It’s January. I can tell that much from the sweet wrappers, pine needles and damp, balled up tissues that litter my house. And from the over flowing laundry baskets, the dust mice and the slabs of fruit cake that, in another existence and another armoury, might have ended the war in Afghanistan
Yes, Christmas is over and I can no longer pretend that wasting time is a legitimate practice. Which is a real shame, because over the festive season just past, I’ve got really rather good at it.
Like anything, becoming good at Time Wasting takes practice and boy, have I been practising. What with the snow and ice and a most unwelcome bout of seasonal flu, conditions have been conducive to doing very little, but doing it guilt free (it’s been tricky shaking off the Protestant-work-ethic-plus-Catholic-guilt combo with which I was brought up, but I think I’ve shimmied it out of my system now).
First, the snow came. I look back to the morning at the gym where I authoritatively told the members of my Body Pump class that we were anticipating a little ‘nuisance snowfall’ and I have to laugh. That was my moment, my Michael Fish moment. Just two days later the snow in my village was two feet deep. If Rock Hudson were passing by, you’d swear my house was Ice Station Zebra (stay where you are, Rock, it’s cold down here).
I don’t want to sound miserable. Snow is great! Really it is. In Val d’Isere or Whistler or the South Pole, where it belongs. Not here in Central Southern where the local authorities’ only severe weather strategy appears to be to hope it doesn’t happen. Not when heating fuel is being charged at 100% mark-up by racketeering oil companies. And not when we’d got tickets to see Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre.
And yet, thanks to the Jet Stream dodging about the stratosphere like a drunk driver, snow fell in huge quantities right on my bloody house, turning even the simplest of excursions into journeys of Homeric proportions. Eventually, worn down by the prospect of yet again crawling five miles to the main road at five miles per hour, I gave up and slumped into a chair with my i pod Touch. And that’s when the whole Time Wasting thing really kicked in.
I won my i pod Touch in a competition in the summer. To be frank, I had thought of it as an upgrade to my Nano, which I used only for playing tunes. I’m of the eighties; as far as I was concerned, the i pod was a size zero Walkman. Ok, it seemed quite good that I could get my e mails on it, and the free menstrual app had a certain novelty value, though, as my husband acerbically remarked, with PMS like mine, his predictions would be more accurate than any technology could be. But as for any real place in my life, the Touch had none.
Fast forward to the festive season. The boxed set of ‘Porridge’ has been watched, the entire ‘Die Hard’ series has been viewed, deconstructed and reconstructed by my sons in the sitting room and Father Christmas, struggling through the snow, has added two more i pod Touches to the family collection.
These new arrivals, with their cameras, microphones and Facetime inspire a surge in interest. Boxing Day is spent comparing them and something called ‘Home Sharing’ happens. i Tunes ‘Home Sharing’ is a scheme whereby one householder’s apps can be shared for free with three others. I let my children take my Touch away, semi-naked and it came back later that day fully clothed in dictionaries, tube maps, radio apps and other stuff that will apparently enhance my life and human effectiveness.
I was flummoxed by something calling itself ‘Angry Birds’.
“What’s this?” I asked. “If it’s Jenny Éclair’s podcast or anything featuring Carol McGiffin you might as well remove it now,” I said.
It’s not though. It’s a game where some red birds are angry enough with some green pigs to want to destroy their homes. Talk about Darwinism gone mad. But I’ve discovered that catapulting birds at buildings can be terribly therapeutic and it’s taught me a great deal about the sort of angle you’d need to achieve if you wanted to demolish a tallish building. I bet the Taleban use this app all the time…
One of the most addictive apps I’ve acquired though, is ‘Words with Friends’, a virtual Scrabble game. I’ve always loved Scrabble and have considered it one of the few areas of competitive sport at which I am able to succeed. I’ve thrashed almost everybody I know who owns a board and have revelled in the smug satisfaction of nailing the triple word score with all my letters – the hole-in-one, clear-the-table feat of the game. So ‘Words with Friends’ (the free version, with the irritating adverts) was right up my street. In the first flurry of activity, I started games with every friend I know with an i phone or i pod Touch, spending precious minutes that I might otherwise be using productively, conjuring words, checking for moves and swearing. Even my dyslexic chums were beating me. Why? Well, I did wonder. Turns out there’s a ‘Words with Friends’ ‘Cheat’ app too which finds the highest scoring word from your letter selection. I’ve joined the rule benders myself now, downloaded that and am cheating with the best of them; at least the playing field’s even.
If I haven’t convinced you yet that the i pod Touch or i phone (if you can afford it), is man’s best friend, let me tell you about the radio app. TuneIn Radio allows you to listen in real time to the radio, or, more impressively, record it and listen back later! I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. All my anxiety about being left in the dark once Nigel fell off the roof in ‘The Archers’ was allayed. It didn’t matter that I was going to be out that evening. I recorded it and listened to Shula break the tragic news of Nigel’s fatal night on the rooftiles while I brushed my teeth before bed!
There, that’s sold it hasn’t it? Your house could soon look like mine. The European Laundry Mountain
