The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  Settling ourselves on sun loungers underneath an umbrella, we grabbed a child each, slathered them both in sun-block and began earnestly getting into the holiday spirit. As Lydia played in the water by our feet, Maisie napped in my arms and, liberated, Claire delved into her bag and pulled out a copy of Heat magazine. Reasoning that there was nothing to stop me joining her in a little light holiday reading I pulled out Leo Tolstoy’s one thousand three hundred and fifteen page epic War and Peace.

  War and Peace (Item 1021) had been on my mental To-Do List for some years now. Having first been introduced to the novel by my secondary school English teacher, Mrs Parker, who hailed it as a ‘must read classic’, at the age of thirteen I had searched it out from my local library and had been stunned to discover that it was roughly the same size and density as a house brick. Having read the back of it, I concluded it was marginally less interesting than one too. Phrases like ‘gossip-filled rooms of a St Petersburg party’, ‘fortunes of the aristocratic Bolkonsky and Rostov families’ and ‘epic sweep of national events and the private experience of individuals during the Napoleonic Wars’, were more than enough to make it clear that this wasn’t going to be my kind of thing, especially given that the other reading material in my hands at the time were books one and two in the Grange Hill novelisation series.

  Since those heady days I was reminded of it every once in a while by watching Woody Allen’s magnificent pastiche, Love and Death, or at university hearing it name-dropped by people who wanted to show they were serious students of the classics. On such occasions I’d think to myself, one day I really must get around to reading that and while novels that I had previously put into that category, like Slaughter House Five and On The Road, got read, when it came to War and Peace I always seemed to find something more pressing to do. This time was going to be different. This time I was going to give Tolstoy my very best shot.

  Excerpt from Mike’s To Do List Diary (Part 7); Tolstoy Do List Diary

  Monday 16 July

  Today is the first full day of our holiday. Yesterday, in the late afternoon Maltese sunshine I opened my copy of War and Peace. Handily, the Oxford World Classics edition begins with a breakdown of the contents of each chapter. It is over fifteen pages long and is in really small writing. I get as far as reading about Book Three, Part Two before admitting I have no idea who anyone is or what any of them are doing and have to go back to the beginning. I reach the same point some time later and remain just as clueless. I decide to give up and concentrate on the book itself.

  Tuesday 17 July

  The novel kicks off with someone called Anna Pavlona Scherer throwing a party although, having read the opening few pages several times now I’m still not sure why. I don’t think it’s her birthday but I could be wrong.

  Later, in need of a break, I take Maisie for a stroll around the roof whilst conducting a quick survey of poolside reading material. The results are as follows:

  Books by Dan Brown: 11

  Books by J.K.Rowling: 20

  Books by Leo Tolstoy: 1

  Books by maverick economists: 2

  While obviously disappointed by the lack of Gayle on the roof top I can’t help but feel pleased that I am the one person ‘doing’ Tolstoy and award myself several house points.

  Wednesday 18 July

  I have now reached page 146, which pleases me no end. The downside is that I still can’t work out what’s going on. People are walking in and out of rooms. There’s someone called Anna Mikhaylovna who seems to have a problem with someone called Catiche. I’m pretty sure there’s a Prince Andrew and someone called Mary but I wouldn’t stake my life on it. Claire thinks that I should read around the events of the book to put it into some kind of context. I can’t help but wonder if Tolstoy was a great writer who, like artists who aren’t very good at drawing noses, was just rubbish at writing endings because even though I’m only on page 146 I know this book needs to be a lot shorter.

  Thursday 19 July

  It’s just after midday and my family and I have switched locations to the beach near the hotel. Claire is on child-watch duty and I am supposed to be continuing with War and Peace. Instead I am assembling a mental list of all the famous classics that I have read and understood without recourse to other books to explain them, because War and Peace is making me feel like a bit of a thicko. ‘I’ve read Finnegan’s Wake,’ I tell Claire, ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the Bible but compared to this, even the third book of The Lord of the Rings is starting to look like a walk in the park.’

  Friday 20 July

  We’re back at the pool for a change of pace and although I feel guilty about it I have left War and Peace back in our hotel room and have brought instead my old friend, Time Coach Mark Forster’s book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play along with me, as it too is on my To-Do List (Item 1000). I read the back cover and the introduction and then Lydia asks me to go for a swim. When I return I end up reading Claire’s Heat magazine from cover to cover and falling asleep.

  Saturday 21 July

  My family and I are dining at the hotel’s swanky outdoor restaurant. Maisie is asleep in her pram, Lydia is throwing bread into the sea and Claire and I are in deep discussion about War and Peace.

  ‘I think deep down you don’t want to read it.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because you haven’t read it.’

  ‘But I do want to read it.’

  ‘Why?’

  I think for a moment. ‘Because it’s the kind of book that you’re supposed to have read.’

  ‘Says who?’

  I shrug. ‘People.’

  I don’t know how but I can tell that even from behind her sunglasses Claire is rolling her eyes.

