The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  3. But to make sure that Gayle doesn’t just sit on his backside for nine months, a ninety-eight-per-cent tick rate or below will be considered a complete and utter failure.

  4. As of today Arthur, Gary, Henshaw, Steve, Danby, Amy, Kaytee, Jo and Amanda are all officially appointed judges of the To-Do List.

  5. The judges’ words are final.

  6. Judges do not have to wear silly wigs unless they really want to [thanks, Steve].

  7. To make sure Gayle doesn’t give up halfway, there will be an audit at the end of April just to make sure that he’s on track.

  8. On completion of the challenge, Gayle must hand over the List in its entirety to the judges.

  9. No fibbing.

  10. And no getting behind on the real everyday stuff that you have to do either.

  There in front of me spread across six half-torn beer mats on the table were the rules that would be my constant companions for the next nine months. And now that I had my rules, and expert opinions from both a busy mum of two and a Time Management Guru, I felt as though there was nothing that could stand between me and a completed 1,277-item To-Do List. But that night as I crawled into bed and settled down to sleep, Claire whispered something in my ear that made me reconsider: ‘I think my contractions have started.’

  PART THREE

  Late December

  (During which an offer is made, a lot of sleep is missed and the list sort of goes by the wayside)

  Chapter 6: ‘Remember failure is just another word for . . . failure.’

  As I stared out of the loft window at the rotten December weather (rain, hail and snow) while contemplating the fact that there were only seven shopping days left until Christmas and I hadn’t bought a single present, my mobile rang and brought me back to earth. The screen said: ‘Agent Mobi calling’. Sadly, this was no James Bond style assignment coming my way but my literary agent Simon calling me. I knew this was likely to be bad news, possibly even the kind of bad news that might see me having to get a day job, because in my experience literary agents are not prone to shooting the breeze for the sake of it, so when one calls you on an actual telephone rather than contacting you by email it is usually for a reason: they either have news or are looking for news from you.

  If Simon was indeed looking for news from me then that would undoubtedly be because he had been prompted into action by an enquiry from my editor, Sue, relating to the book that I still hadn’t finished and was due to be delivered three months ago. Even if he was looking to deliver news to me there was still no reason to relax: it would probably mean trouble anyway.

  ‘Mike,’ boomed Simon (who incidentally once trained as an actor), ‘how are you, good sir?’

  ‘Great, thanks.’ I stared blankly at the half-typed sentence on my computer screen. ‘How about yourself?’

  ‘Me? Never better. All ready for Christmas?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And how’s that new baby of yours?’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘And how’s the new book going?’

  ‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Shouldn’t be too long before it’s all wrapped up.’

  This wasn’t exactly true, given that it was probably going to take another couple of weeks to finish.

  ‘Good to hear it,’ boomed Simon. Small talk time was over.

  ‘So, Mike, that book proposal you emailed me a while back . . . I just wanted to let you know that I loved it.’

  I was confused. ‘Which book proposal?’

  ‘The email that you copied me in on telling all your mates that you were doing those 1,277 things. It’s a great idea.’

  ‘That wasn’t a book proposal, that was just me spouting off like a lunatic.’

  ‘Really?’ Simon seemed unfazed by this news. ‘Well, if it wasn’t, it certainly is now because I’ve just this minute finished pitching it to your publishers. They love it. They think it will really be a lot of fun. What do you think?’

  ‘It sounds . . . it sounds . . . great.’

  ‘Good!’ boomed Simon. ‘That’s what I like to hear. Anyway, no point me wasting your time yakking. Get cracking on that list of yours because you’ve got another book to write!’

  To describe the last couple of weeks that culminated in my agent pitching a non-existent book idea to my publishers as ‘something of a whirlwind’ would have been a major understatement. It had been more like a tornado ripping through my relatively tranquil life and turning various objects (small cows included) upside down and ripping the roof off everything that had a roof to rip off.

  The whirlwind began with Claire’s contractions and continued throughout the rest of the night and the following day and saw not only the arrival of my second daughter, Maisie Gayle (9lbs) at 8.58p.m. on the Monday night but also various altercations with Tory party canvassers, maternity hospital parking meters and overly complacent nurses who thought we were exaggerating when we told them that our baby daughter’s arrival was imminent.

  Following my day of excitement I’d left the maternity hospital just after midnight and stopped off at the local chip shop for a celebratory kebab (in lieu of a cigar), eaten it on the way home and then had promptly fallen asleep. The following morning I was still somewhat shell-shocked but pretty well rested. Little did I know that this would end up being the last full night’s sleep that I would get.

  Heading to bed at around ten on the evening of baby Maisie’s first day at home, Claire and I hoped with all our strength that she would be our ticket to joining that small but perfectly formed group of parents known as the Smug Parents Club, group motto: ‘Our babies slept through the night from day one.’ Our friends Leona and Paul had been members of the Smug Parents Club from the birth of their first baby in January 2002 and had remained fully fledged members despite two more children. Our NCT friends Tracey and Stefan were equally fortunate when Tracey gave birth to baby Jake a fortnight after Lydia was born in the May of 2003. ‘What? You’ve not slept a wink since Lydia was born?’ they both asked in disbelief as we explained to them her erratic sleeping patterns (or should that be non-sleeping patterns). ‘Jake slept through the night from day one.’

