The dinner ladies must have had a system, but we never had a clue what it was. Every kid was supposed to get an equal amount, but I always felt the kids in front of me got bigger portions.

Maybe she was running out and couldn’t be bothered to switch trays, because you know, she had to walk five yards to where the new ones were.

One thing was for sure, you couldn’t point it out to her, or she would have taken great delight in scraping some of it off your plate and back into the tray.

You looked her pointedly in the eye, briefly, and all you saw was a deadeye expression.

Semolina turned up more lunchtimes than any puddings had a right to.

Grey, with a dollop of red jam in the middle that never mixed in properly, just sat there like it had been dropped in from a height.

We used to say it looked and tasted like sick, though none of us had ever actually tasted sick, it was just the best description we could come up with.

Then there was the smell.

You could tell what was for dinner from the corridor outside, sometimes from the playground, if the wind was in the right direction.

A wall of boiled cabbage and gravy that hit you the second you walked in the doors.

It didn’t matter what was actually on the menu. Everything smelled like boiled cabbage.

Mid morning there was always a milk break.

Milk came in little third of a pint glass bottles. You collected a straw from an open box on the teacher’s desk.

It was always full fat milk and on warm summer days sometimes the cream at the top of the bottle had practically curdled in the heat.

None of us complained out loud, you just held your breath and sucked it down.

There was always one dinner that almost everyone hated the most.

Liver, usually, or the fish that came with a sauce nobody could identify, not even the dinner ladies.

You’d sit there, one hand propping up your head, pushing it round the plate to make it look like you’d made a dent in it.

There was always a teacher standing guard at the bins in case you tried to get rid of anything on your plate.

If he got distracted by any commotion in the dinner hall, that was your chance. The plan was to rush over and scrape your plate off before he got back.

You weren’t leaving that room until your plate was clean.

You daren’t cross the dinner ladies or you got less on the days when the food was genuinely good, and they knew which days they were.

Some kids left the dinner hall with half their lunch wrapped in a serviette, and even then you had to flush it down the toilet.

Plus when you got home from school, you couldn’t tell your mum you were hungry because you’d binned your dinner, or you might have gone to bed with no tea.

Funny thing is, you’d complain about all of it at the time, and then thirty years later, get all misty eyed about how good the puddings were, even the damn semolina.

My grandma donkey-stoned that front step and the front window sills every single week.

Down on her knees for the front step, with a bit of stone from the rag and bone man, getting a dead straight white line right along the top edge and sides.

Rain or shine, it didn’t matter.

If you’d asked her why, she would have thought that was a silly question.

It was a Thursday, and the step had to be done.

The outside windows were the same, glass gleaming, and behind them, white nets hanging straight as die.

You’d think she’d got a spirit level on them. Which, thinking about it, she probably had checked with something.

Those nets weren’t really about keeping the sun off the furniture. They were about being able to see out without anyone being able to see in, which as far as my grandma was concerned was the only sensible way to run a street.

She wasn’t one to stand on ceremony about opinions. She didn’t have much time for them, at least anyone else’s.

But she had very strong feelings about what the neighbours might think, which isn’t the same thing at all, and don’t try telling her it was.

The coalman was a particular menace.

Most weeks he’d tip the coal straight into the cellar like a normal person, but every so often he’d leave a load sat out on the pavement instead, and my grandma would be out there within about four minutes, not shovelling it in herself, just standing over it like she’d caught it committing a crime.

She wasn’t bothered about the coal getting rained on. Her concern was always what it looked like, a great black heap outside her house for the whole street to see and natter about.

So if I was there I had to get the shovel out, otherwise it was waiting for my uncle to call round.

Same with the dustbins. Lids on, always, and not because there was anything in there she didn’t want found. There just wasn’t. “Whatever people around here might think if a lid was left off for half an hour.” I heard her mutter to herself several times.

My grandad used to say you could tell which houses had something to hide by how tightly the lid was on, and my grandma didn’t find that funny, ever.

Sunday mornings she was always ready for church, obviously, but the outfits she saved for best was for the working men’s club.

My grandad was treasurer there, so he was down there most nights doing whatever treasurers do with a biscuit tin full of subs money, and most of those nights my grandma went with him.

She always sat in the snug with her friends having a port and lemon and a proper natter, usually about one of the ladies that hadn’t turned up that night.

She’d known every one of those women for at least forty years.

The one battle she always won, or rather the one she never let herself lose, was over the toilet paper.

