The To Do List

Yesterday I crossed off item 29: “Find the only set of spare house keys that we own so that should my wife and I ever leave the house without our keys we won’t be forced to resort to breaking and entering.” It took me the best part of three hours to locate them (would you believe I found them “hidden” under the mat by the front door) but along the way I also found the back to the DVD remote control, two staplers, the missing strap to my bike helmet, the phone number for a roofer that I wrote down three months ago, the spare car keys, two sets of keys that don’t seem to fit any lock in our house and that neither of us can remember bringing home, my national insurance card, Claire’s missing sunglasses and a two month out of date packet of Percy Pig sweets. The finding of the Percy Pigs was for me particularly bittersweet moment as I have an acute fondness for pig-shaped raspberry-flavoured confectionery and so finding the packet and then realising they were out-of date was a bit like winning the lottery only to realise that I’d missed the claim-by cut off date by a measly day or two. I can’t begin to tell you how long I sat mulling over the question: “Can gone off Percy Pig sweets kill you?” before I finally recalled the time way back in my youth when I ate an out of date chocolate “flavour” heart that had been sent to me by an admirer and spent the whole night suffering with acute stomach pains convinced that I was going to die but too embarrassed to explain to my parents what it was I had eaten.

In other news I have also just purchased a new TV so that’s item 28 ticked off too. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that a bloke buying a new TV isn’t exactly a chore and if you were talking about your everyday normal kind of bloke I’d say you were right. Sadly I am so far from normal that what should in fact be a pleasure actually becomes such a huge pain in the backside involving research on Google and Amazon; the purchase of several month’s worth of What Hi-Fi-Sound and Vision; personal testimonies from anyone I know who has bought a new TV in the last three years; visiting every single electronics shop in a twenty mile radius of my house; boring my wife, friends and family to distraction with the pros and cons of numerous brands of TV; and then finally the purchasing on a new TV from a sales advisor whom I have talked to death about the pros and cons of the TV I’ve finally selected for the minimum of an hour and a half. Anyway, it is done. I made myself and everyone around me miserable in the process but it is done. Now all I have to do is choose a Blu-Ray player to go with it…