things are daunting because they daunt.
Last night, I had a to-do-list dream. I often do. They occur when the list has grown too long and there seem more tasks to do than there is time to do them in.
The dream is always the same. I want to get somewhere but things keep holding me back.
Last night, I was trying to board a plane to Dubai in order to rescue a youth who was dying in a tumble drier, but the authorities kept directing me to a flight to Qatar.
The more I scrabbled, the further I found myself from my airport gate. I knew it had something to do with to-dos, but more than that I can’t say.
In general, however, I have learned to live with my to-do list and its nagging reminder of incompletion. It forms a sort of background radiation to the messy business of being alive.
And if the alternative is plumply toddling along London St and wondering why the street is so short and the day so long, I’ll stick with it.
— Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