  Alas, Maisie wasn’t the slightest bit interested in facilitating our membership of the Smug Parents Club. Utilising her own unique hybrid scream (part-tortured fox gnawing off its own foot and part-cat being strangled) she proceeded to wake us up every twenty minutes until somewhere around four o’clock in the morning, having tried everything in the book (and by book I mean the entire library of baby literature that Claire had accumulated from the moment that she first became pregnant with Lydia), I picked Maisie up, headed downstairs, turned off the burglar alarm and decided that now was as good a time as any to tackle something from the List.

  Item 897 was ‘Get round to watching those DVDs that Danby gave you because you’ve had them from the best part of eighteen months’, which on the surface you’d be forgiven for thinking would be an easy tick, given how much I liked watching TV. Sadly, these were no ordinary DVDs of the quality US TV box set variety. These were ‘art’ DVDs that were loaned to me by Danby in his role as Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle as part of an earlier self-inspired attempt to get myself ‘into’ culture. The first DVD was called The Cost of Living and was a piece of performance art by the DV8 dance company. It was hailed by Time Out as being: ‘EXCEPTIONAL . . . nothing less than visual poetry.’ The second DVD, Rivers and Tides, was a film about the artist Andy Goldsworthy who, according to the back of the DVD box, was ‘one of Britain’s best-known sculptors’. At the time when Danby handed these DVDs to me he said, ‘Listen, these are the most astonishing performances that you will ever see. Watch them now.’ And I really did mean to watch them because I wanted to be the kind of person who could make small talk about how there are dance companies ‘breaking down the barrier between dance and theatre’ as well as wanting to be able to name at least one well-known British sculptor.

  Despite my ambition to be interested in stuff that was
n’t about buying or selling houses or that featured explosions of some description, I’d never managed to watch either of these two DVDs but all this time later, as I looked at the digital display on the DVD player that said ‘04.12’ and then at the baby in my arms who showed no interest in sleeping, I reasoned that if ever there was a good time to watch these DVDs this was it. So dropping the first DVD into the player, I settled myself on the sofa, propped the baby up so that she could see the TV and settled down in preparation for a late night dose of high culture. Needless to say we were both asleep within a matter of moments.

  From that night onwards Maisie proved to be the worst sleeper ever. In fact if there had been a club for not-so-smug parents who wanted to crow: ‘Oh, my baby has kept me awake from day one!’ then Claire and I would have been made presidents of it in a shot. Though Maisie did sleep, it just wasn’t at night, and with Lydia awake and alert from six in the morning there were times when Claire and I were convinced that our kids were deliberately trying to keep us up for twenty-four hours seven days a week in some kind of Olympic endurance test. It was no way to live at the best of times and certainly no way to live if you had a book to write and a 1,277 item-long To-Do List to whittle down to something more sensible.

  After my conversation with Simon I leaned back in my chair and began searching through the pile of debris on my desk (a broken fax machine, a week’s worth of newspapers, half a banana and a half-drunk bottle of Evian with bits floating in it) until I finally found the List. As I scanned its pages I could feel myself beginning to panic; it was starting to sink in that I had just informed Simon that not only would I be continuing with the To-Do List but also writing a book about it. Why? Why hadn’t I just said, ‘No, Simon, it wasn’t a pitch for a book but a daft email about a daft idea that I no longer want to do?’ I can only imagine that my subconscious wanted to motivate me to greater things. Or possibly it was down to the simple fact that I was so shattered from being up with the baby that I truly could no longer tell my arse from my elbow.

  In a bid to (as the Time Management Guru had put it) ‘impose some kind of order’ on the chaos that was threatening to take me over, I grabbed a loose sheet of paper from my printer tray and wrote down a list of all the things that I needed to do right now that weren’t on my original To-Do List:

  1. Buy a new mobile phone to replace the one that Claire put in the washing machine.

  2. Phone old phone company about porting number.

  3. Sort out problem with laptop.

  4. Cancel old phone insurance Direct Debit.

  5. Email editor.

  6. Send Connie a birthday card.

  7. And a present.

  8. Send publisher receipts for library event.

  9. Invoice BA.

  10. Make appointment to see accountant.

  11. Invoice The Express.

  12. Print out photos.

  13. Write short story for charity book.

  14. Write other short story for charity book.

  15. Edit page proofs for short story for the other charity book.

  16. Send biog stuff to Simon.

  17. Buy the kids’ Christmas presents.

  18. Decide what we’re doing about Christmas.

  19. Decide what we’re doing about New Year.

  20. Book hotel for London trip.

  21. Call Dyson about vacuum cleaner.

  22. Reply to website email.

  23. See Nadine.

  24. Get together signed copies of books for Danny’s charity thing.

  25. Sort present for Lauren and Greg’s wedding.

  26. Book Claire’s theatre tickets.

  27. Chase council about parking ticket.

  28. Send camera back to Amazon.

  29. Wait in for gas man.

  30. Do Phil’s DVD.

  31. Pay web people.

  32. Sort out TV aerial.

  33. Take Lydia swimming.

  34. Sort out problem with disappearing cursor on Word.

  35. Finish novel.

  36. Spend time with kids.

  37. Spend time with wife.

  38. Find time to sleep.

  Even just looking at the List made me hyperventilate. I’d been putting off some of the stuff ever since I’d first started the To-Do List and those things had become more and more pressing until now there really was nowhere left to hide. And to top it all I had just informed Simon that I was going to turn the To-Do List into a book too.

