The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  I knew she would be pleased that I was giving considered thought to the arrival of the new baby, but when it came to the idea of my cultivating facial hair, I was on less certain ground.

  ‘It’s just stuff.’ I sounded sulky. ‘Not interesting stuff. Just stuff.’

  ‘Right. Well much as I’d love to sit here talking to you all night about “stuff ”, I’m badly in need of sleep. I only got up because I needed a wee – this baby is pressing down on my bladder something rotten – and now I need another one so I’ll leave you to your list making.’

  ‘Cheers, babe.’ I got up from my desk, walked over and put my arms around her.

  ‘Look, I won’t be long. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes tops and then I’ll be back in bed.’

  ‘Fine, but no more than that, okay?’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’

  It was two and a half hours and an extra two hundred or so items on the List later, not to mention having taken Lord Baden-Powell’s name in vain, that I finally slunk back into bed without rousing my wife. I was exhausted. Shattered. Good for absolutely nothing other than sleep. But also elated. And alive. And excited. Because for the first time in a long while I felt as though I’d got a bit of direction in my life. As though I’d got a plan.

  Chapter 2: ‘Do something about the aforementioned problem.’

  Waking up just after nine on the day of my birthday I was struck by how much energy I felt I had despite getting far less than my preferred seven hours sleep. As I pondered why this was, I heard my daughter scrambling up the stairs and within a few moments she’d appeared in the room, carrying a pen and pad of paper.

  ‘Because it’s your birthday Mummy said I can be a waitress and take your breakfast order,’ she explained in her best ‘proper’ voice. ‘What would you like to eat, sir?’

  ‘What’s on the menu?’

  She looked down at the pad. ‘Eggs.’

  ‘What kind of eggs?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just eggs.’

  Opting for ‘just eggs’ and ‘just orange juice’ I got a big kiss on the lips from my waitress, who wished me a happy birthday and left the room.

  Half an hour later, I’d polished off my breakfast, opened my presents and listened to Lydia singing her best rendition of Happy Birthday, and was bouncing up and down on the bed with Lydia in time to music coming out of the i-Pod. It was weird. I’d gone to bed very late indeed and by rights should be completely shattered yet the tiredness didn’t seem to want to come. I felt good about life. In fact I felt great about life. It wasn’t just about it being my birthday. It wasn’t that I’d had a rare lie-in combined with breakfast in bed. In mid-bounce, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Lydia’s old doodling book and remembered the reason for my new-found energy.

  I picked up the notebook and scanned the last few entries: ‘409: Take all unwanted books to Oxfam because you’ve got too many’; ‘410: Get magazine subscription for Vanity Fair because it has long articles and it’s not just about music’; ‘411: Start reading Private Eye again so you can work at being both humorous and topical’; ‘412: Give blood because you know it makes sense’; ‘413: Try wearing hats more often because you look good in them’.

  It was odd reading these messages from my late-night self. What had possessed me to spend from eleven at night through to five thirty in the morning writing a To-Do List? I was reminded of the scene from Memento where Guy Pearce’s amnesiac character notices that his body is covered in tattoos reminding him of things he needs to know. This notebook was my version of Guy Pearce’s tattooed body. And oddly enough it was the reason that I was feeling happy.

  The truth of the matter was that I’d always loved To-Do Lists. Always. I’m pretty sure that the second thing I did after learning to scrawl my name was to write a list of things I wanted to achieve. It probably went along the lines of:

  1. Learn to read.

  2. Take a nap.

  3. Watch Rainbow.

  4. Play with toys.

  And though I might not have learned to read before I’d taken a nap or indeed watched Rainbow before playing with my toys, the very act of taking a pencil and paper and writing these things down one after the other gave me an immense amount of pleasure.

  To me a list is a statement of intent, a plan, a map to point you in the right direction. Without my To-Do Lists I’d be lost. Without my To-Do Lists I would just be making stuff up as I went along and that, as far as I’m concerned, is no way to live a life.

