Then I realise that putting the same sign on both tubs is unnecessary: one will suffice. So I don’t bother with affixing the other sign, but do decide to add the words ‘IN BOTH TUBS’ in the only space available on the first sign: at the bottom. I also add brackets, to indicate an afterthought, but really indicating that I’m someone uncertain in my life and prone to making a mess of things.
So it now reads:
‘PLASTIC BOTTLES ONLY
– SEE LEAFLET IN HALL.
(IN BOTH TUBS)’
Clearly, I’ve made it even worse. Not only does it look messy, it now sounds that it’s the leaflet that’s managing to be in both tubs, as well as in the hall. A kind of God-like, omnipresent leaflet that will be with us at all times.
The only clear message that the sign does carry is one to myself: everything needs a draft version first. And that slower people prone to making mistakes should allow for this when dividing up their time.
At this point, it’s getting on for nine, and I have to get on with other things. So I leave the awful sign, a testament to why I am best sticking with my own little world rather than dabbling with the real one, and decide to remove it later.
The thing I first have to get on with is filling out a payroll form for my DJ spot at the Latitude Festival. It’s pretty simple stuff: address, bank details. Except, of course, I make mistakes, and the thing is posted off in a fit of frustration, speckled with crossed-out words and tiny correct numbers floating limply above the blacked-out wrong ones they should have been.
I check my email, and Tom tells me that I’ve put the wrong date on a Fosca rehearsal – again. Have I changed the session, he reasonably enquires? I can see what I’ve done: copied from an old erratic email but failed to copy the correction. Do I mean the Saturday or the Sunday, he asks. I go a bit hysterical by this point, writing back, “It’s SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY!” And then I fire off another mail, saying “SORRY SORRY SORRY”.
I’m a wreck of nerves and bad temper, and it’s not even half past nine. How do all those other people cope, I wonder, looking at the commuters walking off to the Tube outside. Why is it just me? If I had a sniff of a normal working life, would I be better, or worse?
I stagger out of the house, my thoughts in spiralling hysteria. Feeling doomed to making a mess of things and take too long about it into the bargain. Worrying that I’m ‘losing it’, or that I’m just the most useless person in the world. That life is essentially a race I have no hope in ever properly taking part in, let alone winning or losing. That I am going mad. AND that I’m slow.
Then I calm down, pledge to spend less time on the computer and more time writing on paper. And I decide to go shopping for a nice fountain pen.
Just as well no one’s life is in my hands. It could be worse. I could be a surgeon.