  I was in trouble. Big trouble. And whatever happened over the course of the next twenty-four hours, the one thing of which I was sure was that I was going to have to make some pretty huge decisions very, very soon.

  ‘I’ve made a decision,’ I said, sitting bolt upright in bed at just after five in the morning.

  ‘Urrrrggghhh?’ said Claire.

  ‘I said I’ve made a decision.’

  ‘You’ve . . . waarrrggghhhh?’

  ‘Don’t worry, just go back to sleep.’

  At this Claire opened one eye and fixed me with it. ‘Don’t worry about what?’

  ‘About nothing. Just go back to sleep.’

  ‘How can I go back to sleep when you’ve just told me there’s nothing to worry about?’ She too sat bolt upright. ‘What is it exactly that I shouldn’t be worrying about?’

  ‘The To-Do List,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh that,’ sighed Claire flopping back on the pillow. ‘I thought you were worrying about something important.’

  ‘It is important. I didn’t tell you this earlier because I was trying to make up my mind, but Simon called yesterday morning and told me that he’s pitched the To-Do List to the publishers as a book idea.’

  ‘Well, that’s good isn’t it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if I do it as a book then I’ll have to actually do it, won’t I?’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Claire gave me a full-on 360-degree eye roll. ‘That you don’t want to do it? What about all that stuff about how this birthday of yours and Maisie being born and us being married ten years were real milestones that meant that you had to pull your finger out and start being more like Derek and Jessica?’

  ‘That was before I realised how much work it must take to be Derek and Jessica. Basically I think that you and I need to set our sights a little lower.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re doing already?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I just can’t see how it’s going to work. I’m three months late with the book I’m writing, I’ve got another novel to write after that and then I have to find the time to do all the stuff on my To-Do List and write a book about it. It’s just not going to happen.’

  ‘So knock it on the head then,’ said Claire.

  ‘That’s exactly what I said.’

  ‘Good, we’re on the same page then. Now, listen, Mike, I love you, you know I do, but right now I really, really, really have to go to sleep. So if you wake me up again with any more revelations I can’t be held responsible for my actions, okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Okay.’

  When Lydia woke up twenty minutes later saying that she couldn’t sleep because her hair ‘felt funny’ I realised that I’d made the right decision in giving up on the To-Do List. There was no time left in my life for anything other than the bare minimum. So when I returned home from dropping Lydia off at pre-school I headed straight upstairs and began working on the book that I was supposed to be writing. I’d barely written a dozen words when I admitted I was simply trying to postpone the inevitable, so I reluctantly picked up the phone and dialled Simon’s number.

  ‘Hi, Simon, it’s me,’ I said trying to sound jovial. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Mike, how are you, sir?’ boomed Simon. ‘Cracking on with that list of yours I hope. You must nearly have the whole thing done.’

  ‘Not quite.’ I laughed nervously. ‘The thing is . . . I’ve been thinking about it all night a
nd well . . . as much as I appreciate everything you’ve done I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to do it.’

  ‘You don’t want to do it?’

  ‘No. It’s practically Christmas. Everyone I know is looking forward to a bit of time off and then there’s me trying to finish a book that’s already late while trying to help out at home with a brand-new baby. I can’t afford to be spending time doing stuff on the List when I’ve already got a list of stuff to do as long as my arm.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Simon. ‘Maybe it’s something you could do another time?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Another time, definitely.’

  But even as the words left my lips I knew that ‘another time’ was never going to happen.

  With a heavy heart I composed the following email message:

  Dear all,

  As you may well remember a while back I sent out an email letting you know that I’d made the decision that it was about time that I joined the world of fully functioning adults and that along with my regular day job I would be undertaking a 1,277-item To-Do List which I planned to have completed by my thirty-seventh birthday. Sadly, for reasons too mundane to go into I have decided to give up the challenge. I feel like a complete and utter buffoon and you should feel free to exercise your right to mock me to within an inch of my life.

  Have a great Christmas

  Mike x

  Within a few minutes I received my first reply, from my friend Cath in London.

  Mate! Don’t give up. I was really rooting for you! I’ve got a To-Do List as long as my arm and was hoping that you’d inspire me to pull my finger out a bit and get things sorted!

  Have a great Christmas

  Cath xxx

  An email from Jackie quickly followed.

  Mikey baby! Say it ain’t so! I was so in love with your To-Do-List idea. I even drew up a list of my own but then I lost it for ages and by the time I picked it up again the moment was gone! You should definitely carry on. If not for your sake then for mine. Otherwise how will I ever get around to finding the time to do any of the things on my list without you as an inspiration?