  ‘I think that it’s probably an okay book if you’re into Russian literature but most people read War and Peace because it’s a big fat book that gets name dropped a lot as a shorthand signifier of supposed intellectual greatness. In my position as a former English student at one of the UK’s premier redbrick educational institutions, I can tell you first hand that it’s not all that.’

  I can hardly believe my ears. ‘So you’ve read it then?’

  ‘Years ago at university.’

  ‘So what happens in the end?’

  Claire shrugs as Lydia crawls in to her lap. ‘I have no idea.’

  Sunday 22 July

  It’s the last day of the holiday. Not only am I back at the beach but I’m back reading War and Peace. Despite agreeing with most of Claire’s speech yesterday I think that I probably should carry on reading not because it will make me any wiser (the words fall out of my head the second after they enter), and not because I need the tick (though I do) but for the same reason that George Leigh Mallory wanted to climb Mount Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’

  Refreshed from the holiday, I felt ready to throw myself into To-Do Listing again and I attacked the List with everything I’d got. I started getting up half an hour earlier every day and the ticks started coming, if not thick and fast, then at least reasonably regularly and far from slow. The eclectic nature of some of the things I was tackling were startling and heartening at the same time. One day I would be knee deep in ancient bank statements attempting to address Item 356: ‘Shred all old bank, credit card statements and letters from financial institutions so that you don’t end up having your identity stolen’, and the next I would be staring at my younger daughter in wonderment at her new-found smiling skills in a bid to fulfil Item 426: ‘Spend a whole day with your new kid trying to make her laugh.’ Later I’d lurch from a day on Item 843: ‘Find out what the big fuss is about Bob Dylan’, to an afternoon in Cannon Hill Park attempting to undertake Item 1005: ‘Learn to catch a fish so that I will have all the skills I need to live off the land (or water)’. It was like that maxim of Karl Marx that a man should be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner without permanently becoming hunter, f
isherman, cowherd or critic. This was me. I was getting a million and one different things done every day. It felt great.

  But at the same time the List was taking its toll not necessarily on me but on Claire. Any time that I wasn’t working was shared between To-Do Listing or playing with the kids or getting extra sleep. I was in danger of neglecting my wife and undoing all my good work earlier in the year. I needed to do something special for her. Something to demonstrate that I really did think she was the best woman in the world. Three days later I hit the jackpot.

  Ever since she turned thirteen Claire has been a fan of the artist Prince. When we first got together she would regale me with tales of how she would buy Prince’s new albums on the day they came out and spend hours locked in her bedroom studiously attempting to learn the lyrics whilst dreaming of the day she would get to see him in the flesh. Unfortunately she was thwarted in the one opportunity that did present itself by her mother who thought that Prince’s stage show contained sufficient ‘adult’ material to render it inappropriate for a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Leicester. Unable or unwilling to run away and see him against her mother’s wishes, Claire had missed out on her chance to see Prince. Until now.

  Surfing the web I came across an announcement that Prince was going to be playing what I thought was a one-off concert at the 02 Arena in London. ‘Great,’ I thought. ‘I’ll keep Claire in the dark, get tickets, book a hotel, book my mum in to babysit and one evening I’ll spring the whole lot on her and in one fell swoop grab the coveted “Best husband in the world award”.’ It was a no brainer.

  The tickets were being released for sale at 10.00 a.m. on the following Tuesday. At 9.55 a.m. I sat glued to my computer refreshing the Ticketmaster website every five seconds with my credit-card details at the ready so that I could be first in the queue. At 10.00 a.m. on the dot nothing happened. At 10.05 a.m. still nothing. And when still nothing was happening at 10.10 a.m. I started to panic, imagining that thousands of Prince fans were getting in ahead of me.

  I went to The Prince website and was puzzled to discover a notice advertising advance tickets for a secret Prince gig at Koko in Camden starting at 11.00 p.m. and going on to the early hours. I assumed that the tickets were for an after-show party following on from his 02 Arena concert and so I clicked on the link which took me to the Ticketmaster website. Grateful that it now appeared to be working I bought the after-show tickets and tickets for the best seats I could find for the actual gig.

  Thoroughly pleased with myself at having pulled off a Prince double whammy, I booked a hotel and my mother and headed down to the living room where Claire was playing with Maisie.

  ‘Just so that you know,’ I began casually, ‘it’s official: I am indeed the best husband in the world.’

  Claire laughed. ‘As if there was any doubt.’

  ‘No, I mean it. I’m the best. Who’s the one recording artist in the world that you’d most like to see play live?’

  She didn’t miss a beat. ‘Prince!’

  ‘And guess who’s going to see him in August?’

  Claire’s jaw dropped. ‘Are you saying that you’ve got tickets to see Prince? I didn’t even know he was playing! That’s brilliant. I love you so much right now!’

  ‘And there’s more.’

  ‘More than Prince tickets? We’re not going to meet him are we?’

  ‘No, but what would be the next best thing?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Well, how does an exclusive secret Prince aftershow party sound? Because we’ve got tickets to that too.’

  It was minutes before I could stop her jumping up and down and running around screaming, ‘I’m going to a Prince aftershow party!’ And then she only stopped to ask me what she should wear and how long Prince might play for and whether we might meet him? It was as though the fifteen-year-old Claire had had her all-time top dream come true. It was great. I really was the best husband in the world.