The outside toilet, like most people had back then, was stocked with Izal. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it was less like paper and more like tracing paper with attitude.

My grandad would complain endlessly, every time he came back from a visit, in a way that would’ve been funny if he hadn’t meant every word of it.

But she never budged, never once bought anything softer. I don’t think it was really about the toilet paper by that point. I think it had become a point of principle. .

She’s been gone a long while now, and the terrace is long gone too, knocked down for rows of modern looking flats.

Nobody donkey-stones their front steps, in fact there are no front steps.

I think about that sometimes, not the house, just the doorstep, and how clean it always was.

Three of us had to finish bath time before our dads got home.

My grandma had it down pat like an old fashioned time and motion study.

I was four. My cousin, one year behind me, and my brother, bringing up the rear as usual, was one at the time.

We all lived under the same roof. My grandparents, my mum and dad, me and my brother and my aunt and uncle with their daughter. Two mothers on duty every evening and my grandmother in charge of everything.

Once a week was the usual arrangement, always on Friday night.

Me first, my cousin second, my brother last. I didn’t think to question the order, after all I was in the clean water and didn’t want to upset that apple cart.

My grandma was a wonderful woman and I loved her dearly, but she was so domineering. Everything in the house had to run like clockwork or she just wasn’t having it.

My aunt and my mum did as they were told. They were used to it though, they’d grown up with it because they were her daughters.

The dads and my grandad were out at work all day.

The entire operation existed because of one household truth. Bath time had to be over, the kitchen had to be spic and span, and the tea had to be ready before the men walked through that door.

I went in first because I was the eldest and the water was clean, and every stage of that bath after me was a slow decline in quality that nobody took any notice of.

My cousin went in second. A splash more hot water from the kettle, and off she went in whatever was left of the first lot.

My brother went in last, aged one, into water that had already done two full tours of duty, and I don’t believe he had the faculties at that stage to object to it, which was lucky, because nobody was asking.

Three children, one tin bath, one fire, and grandma moving between us with the brisk efficiency of somebody who had a deadline she intended to hit.

The men would be home at various times. My grandad always came home first. He closed his printing business everyday at bang on 5.30pm and was home at 5.35pm. His business was 50 yards up the road.

My uncle was usually next through the door and my dad was always the last one home. Both daughters would serve their father, never my grandma, she did the cooking.

Of course the relevant wife would put the food out for their husband when they sat down at the table.

There was another kind of bath night as well, and that one had a different feeling to it entirely. If we were going visiting the next day, seeing relatives, being taken somewhere where grown-ups would notice us, there’d be an extra bath the evening before.

Of course the bath routine never changed. Same tin, same fire, same order, but a bit more scrubbing than usual. Clothes were laid out the night before.

Before we left the house nobody warned us to behave. There was no need. My father had one line for that.

Children were seen and not heard.

It was the rule, laid out to me as soon as I was old enough to understand. It never needed repeating, we knew exactly where we stood, all three of us.

After the bath we were allowed to stay downstairs just long enough to say goodnight, and then it was straight up to bed while the grown-ups had the rest of the downstairs to themselves.

My grandparents went out most evenings. They had a car, which put them in a different class of person entirely to my parents, who didn’t, and who stayed in and played cards or talked or did whatever it was adults did once children had gone to bed.

I used to lie there and wonder what they talked about.

Although, I never once wondered what happened to the bathwater. As far as I was concerned, that bath was just how Friday evenings worked.

My grandma ran everything like a woman with a train to catch, and somehow, every single week, she never missed it.

We went out after breakfast and nobody saw us again until dinner time.

No one questioned us about where we were going, and I couldn’t have told them if they had, because we didn’t know ourselves.

We had the whole day, a street full of mates, and no plan at all. That was more than enough to take care of about nine hours of whatever mischief we could get into.

One overriding rule was as soon as the street lamps came on, we had to be back at the house.

No texts, no phones, no calls and no instructions before we went out.

Even if we were in some fields somewhere, which we often were, you could see the glow of the lights from there and off we scampered back home.

Woe betide you if your mum ever had to come out and start looking for you, well, you only let that happen once.

She had no idea where we were, I say we because I had to take my little brother everywhere.

He was three years younger than me and what a pain it was. Especially the stick I got from mates when they saw my brother.

We could have been ten miles away for all my mum knew. She wasn’t neglectful in any sense of the word, just the same as every other mum in those days.

Dads went out to work, and mums had the housework and shopping to do. We were out and that’s about as far as the thinking went.