  My early To-Do Lists tended to be lists of books that I wanted to read, and each time I read one I got a tick. Now, while the writing of a list can be a reward in itself, as any veteran To-Do Lister will attest, the real pay-off is the satisfaction that comes from ticking, crossing, or scribbling an item off your list. With one neat action a task that has been bugging you for the longest time is utterly obliterated. Pow! It’s gone. Nothing beats a hard-won tick off the list.

  Soon after reaching secondary school in the early eighties, I came to realise that the making of To-Do Lists wasn’t just an idle pastime but rather a means of survival, the significance of which I learned the hard way.

  Set the arduous homework task by the Biology teacher, Mr Mason, of drawing margins on every single page of my exercise book, I decided that I would save time and effort by simply adding it to the To-Do List inside my head. At the time my mental To-Do List was populated by things like:

  1. Learn how to dance like Michael Jackson.

  2. Watch Grange Hill.

  3. Read the Lord of The Rings trilogy.

  4. Decide whether you’re too old to still be playing with Star Wars figures.

  5. Persuade parents to buy a video recorder.

  I should have known that I was on a hiding to nothing. But it was only when the next Biology lesson came along and Mr Mason asked us to present our homework for inspection that I realised my mistake. My punishment was to write a five-hundred-word essay during lunch break entitled ‘My favourite animal’. As punishments aimed at twelve-year-old boys go, it wasn’t that bad but it was enough to demonstrate conclusively that when it came to keeping track of things you need to do, there is no better invention than an actual, written-down-on paper, To-Do List.

  Years later, having ticked off items like ‘get a girlfriend’, ‘get a degree’, ‘get a girlfriend who’s in a band’, ‘get a job as a journalist’, ‘get married and buy a house’ and ‘write novel’, all by the time I was thirty, I smugly thought I was doing pretty well with the whole To-Do-List thing. Of course there were a few items along the way that never got ticked off such as ‘write music reviews for the NME’, ‘write a sitcom’, and ‘Go out with Kylie Minogue’ but on the whole tickwise I thought I was doing okay. In fact, I thought I was doing so okay that there really was only one more thing left on my life list, and that was ‘Have a baby’. And while ticking that one off was a lot less straightforward than I hoped it would be, once it happened in the spring of 2003, and Lydia was born, I felt ready to retire from the world of To-Do Lists. After all, I reasoned, what else is there? What I failed to realise of course was the first undeniable truth of To-Do Lists: ‘Unless you’re dead there’s always going to be stuff that needs doing.’

  As Claire and I got on with the business of raising our daughter, I took my eye off the To-Do-List ball, so to speak. After six years without a To-Do List to my name, a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter in the mix, another child on the way and a whole lot of stuff that I’d been putting on ‘the back burner’, there was no doubt that I’d probably stored up enough ‘trouble’ to last me an entire life time.

  Returning to my breakfast leftovers I managed a few mouthfuls of toast before I found myself reaching for the list and writing in purple wax crayon (the only writing implement to hand): ‘414: Put pens in every room because I’m sick and tired of not being able to find anything to write with’; followed by ‘415: Tidy Lydia’s crayons away before they all end up getting walked into the carpet’, before scribbling a completely r
andom ‘416: Overcome prison phobia so that you don’t have to keep coming up with excuses for why you’re not watching Prison Break like everyone else’.

  I was fine for a while after that. In fact I’d had a shower and was almost dressed before succumbing to the urge to add items such as: ‘Have a facial’: ‘Sample all the milks’; ‘Be someone’s mentor’; ‘Text Richard’; ‘See Darren and Emma’, and ‘Replace broken remote control’. I re-examined what I’d written and was confused. I understood why I wanted a facial (because I’d never had one and well, why not?) but where would I get one done and how would I avoid feeling like an idiot while receiving it? What exactly did I mean by sample all the milks? I’d done pasteurised, semi-skimmed, skimmed and gold top but I’d never tried Guernsey, goat or soya. But when I said ‘all the milks’ did that include camel, donkey, yak, water buffalo, reindeer, thistle, and . . . breast? And whose mentor was I going to be? What would it involve me doing? Would I have to put an advert in the paper? Would they know I was mentoring them or would I mentor by stealth? Texting my friend Richard sounded easy, but would it really be that straightforward given that I hadn’t worked out how to send or receive text messages since getting my new phone? I had found it hard enough to see Emma and Darren when they lived in Manchester so what was I going to do now they were in New Zealand? Finally, where on earth was I going to find a replacement remote control for my TV?

