The To Do List

You can really tell that you’ve really being throwing yourself into your To Do List by the fact that you feel a sense of relief rather than dread that it’s Monday again because it means that if you’re at work you won’t have to do so much.

In a word my weekend has been mental. Most of it has been spent moving out all the stuff that I moved from my home office two years ago in order to fulfil To Do List item number 12. Given that I’m a writer you’d think that by “stuff” I’d be solely referring to items essential to the life of a novelist (pens, computers, tables, chairs and the odd book or two) and there you’d wrong because what you’d also need to add to the list (amongst a whole lot of other stuff) would be eight partially clothed and bought on eBay Six Million Dollar dolls, a large photograph of Bruce Lee’s grave, a sofa purchased several years ago when Claire and I decided that it was time that we learned to stop slouching that was so ludicrously uncomfortable that we both ended up sitting on the floor, two suitcases, four year’s worth of back issues of J17 and Top of the Pops Magazine and a pair of “Hulk hands.” Obviously none of this junk was essential to the writing process and I think it explains why I never really used my office as much as I could have done…I just couldn’t get through the doors for all the junk I was storing there.

One upside of moving out of my office was the interesting (at least to me) fact that it encouraged me to also tick off To Do List item 18 (“Get rid of fence panels at side of house.”) The fence panels had been sitting at the side of the house making me feel guilty since the end of the summer. I’d been planning to either call the council to take them away or find the time to take them to the local tip but options seemed too much like hard work. In the end I got up hideously early on Sunday morning, broke the fence into small pieces, stuffed it in the back of my car, drove to my office, took all the piece up to my office in the lift, locked the car and then proceeded to take them down the lift all the way down the other end of the block to the skip room in the basement. It was a long and arduous procedure made that bit more surreal (as though the sight of me trudging through an office block with a broken fence wasn’t surreal enough) by my encounter with a number of stray clubbers from my office block’s bar/club still “havin’ it large” at 7.30 a.m. ‘What are you doing?’ asked a youth in a baseball hat. ‘Getting rid of some fence panels,’ I replied. He nodded sagely: ‘Sound. Have a good one, yeah?’ ‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll try.’

For an opportunity to win £100 worth of Hodder books, enter the To-Do List challenge at www.hodder.co.uk/thetodolist.