Shooting each other was our favourite pastime, not literally of course, we just loved to play cowboys and Indians or reenact the latest war movie we had seen.

Either way it came down to running about pointing a stick or even a toy gun if we had them, at your mates and telling them they were dead.

Nobody was ever dead, we wouldn’t accept that we’d been got. You could get a kid square in the chest from three feet away and he’d carry on running around like nothing had happened at all, and then the whole fight had to stop while we argued about it.

“I got you.”

“You never.”

“I got you in the chest.”

“You missed.”

Half the day went on that sort of thing, two of you behind a wall having a proper row about an imaginary gun. I can’t remember a single one of those arguments ever being settled. We’d just get bored of it and found something else to do.

We had bikes, well some of us did, we’d double up if anyone didn’t have a bike. Of course my brother was always on the back of mine.

Naturally they were always a bit too big on the understanding that you’d grow into them. No one got a new bike every year because they’d outgrown the old one. Unless a younger brother was big enough to get your hand me downs.

That was one of the few good things about being the oldest.

Anyway, you spent a good couple of years riding a bike you couldn’t actually sit down on, until you could sit on the saddle and reach the pedals.

Nobody had a helmet because helmets weren’t a thing back then. I don’t think I ever saw a helmet, not even in the shops. Not that I looked, my mates would have taken the piss mercilessly if I had turned up with one, anyway.

Then there was the canal.

We weren’t allowed anywhere near the canal, which is exactly why we went down there most days.

The water was as black as anything back then. With all kinds of rubbish people didn’t want thrown in there. Old bikes, prams, tyres, you name it.

Every business up the way used it as somewhere to pour whatever they didn’t want, and it had oil slicks floating on the top of it.

We didn’t understand any of that. It never entered our heads. It was just water, and it was the most interesting thing within walking distance. I don’t ever remember being frightened or worried about playing around there.

We came back at dinner time, because by then we were starving hungry and thirsty. Some of us needed a pee. The others would have peed in the canal if no one was about, I wouldn’t let my brother pee in the canal in case he fell in. So that meant I had to hold it as well.

In and out of the house in about fifteen minutes. Just as quick as it took my mum to give us some beans on toast and for us to gulp it down and get back outside.

It seemed like every streetlamp on every street came on at the same time.That was the signal for all of us to take off and get home as fast as possible.

I hated those streetlamps because it meant the day was over. For me and my brother it also meant a quick dinner and bedtime.

Our mum could let us take off into thin air every morning without a second thought because she knew that streetlamp was coming on as soon as it started to get dark and it would bring us back.

I watched one come on outside my house last night.

I didn’t see any kids scampering home though.

You could tell how good the party had gotten by how far up the stairs the noise had climbed.

By nine it was at the bottom step.

By ten it was past the landing and coming under my bedroom door, and by then I’d given up pretending to be asleep and was just lying there in the dark, listening to the best night of the week happen right under me and without me.

That was the deal.

The grown-ups got the evening. I got sent up the moment things were clearly about to get good, marched off to bed while downstairs the front room filled with aunts and uncles, friends and neighbours.

The best glasses came out, having been washed and polished by me earlier in the day.

Always babycham for the ladies and the pints of bitter for the men. Later on, out came the whiskey.

It was the great injustice of my childhood. A whole world of adult life going on beneath me, and I was expected to sleep through it.

Then grandad would sit down at the piano.

I should explain about my grandad. He was, and I say this as a plain fact, a gifted man.

He could play six instruments, all of them properly, none of your one-finger business. He could have played you anything, even difficult things with a lot of notes in.

And what did the room want, at 10 o’clock at night, four or five drinks in, with my uncle probably already standing up conducting the singing.

‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

Again.

That was the great comedy of it, though it took me years to see it.

A genuinely talented man sat at the piano, deploying the full range of his abilities on ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ so that a front room of tipsy relatives could bawl along to the one bit everyone knew.

‘My Old Man’, with the whole lot of them joining in banging out the words they were sure of and just making a noise where they weren’t.

‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, which turned grown adults back into six-year-olds faster than anything I’ve seen before or since.

He could have played Mozart, but they wanted the barrel rolled out. So he rolled it out.

Every time.

I couldn’t see any of this. The floor of my bedroom was the ceiling of the party, and it all came up through the floorboards, and I had to put the picture together myself.

My mother laughing and giggling with my dad both just that little bit tipsy.

Other relatives being sillier than they’d ever admit to in the morning.

