TOM JACKSONWhen it’s been dark so long it feels like 10pm
and it’s only just gone half seven, you have to
find ways to stay sane and pass the time. Ways
that, for me at least, must not include drinking
at all, eating too much or overdoing the telly.
Nicola has rediscovered a long-dormant
childhood affection for jigsaws, the harder the
better. Last weekend she nailed a 1,000-piece
view of Walmer Castle in Kent, 20 per cent the
Queen Mother’s pond and 30 per cent clear
blue sky, so that kept her quiet for a while.
The last time I tried a jigsaw I threw it
against a wall. Bit pointless seeing as they’re
already broken, jigsaws, but believe me, the
damned thing deserved it.
I like an online quiz, of course, and I’ve
been intermittently revisiting my obsession
with Sporcle, the trivia website. Strangely,
though, seeing as just a few short years ago
I could happily immerse myself in Sporcle
until the wee hours, in the way some people- all right, some men – can with Call of Duty,
Hornby train sets or Pornhub, I seem to
have lost the bug.
Besides, I know all the answers off pat
to any topics that interest me. Hull City
footballers? Short-named American cities?
British prime ministers? I rattle up 100 per
cent as fast as I can type.
So what I might do then is mooch outside
and fish a few stray wisteria stalks out of the
gutter. But now, by mid-November, there aren’t
many left, and anyway, I’m so all over my
gutter-flushing duties that on any night of the
year, even in the autumn, you could eat yer tea
out of those rain drains, no worries at all.
Descending from the stepladder, I’ll fetch
the axe from the shed and split a log or two,
taking care not to leave a couple of fingers out
there in the gloom. Chopping firewood in the
dark is a heck of a lot safer now I’m no longer
a drinkin’ man. I had some close calls in those
days. So did the cats’ tails.
The firewood doesn’t take long. As with the
gutters, I’m well on top of the chore. All the
kindling, logs (small, medium and large) and
smokeless fuel we can reasonably store is
already stacked away all neat and tidy. We
don’t (sadly) live in Wyoming, the nearest
store 40 miles away. Tony’s hardware shop
is 200 yards and stocks loads of everything.
Pioneering fantasies are hard to sustain.
Most evenings we’ll go for a walk, thus
indulging my twin obsessions of putting one
foot in front of the other and counting my
steps in one go. Walking and steps have become
the same thing, really. To the extent that if my
phone’s dead, and thus I can’t count the steps,
I won’t bother with the walk. Or if I forgetfully
walk from my room to the loo without
bringing my phone, I’ll howl in frustration
at the 60 tragically unrecorded paces.
Counting steps merges into another major
obsession, one especially urgent as the year
nears its ends: stats. I’m constantly reassessing
progress, as in: “If I do 11,000 today, that’s
5.5 miles, which bumps my weekly average up
to 5.2, and November’s running average up to
5.1, which means I should get to 4.3 a day for
the year. Or 5 a day for the year if I walk
17 miles every day in December.” Etc.
Such calculations are running constantly
through my head. Very good for the mental
maths, not so good when you walk into a
lamppost on account of staring at your phone.
Back at home, I’ll do fast circuits of our
garden, 20 steps in each lap (it’s a small
garden), to boost the daily total to a round
number. During this manic pacing, I’ll possibly
spot an errant leaf, most likely a skinny
eucalyptus or bamboo bad boy, wedged
between two pebbles. Out it must come.
It’s brutal, inch-by-inch work pursuing my
project of a fully clear garden, fallen leaf-wise.
I imagine the street fighting in Stalingrad
in ’42 wasn’t dissimilar.
Nicola waves at me through the window as
she toils away on her latest puzzle, a superhard
patchwork of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms.
Fixated as she is, possessed of prodigious
powers of concentration, she only waves
when I knock on the glass, and then only
after two or three attempts. Then it’s back
to different versions of scrabbling around
for the both of us.
Sometimes I wonder, crouched in the
drizzle, tweezing out a recalcitrant sliver of
foliage or chasing a single swirling intruder
with a dustpan before it’s even made landfall,
shouting, “Don’t you dare, you bastard!”,
whether this obsession (as with the steps and
losing weight and racing to see off by the end
of winter every box set ever issued) is, rather
than keeping me sane, actually driving me
a little bit bonkers.
Probably the latter. Hey-ho. n[email protected]‘Some men immerse
themselves in
Hornby train sets
or Pornhub in the
evening. Me?
I chop wood’
Beta male
Robert Crampton
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