where art collides philosoperontap

click for part 3

I was out kayaking this morning and drifting around in the breeze on the lake my mind drifted up to see lots of fluffy white clouds drifting by. I thought to myself, how wonderful. I thought how can I write something artistic about those fluffy white clouds? But then it occurred to me that it must be practically impossible to write anything about fluffy white clouds that hasn’t already been written. They are such an obvious thing for people to get all wistful and romantic about.

The old lateral thinking machine did kick in and I then had one of those eureka moments. Clouds = internet. Hmm. A bit tenuous really. How do you go from kayaking and then watching clouds to talking about tinternet? Who cares.

I don’t know how tinternet got to be described in terms of clouds. Is tinternet just another in the dictionary of clouds? Cumulus nimbus, stratus, tinternet. Dear ISP, I can’t get my cumulus nimbus to work because my broadband isn’t working properly. Probably not. I wonder whether tinternet carries rain in it that is discharged as it rises in a flow of cold air.

There’s plenty of hot air on tinternet I’m sure though I’m not so sure about the cold stuff. It isn’t as if rain and computers would get on anyway or they would have to invent waterproof computers. They probably have already. Get your Goretex lined PCs here. Guaranteed to keep the water out and let all that hot air through. I think I should patent that one. I hope nobody else got there before me. Well I will probably get round to it sometime anyway.

It seems likely that since they invented tinternet lots of the jobs that used to get done around the house at evenings and weekends just don’t get done now. Nobody has the time. Everyone is constantly checking eBay to see whether their bid has been beaten, or Facebook to look at someone else’s holiday snaps or twitter.

This does of course make this a very dated piece of writing. In 100 years time people will have never heard of twitter unless they have been attending some very specialised history lessons.

I’m into history meself. Got a pile of books queuing up to be read both in the kitchen and in the bedroom. I even sometimes keep one or two in the downstairs loo. No sense in wasting time while you are in there. Only trouble is I’m never in there long enough to really get into a book so I keep rereading over old bits. I find myself saying “Dang it, I’ve already read this bit”. Then I flick around to try and identify where I actually should be and before I know I’ve finished and it’s time to get up, so to speak.

I even have one book that was an A Level History text book when my wife Anne was at school. She can’t understand how I can like reading this stuff. I did buy here Bridget Jones’ Diary once, a long time ago and she actually read that one twice. Other than that Anne is a doer not a reader.

I can’t do any jobs around the house unless it is written down on a jobs list. It all comes from when we first got married. We didn’t have a dishwasher in those days (for American readers – I know unbelievable eh?) so we would take it in turns. One day it was my turn. There I was scrubbing away, feeling quite content with myself having cleared out the whole bowlful of dishes, when another pile of pots and pans was duly deposited in the sink. This was totally disheartening.

I realised then that I needed to be able to see the size of the task ahead of me in order to be able to get it done to any degree of satisfaction. Where dishes were concerned I needed to know the full scope of the job. This led to me starting physical jobs lists. If it wasn’t written down then it wouldn’t get done. After her initial exasperation at this Anne realised that this could work and each weekend I would be presented with an old envelope with a long list of jobs on the back of it.

This isn’t as bad as you might think because what was not written down was the timescale in which the jobs had to be done. I would assess the damage on Saturday morning and say “that one’s a half-dayer, this one’s an hour”, the point being that they would not all necessarily be done immediately.

The system did work, though my control element was tested as when I had crossed some jobs off Anne had a tendency to add more to the list. This was not acceptable. I wanted to see the whole list done before moving on to another. It was the same mental issue as not wanting more dishes put in the sink. Works for me anyway.

We also have clashes on the writing things down front when it comes to diaries. Anne keeps a diary on the wall by the door into the kitchen. On it she writes all her forthcoming appointments, charity lunches, coffee mornings etc. There is a column for each of us in thefamily and she dutifully fills in the kids dates as appropriate – dentist etc.

Unfortunately I don’t use the diary in the kitchen. I use the calendar on my PC. In fact I’ve just moved on to using Google Calendar. This leads to some confusion when Anne arranges something and finds that I am unavailable. “But you didn’t write it on the calendar”. The ups and downs of family life eh?

click here for part 5