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that neither of us can remember bringing home, my national insurance card, Claire’s missing sunglasses and a two month out of date packet of Percy Pig sweets.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acute fondness for pig-shaped raspberry-flavoured confectionery and so finding the packet and then realising they were out-of date was a bit like winning the lottery only to realise that I’d missed the claim-by cut off date by a measly day or two.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 before I finally recalled the time way back in my youth when I ate an out of date chocolate “flavour” heart that had been sent to me by an admirer and spent the whole night suffering with acute stomach pains convinced that I was going to die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…

With all To Do Lists there are always a few items that you put on that even as you scribble them down you know full well they will never, ever get done. And so while it’s highly likely that you’ll phone your auntie Margie, pay the gas bill or even take that jog/power walk that you’ve been talking about for ages it’s highly unlikely that you’ll cure cancer, fill in that on-line application to become a spy that you started filling in after watching the series finale of Spooks or for that matter fill in the one hundred and sixty demands from Facebook asking you to confirm how you know all these people. I tell you all this as a preamble to explaining why despite it being on my January To Do List that there is NO WAY AT ALL that I’m going bother trying to tackle item 20: “Wean youngest daughter off her dummy.”

When Claire and I handed her our youngest daughter her first dummy we knew we both knew that we were opening a can of worms that would one day end up being thrown back at us at high velocity no doubt hitting us on the bridge of our noses and leaving us with a mild concussion. We knew all this because we’d had it the first time round with our eldest daughter who sadly loved her dummy considerably more than she loved us. Had our home ever been on fire resulting in her having to make a decision about which three things she might save I had no doubt that the list would go (in order of importance) like this:
1. Dummy.
2. Mummy.
3. Milky.

Were she to have been offered a fourth choice I have no doubt that I would have been it but with just the three places on offer I have no choice but to accept that I would have been bested (and therefore condemned to a severe crispening) by a two litre bottle of full-fat milk. But anyway, I digress, my point, and I do have one, is that it was murder, absolute murder getting child number one to give up her dummy. We tried coaxing (“Oh, go on give it to us, pretty please!”), we tried bribery (“Give it to us and I’ll by you a sweet shop,”) and we even tried shame (“Look, just give it up okay or you’ll end up with teeth like Bugs Bunny,” but she was completely indifferent to both us and our suggestions and so one night we thought ‘This is stupid,’ and just took it off her. Biggest. Mistake. Ever. I have never heard screaming like it. It was like she was a superhero whose secret ability was to be able to rattle small life forms to death by use of her vocal chords. We handed the dummy back and cowered waiting for the noise to stop. It didn’t. It just carried on. All night. Like a wailing siren of misery whose single aim was to punish us for messing with dummy. We never did it again. Ever. So all we could do was wait until she gave dummy up of her own volition. Thankfully it was only another couple of months and she never looked back even once. But the thing is as much as child number one loved her dummy, child number two loves hers even more.