  Problems. Problems. Problems. It was tempting to give up before I’d begun and yet despite the many obstacles to completing my ever-growing list I couldn’t seem to stop adding to it. I added to it in the tapas restaurant that Claire took me to for my birthday lunch; I pulled over and added to it in the car on the way home from the park; I added to it as I prepared Lydia a tea-time snack and I carried on adding to it for what was left of the rest of the day. The following morning I added to it as soon as I woke up (admittedly less able to dance on the bed); I added to it when I was supposed to be getting on with work, and I added to it when I was supposed to be spending ‘quality time’ with Claire. In fact I added to it for more than six and a half days. Then I wrote Item 1398: ‘Ride on world’s fastest rollercoaster,’ stopped, and felt very strange indeed.

  PART TWO

  Early November

  (During which I try and work out what to do next with my to-do list and come up with a plan)

  Chapter 3: ‘Speak to a Canadian (they are nice).’

  What exactly was I going to do next, now that I had this ludicrously long list? Perhaps the best thing was to put it in a drawer and forget about it. After all, it wasn’t as though I was going to do all this stuff, was it? It was hard enough doing the essentials let alone actively seeking out stuff that – while it might improve my quality of life – wasn’t exactly urgent. I mean, was it urgent to buy a few shirts that actually fitted? Couldn’t I just carry on with the ones that were two sizes too small? And while I did appreciate that my parents wouldn’t always be around, was there a desperate need to tell Mum and Dad that I loved them right this very second? Couldn’t I just carry on giving them the thumbs-up sign whenever I nipped round to theirs? Yes, it would be great to play my bass guitar like Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but given that it had been at least fifteen years since I’d bought it and no longer harboured the desire to appear on Top of The Pops, shouldn’t I just let the whole thing lie?

  The drawer was definitely the best place for the List so I stuck it in the one by the back door which was always overflowing with takeaway menus (Item 498: ‘Empty drawer by back door of takeaway menus and bits of old junk’) and told myself to forget about it until I could see a way forward that made some kind of sense.

  I didn’t have to wait too long. A few days later, when I least expected it, the way forward presented itself from a most unlikely source: Claire’s friend, Alexa.

  Alexa is Canadian. I mention this because as far as I can work out, being Canadian is a pretty good thing and the more I learn about my wife’s friend (and about Canadians in general) the more I wonder why they aren’t running the world. Canadians appear to be not only incredibly sensible but also really nice. Trust me, every home should have one.

  Anyway, along with being Canadian, being a wife and mum to two kids and something of a master baker, Alexa also occasionally helps me out with some general administration. By which I mean pretty much everything work related that isn’t to do with the actual writing of books: filing the important papers I’d neglected to put away; replying to letters that I hadn’t answered; paying the bills I’d long been ignoring; and doing magical things with the huge plastic carrier bags of receipts that sat unlogged on the floor of my office, all so I could get on with the incredibly taxing business of being creative.

  Anyway, what with the summer holidays, her having the kids at home to look after and my lax attitude to deadlines, it had been quite a while since Alexa had been over to help out. After receiving a particularly alarming demand from my accountant, telling me that I needed to email him some figures or risk handing over my family and home to the Inland Revenue, the first thing I did was set Alexa on the case.

  ‘So what is it that you’re working on?’ she asked as I typed away on the computer.

  ‘Looking up trips to Antarctica on the internet.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘It’s on my To-Do List, which I’m supposed to be ignoring at the moment but finding hard to let go,’ I confided.

  ‘Ah,’ said Alexa knowingly, ‘the To-Do List! Claire told me you’re going through something of a mid-life crisis.’

