To borrow a title from Burt Bacharach [and Hal David] - I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself...
The options:
1) spend some time with Ava and Jo.
2) go to the pub and have a lovely, long, all-dayer.
3) get out into the back garden and make myself rosy-cheeked and muddy fingered.
4) hop on a train to anywhere I haven't been before.
5) start the business of finishing my book.
6) pick a bunch of albums off my shelf. Make a fire downstairs. Grab a book I haven't read off the shelf. And kick my slippers off.
7) embroil myself further with and deeper into this myspace narcotic.
well - 1) is my inclination, but Ava is at school, and Jo claims she has gone to the gym all day with Lizzy. I am cynical. I reckon they're shopping.
2) I'm not 25 or a raging alcoholic, yet. 5 years' ago, there would have been no argument. Is this a sign of maturity?
3) As if. I wouldn't know where to start.
4) The only place I want to go, since watching last night's bandit, is iceland. Someone there mentioned the Northern Lights. My passport has expired. Fuck a duck.
5) This is supposed to be a holiday.
6) Global warming? But looks tempting.
7) I'm not spending every minute here, right. Just because that annoying little icon says I'm online, doesn't mean I actually am. I do have a life, you know, Soundhog ;0)
Option 6, then.
With occasional Option 7's thrown in for good measure.
After the BT engineer had drilled through our power line yesterday, I didn't think it was wise to bring Ava straight back from school while the emergency electrician gouged a hole in our wall and made things good.
There aren't that many places that are open on a dank and dark November afternoon, so I took her to Toys R Us.
How do kids even begin to choose what they want for Christmas?
There's so much choice.
Zillions of loud and garish things fashioned from moulded plastic that are guaranteed to shatter jthe milisecond your consumer rights expire.
No wonder we need all of that crass advertising in between kid's TV shows. Actually, I remember loving all of the toy adverts when I was a kid. Another example of my inveterate hypocrisy? You bet.
Ava picked up one of the smallest toys in there.
A puppy in a box.
It was only £1.19 and I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was a shit toy.
We went to Pizza Hut to get her some tea. It's just across the road from Toys R Us. The door handle was greasy when we walked in. The staff were surly. When I asked them for a key for the disabled toilet so that I could take Ava for a wee, they looked at me like I was a paedophile. I imagine.
I sat at the table for ten minutes waiting to order.
No one came.
Paedophiles, clearly, aren't deserving of synthetic pizza-lite. The menu was greasy too. Smudges and stains everywhere. Urgh.
I got up and walked out, dragging Ava with me.
I'm sure that made me look less suspicious.
No amount of cheese goo imaginitively squeezed into the edge of the pizza crust will ever tempt me to go back.
Maybe if they start doing a doughnut pizza.
©Adam Walton
2010
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