Grandad, quietly the best musician for streets around, cheerfully wasting it on a singalong and having the time of his life doing it.

I used to creep to the top of the stairs and sit there in the dark, out of sight, just to be a bit nearer to it.

‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)’ came near the end, when it got late and the room went quieter and everyone remembered they were sad about something.

That was my cue that it was winding down and I’d missed the whole thing again.

I’d take myself back to bed genuinely disappointed, because I missed a party.

Grandad’s gone now. So’s the piano, off to a house I don’t know where.

Nowadays, there’s no more parties, no aunts, no uncle up on his feet conducting, and no gifted man at the piano refusing to play anything harder than a song about a barrel.

I’d give a great deal to be kept awake by it now.

When I was a kid we had a room in our house that we weren’t allowed to be in.

It was called the front room. Not the living room. We lived in the other one, the back one, the one with the good telly and the settee that had been sat on so many times it was shaped like us.

The front room was for “best”.

I never fully understood what “best” was. It was never defined or explained. It just was. But I’d lived under its rule long enough to recognise it when I saw it, the way you recognise weather.

The front room had the “best” sofa. I don’t recall anyone ever sitting on the best sofa. It was a sofa the way a museum exhibit is a chair. You could look at it and admire the craftsmanship. You could not, under any circumstances, plonk your actual body on it.

The Guest

The room was for visitors.

Not us. We lived there, which apparently disqualified us.

It was kept in a permanent state of readiness for a superior class of guest who would arrive one day, notice how nice everything was, and think well of us. These guests were never described to me. I never knew their names. They never came.

When people did come, actual people, aunts and uncles and cousins, they sat in the back room with us, because that’s where life was happening. The front room watched them not use it through a door left slightly open.

The Good Towels

It wasn’t just the room.

There was a set of towels in the airing cupboard we weren’t allowed to dry ourselves with. They were the best towels. Thick, matching, folded with a precision I doubt I could reproduce if my life depended on it. They were for the same guest who never sat on the sofa.

We dried ourselves on the other towels. The thin ones. The ones that had given their best years to the family and now have roughly the absorbency of a crisp packet.

There were plates we’d used twice. Wine glasses in a cabinet we drank out of on precisely no occasions, because no occasion was ever quite best enough to risk them. A tablecloth that appeared at Christmas and spent the other three hundred and sixty-four days being too nice for any given Tuesday.

The logic, as far as I can follow it, ran like this.

The best things were saved for when they were needed. But needing them required an occasion. And no ordinary day qualified as an occasion. And every day, without exception, turned out to be ordinary.

So the best things waited. Ready. Unused. For best.

I said to my mum once that maybe we could just use the front room. Sit in it. On a normal evening. For no reason.

She looked at me the way you’d look at someone proposing you eat the Christmas decorations.

“It’s for best,” she said.

I asked her when best was.

She didn’t answer, because best isn’t a date. Best is a direction. It stays slightly ahead of you, keeping its distance, staying nice.

Our grandparents did exactly the same. A front room nobody used, plates nobody ate off, all of it kept immaculate for a version of company that was always about to arrive and somehow never quite did. We inherited the room and the rule and the guest who doesn’t exist.

One day someone will inherit ours.

They’ll open the front room and find a perfect sofa nobody sat on and good towels nobody dried with, all of it saved, all of it ready, all of it for best.

And I suspect the ordinary days, the ones in the back room with the shaped settee and the thin towels, will turn out to have been the “best” all along.

So today, I bought a planner.

Not just any planner… no, no.

A nice one. Leather-effect cover, a little elastic strap, the kind of cream pages that make your handwriting look like it has a pension and firm opinions about wine.

£24. For paper.

I’ll be honest, the price was the appeal. A cheap planner is a notebook, but a £24 planner is a commitment.

I bought it because I’m going to become organised. Not slowly and not gradually. Immediately.

The moment it arrived I would transform fully, into a man who knows where his appointments are and possibly owns a small herb garden.

It arrived by special delivery on Tuesday.

I held it.

I admired the weight of it.

I opened it to the first pages and looked at all those clean little boxes, waiting patiently for the structured and frankly enviable life I was about to pour into them.

Then I reverently placed it in a drawer I’d prepared earlier awaiting its arrival.

Because I understand something about myself, and I’d rather I didn’t. But here we are: I don’t need to use the planner.

I need to own the planner.

Owning is the achievement. It’s not a tool, it’s a statement of intent, and I’ve made it, and now I can have a sit down.