  ‘It’s not a mid-life crisis,’ I objected. ‘It’s me making a decision to become a fully fledged adult by finally sorting my stuff out.’

  ‘And going to Antarctica is on there because . . .?’

  ‘It’s Antarctica.’

  ‘Do you think that’s a good enough reason?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t want to go to Antarctica?’

  ‘Well, me for one.’ She perched on the edge of my desk. ‘I mean come on, Mike, you’re a guy who likes his creature comforts. You can’t tell me that you’d be happy in Antarctica?’

  She made a good point. I do like my creature comforts and in order to go to Antarctica I’d have to fly to Buenos Aires in February, make my way to some remote town at the bottom of the country, then meet the boat and share a cabin with a total stranger for upwards of the three weeks (weather dependent) that it would take to get there. All of which, I strongly suspected, would feature a distinct lack of creature comforts.

  ‘Now you put it like that I suppose the answer is no. And while I’m thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to have a ride on the world’s fastest rollercoaster . . . fly to Las Vegas and gamble everything I own on one single roll of a dice . . . go bungee jumping . . . or pet a dolphin . . . or drive a Ferrari at top speed . . . or even buy a pet monkey.’

  ‘You really thought of buying a monkey?’

  ‘Not a big one. Probably a chimp of some kind. Though I’m guessing even the small ones are quite messy.’

  ‘So if you don’t really want to do these things,’ Alexa fixed me with a bemused grin, ‘why are they on your To-Do List?’

  ‘Aren’t these the kinds of things that we’re all supposed to want to do?’

  Alexa shook her head. ‘They’re not on my list and I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t be on yours either. Can I be honest with you? When Claire first told me what you were doing I thought, “Here we go, yet another guy trying to regain his youth by going on lots of Boys Own adventures”; then she told me how normal and everyday some of the things on your list were and I found myself thinking, “Good on you, Mike.” I could get behind this. It’s the kind of thing I would love to do. I can understand wanting to get things done, things that need to be done rather than stuff you just quite like the look of.’ She paused and smiled. ‘I do think you ought to do this list, but I don’t think you should spoil it by getting too self-indulgent.’

  ‘So you think the
Antarctic stuff should go?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And the stuff about wanting to touch a fake breast?’

  She rolled her eyes exactly like Claire does.

  ‘And the monkey?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that one, Mike. Just keep it real.’

  After Alexa had gone home, I headed downstairs, took the List out of the takeaway drawer and started checking through the entries. While most of the early items were okay, somewhere around the late eight hundreds an increasing number of ‘less real’ items had sprung up and continued to do so with alarming regularity, reaching a climax with the last hundred or so entries which wouldn’t get me a single step closer to my goal of being a ‘proper grown up’. So I set about scratching off every item that failed to reach my new standard of ‘keeping it real’. In a bid to separate hardcore items from the kind of everyday stuff which I would probably get round to doing eventually anyway, I struck off anything that hadn’t spent a good six months or so hanging around in To-Do-List purgatory. By the end of the day, although I was some 121 items poorer, I was in fact all the richer for having a list that now positively gleamed with an integrity of which Alexa and her fellow countrymen would be proud. I could feel it, I was nearly there. Now all I needed to do was to test out the plan slowly forming in my mind to make sure that it didn’t have too many holes in it. Who better to test my theory on than the Sunday Night Pub Club?

  Despite its title the Sunday Night Pub Club isn’t so much a club as a loose collective of friends who get together once a week in the Queen’s Head pub (commonly known as the Queen’s), for a drink and a chat. At first this was a strictly boys-only affair that convened on a Thursday night but then Thursdays got too busy so Sunday became the new Thursday (which in itself had been the new Friday) and somewhere along the way we were joined by various girls who in spite of their fundamental fragrance could drink pints and hold their own in conversations that required them to rank pretty much everything into a Top Ten. Having gone through several line-up changes over the six years that we’d been in existence we were now down to a relatively solid (but classic) line-up of nine members: Arthur, Amy, Danby, Gary, Jo, Henshaw, Steve, Kaytee and Amanda.