  When Claire had calmed down I returned to the loft to check my emails and discovered I’d got two messages. The first was from Ticketmaster telling me that they would email me my ticket for tonight’s secret concert later that afternoon. I was confused. The concerts weren’t until August so why were they going on about tonight? I opened the second email. It was from my friend Matt, a huge Prince fan whom I’d emailed earlier to let him know about the tickets.

  Hi Mike, great news that you’ve got the tickets. I’ve been lurking on some Prince fan sites and word is that he’s going to do something really special. See you tonight!

  I double-checked Matt’s email, no, I hadn’t misread his message. It definitely did say: ‘See you tonight.’ I had an awful sinking feeling in my stomach. The sinking feeling was right. The secret Prince party was for that night in London.

  The list of reasons why we couldn’t go was long and tedious. Lydia had a pre-school play that we’d promised to go to, Maisie was teething and wasn’t sleeping very well, I had a newspaper article that needed to be in first thing, Claire was supposed to be seeing a friend who she had already cancelled on three times, Claire didn’t want to go without me, I didn’t want to go without Claire and on and on. How something so great turned into something so awful so quickly I’ll never understand.

  In the end I gave the tickets to my brother Phil and over breakfast the following morning Claire and I read about it in the Bizarre column in The Sun. Touts were asking hundreds of pounds for tickets. The venue was really small. Prince played loads of his hit songs. There were tonnes of celebrities in the audience. Prince didn’t leave the stage until three in the morning.

  In contrast Claire and I had watched a repeat of CSI: Miami and gone to bed only to be woken up by Maisie (at 11.05 p.m., 1.05 a.m. and 3.23 a.m.) and Lydia (complaining of foxes in the garden at 4.12 a.m. and 4.32 a.m.).

  Of course we loved our kids and would never have been without them for a single second. But this was a pretty brutal demonstration of the difference between a life with kids and one without. The following night, as we consoled ourselves with a Chinese takeaway Claire said ruefully, ‘Perhaps we are proper grown-ups after all.’

  Excerpt from Mike’s To-Do-List Diary (Part 8)

  Monday 6 August

  1.22 p.m. I have had enough of driving around with all my childhood belongings in the back of the car. I have to do something.

  1.32 p.m. I have dumped all my old school exercise books in the paper-recycling box.

  2.34 p.m. I have taken my junior microscope to the Cancer Research shop on the High Street. Maybe it will inspire some kid who might have gone into a life of crime to become a doctor or a scientist instead.

  Tuesday 7 August

  9.01 a.m. I have taken all my old school exercise books out of the recycling because I can’t bear to part with them. My next stop is the Cancer Research Shop on the High Street to get my microscope back. Claire tells me that I am a hoarder. ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I yell as I close the door.

  9.45 p.m. The microscope is mine although it cost me £4.99 which is roughly £4.98 more than it is worth.

  10.00 a.m. I feel bad about this but have no choice than to move everything that was living in the boot of my car into the boot of Claire’s car on the grounds that she hardly ever uses her car and so won’t miss the space.

  Wednesday 8 August

  5.50 a.m. I have got up early in order to tackle Item 120: ‘Print out all the digital photographs that you’ve never got round to printing off.’

  6.00 a.m. I have just opened my computer’s digital photo software to assess the size of the problem. I have a staggering 3,483 pictures of which roughly 94% are of Lydia and Maisie, 3% are pictures of other people’s kids, 2% are of sunsets on holiday and 1% of me and Claire. This is going to be tougher than I thought.

  10.32 a.m. I am in PC World looking for a colour printer. I flirt with the idea of asking one of their staff for advice but quickly give it up when I’m unable to find anyone who actually works there. I end up asking a mid
dle-aged customer lingering in computer cabling because he looks like he knows what he’s doing. He suggests a flash-looking printer that doubles up as a fax machine and a scanner as he’s got one at home. I thank him, grab one from the display and head for the check out.

  11.12 a.m. I have downloaded the latest printer drivers, I have double checked the cartridges and plug and unplugged the USB cable more times than I care to remember and I cannot get the printer to work for love nor money.

  11.15 a.m. I call the printer manufacturer’s helpline and anticipate AOL-style service. The first question is have I set it up correctly and I tell them that I have. The second is if I’m sure that it’s actually switched on and of course I want to curse them for asking such blindingly obvious questions but then I look over at the printer and notice that the little ‘on’ light is actually off.

  11.16 a.m. The printer is working.

  12.18 p.m. It has taken me the best part of an hour to print out a single decent photo. The first one came out looking like an X-ray, the second made my daughter look like a junior version of the Incredible Hulk and the third and fourth ones were ruined because I’d put the paper in the wrong way.

  1.34 p.m. Of the 3,483 photos on my computer I have so far managed to print out six, two of which are of sunsets. This is trying my patience to the extent that I am verbally abusing both the computer and the printer with the threat of violence.

  2.02 p.m. I am wishing that someone would invent a machine that would just do the things that you want it to do without you having to get involved with any of it.