Recently I’ve been doing so much explaining about To Do Lists and their value to the world that I almost feel like I’ve become the leader of some kind of To Do List based cult. Time and time again I’ve been sat in radio and TV station studios announcing to the world: “To Do Lists really can change your life!” have been leaving my lips to the extent that it almost feels like a mantra which it isn’t. It’s just some words that I keep repeating over and over again…wait a second…that is a mantra! Seriously though, it’s not a cult. It’s just a list, a way of encouraging you to remember the all the stuff that’s floating around in your head. Anyway, I say all this in a round about way of introducing today’s topic: gardening.

I am not a natural gardener. In fact I’d go as far as to say that I am very an unnatural gardener. I only like to do gardening when I really, really, really, have to do it and then only for fifteen to twenty-minutes when the sun is shining. Sadly however it turns out that in the real world that most people inhabit you actually have to do the garden all year around unless you want your place to look like a tip. And would you believe that includes gardening in January when it’s cold and wet and your lawn is covered in a deep carpet of dead leaves that have been there since mid-September? It’s wrong I tell you! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! And had it not been for this January list I can honestly say that I don’t think I would’ve ventured out into the garden until April at the earliest. Still, I’m sort of glad that I did because had I not ventured down to the bottom of the garden I would not have discovered that some thieving git and broken into the shed and stolen my mountain bike (a mountain bike that admittedly I hadn’t ridden on for some time and was on another To Do list somewhere else waiting to eBayed). When I called the police and informed them of the crime they asked me when I thought the crime might have taken place. “Somewhere between the middle of September and last night,’ I replied. “It’s hard to be any more accurate than that because I actually only came outside to tidy up the leaves because they were on my January To Do List.” The policeman didn’t seem all that interested in my January To Do List, he just sort of umm and ahhed and took my details. As I put down the phone I wondered if I should go back outside and start raking up the leaves but a small voice inside my head said: “Nah, you’ve had enough excitement for today,” and so I read a book instead.

There’s still an opportunity to win £100 worth of Hodder books at www.hodder.co.uk/thetodolist. . .

For those of you who have been worrying these past few days about my bee predicament (I’m mainly thinking of you, Mrs A. Harries of Barton-Under-Needwood) I’m pleased to say that having lived with them for some months now yesterday (and so far today) I’ve been completely bee free. Part of me likes to think that this is a vindication of the To Do List belief that if you leave most things that need doing long enough eventually they will sort themselves out but mostly I put it down to the Mrs playing Dido’s new album Safe Trip Home on constant loop. Bored to tears by this woman’s mithering they have either moved house or fallen asleep until the winter or Dido (whichever comes sooner) is over.

To Do List wise I have been having a very productive couple of days. I have for instance now ticked off To Do List item six: “Buy shirts that fit,” and I now have not just one but three shirts that I can button up all the way to the top without recourse to bulging eye syndrome or indeed keeling over. I have also chased up an invoice that I have spent several months avoiding because I knew it would be nothing other than a big fat pain in the backside. How did I know this? Well for instance take this piece of correspondence I received from them a while ago:
“The attached Purchase Order has not been sent to the Supplier as Saturn does not have a suitable email address. Please print and post/fax or email the attached Purchase Order to the Supplier as soon as possible.”

And how did I receive this purchase order which was sent directly from the accounts department that generated it? Would that be via an email address that they claimed that they didn’t have? Yes it would indeed! Is it any wonder that in the face of such “computer says no” mentality that I was far from excited at the prospect of chasing up my cash? Anyway, because it was on my list I chased them up and having forwarded, faxed, emailed and screamed the various bits of information that they claimed that they hadn’t received I finally took receipt of an official notification yesterday that yes, they would indeed pay me. Once I get the cheque I’m thinking of spending every single penny of it on Choco Leibniz biscuits (the Rolls Royce of the chocolate biscuit world) in a bid to make the effort involved in getting the cheque seem worth it because I’m telling you now if I have to spend it on once again off-set my every increasing electricity and gas direct debits I may well lose the plot.

Don't forget, there's still a chance to win £100 of free books here: www.hodder.co.uk/thetodolist.

I was about twelve when the whole video nasty/horror film craze happened. Mates would come into school claiming to have seen “Friday-the-thirteenth-I-spit-on-your-grave-let’s-murder-the-teenagers-staying-in-the-house-III” round at some mysterious “friend’s” house and then regale you with fantastical stories of what they had seen. I knew they were lying and they knew I knew they were lying but it was as though there was a written agreement between us all that we should never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Spurred on by this horror craze I decided that I would do my bit for playground storytelling by reading horror books (my parents at the time didn’t have a video player and even if they had the last thing that they would let me watch would have been a horror film) and my favourite of these was the paranormal story The Amityville Horror in which there was a memorable scene where one of the characters in the book enters an attic room to discover the spookiest of propositions: a room full of flies in the middle of winter!!! Quite why a house being held of the grip of a paranormal experience should necessarily result in an out of season fly infestation I’m not sure, but it was definitely scary and this scene in the book always stayed with me so you can imagine how I felt when I discovered that my own attic room had been taken over by out of season bees!

They started slowly at first. I’d be sitting at my computer staring at the screen then all of a sudden I’d hear a low droning noise and I’d look up to discover that I was now eye to compound eye with a bee. Now I’ll admit that even though it was a bee and not a wasp my second instinct was to kill it (my first, was as always to scream like a girl) and within a few moments I had rolled up my copy of the Sun and was primed to send this bee on a one way trip to meet his maker when I suddenly recalled the fact that I had seen Bee Movie with my kids and quite liked it. How could I destroy an insect that had once been voiced by Jerry Seinfeld? Plus there was the fact that I’d recently read that in the UK and the US the bee population had been dramatically reduced due to a bad weather and a virus. I couldn’t kill this bee. It would be wrong.

So in the end I opened all the windows and told the bee that I was going to make a cup of tea and that he should be gone by the time I got back. Not only did he not go by the time I returned with my cuppa but also to add insult to injury he had invited six bee mates to join him. Now given the fact that it was November I knew these bees hadn’t come from outside because as any schoolboy knows bees sleep in November so I found myself asking the question: where are all these bees coming from? To which the answer I discovered yesterday when I finally got round to it, was behind the halogen light fittings. Anyway, I called a man and he came round and said, “Yeah, you’ve got bees behind your halogen lights.” So I said, “Well can you get rid of them for me?” and he said, “Nah, mate. Bees are protected by law.” And then he paused and added, “Are they bothering you?” And so I said, “What? Am I bothered by six bees flying round me head while I’m trying to work?” And he said, “Yes?” because he seemed to have missed the irony in my voice and so I just sighed and told him that I’d learn to live with it and so as I write the bees are still here.