A week passed and of course the boxes stayed empty. But the planner…. The planner sat there radiating potential, like a gym membership you can see from the sofa.

I told my wife I was “getting on top of things.”

She looked at the planner. She looked at me. She said nothing, which is somehow worse than anything she could have said.

So I came up with a very reasonable plan.

If I start feeling guilty about not using the planner, I would buy something to give the planner moral support.

Could be a special pen, or those little coloured tabs. Or maybe….. Yes definitely, a second, smaller planner, for planning what goes into the big planner.

Of course, the big planner hasn’t seen the light of day, but I’m now, by any measurable standards, a man who plans.

The infrastructure is in place, the pens are available and they all fit nicely into the drawer.

My transformation is complete.

I noticed an advert for a habit-tracking app. Apparently it syncs.

Hmmm… seems like I’m due an upgrade.

There is a drawer in our kitchen. Probably in every kitchen.

Ours is the third one down, on the left, opposite the dishwasher.

I open it most days. I’ve never once been able to find what I was looking for. It’s a black hole. Things go in. Nothing comes out.

I should make it clear that no-one designated this drawer. There was no family meeting. No vote.

The drawer simply began collecting things at some point in the early 2000s and has been storing them ever since.

What’s In The Drawer

A roll of brown parcel tape.

Three batteries of unknown charge. They might be new. They might have been there since 2009.

A small pair of scissors that don’t cut anything.

Numerous screws.

Half a dozen keys. None of which seem to open anything in this house. I’ve periodically tried them.

Rubber bands.

Several takeaway menus from restaurants that closed during the pandemic.

A torch that doesn’t work, kept in case of an emergency in which we’ll then remember doesn’t work.

A stack of instruction manuals for household appliances, some of which were replaced many moons ago.

Several small notebooks and one in particular in which someone has written, in pencil, the single word Tuesday.

Plus an assortment of other rubbish I won’t bore you with.

The Logic Of The Drawer

The drawer operates on one principle, and one principle only.

If you don’t know where something goes, it goes here.

Of course, it’s not much of a system. It’s the essence of the absence of a system, given a location. A small geographical concession to the fact that life produces objects faster than anyone can categorise them.

The drawer accepts everything. It doesn’t judge. It also gives nothing back.

I’ve looked for the small scissors several times. I know they’re in the drawer. They’ve been in the drawer for years. I’ve looked but never manage to find them.

They’ll surface eventually, probably while I’m looking for something else, and by then I’ll have forgotten why I wanted them.

This is also part of the system that isn’t a system.

My wife walked in during one of my periodic excavations. She stood in the kitchen doorway, watching me push aside four Allen keys and a dead Duracell.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

I paused, looked at my hands, and realised I genuinely had no idea. “I don’t know.”

“Excellent,” she said, not missing a beat. “Let me know when you find it.”

She turned and walked out , leaving me alone with a handful of mystery screws that I was now apparently defending.

The Drawer Gets The Last Word

I’ve thought, occasionally, about emptying the drawer.

Sorting it. Throwing things out. Restoring some kind of order.

But I know what will happen. I’d empty the drawer. I’d feel briefly accomplished. Within three weeks the drawer would be full again, with mostly the same things, because the drawer isn’t a problem you can solve.

The drawer is a category of object. It exists wherever there are people and things and a slight unwillingness to make decisions about them.

There are numerous screws in our drawer.

I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know what they’re for. I’ve never considered throwing them away.

They could be important.

I’ll never know.

They stay.

Every morning, before I do anything else, I conduct an assessment.

Nothing to do with the day ahead.

A physical one.

A rough check of my moving parts and which are working and which have decided to throw in the towel. This is at least a five minute job.

It didn’t take any time at all, when I was younger, in fact, I didn’t bother with any checks.

These days the process starts before I move.

Moving is phase two. And yes, there are two phases to this.

Phase one is the pre-movement check, conducted while still I’m horizontal, before the body has been asked to do anything and has not yet had the opportunity to object.

The Neck

The neck always has something to say.

This morning it’s four out of ten. Manageable. A four means I can turn my head to both the left and right, providing I do it slowly and with adequate warning.

I’ve been operating under this arrangement for a few years now, and we’ve reached an understanding.

The Lower Back

The lower back doesn’t so much report as make a grand statement.

Today the statement is: medium.

Not the sharp specific intake of breath complaint that means today is going to be one of those days.

Just there, opinionated about the mattress. As usual.

The Right Knee

The right knee and I have been in ongoing negotiations since early 2017.

The terms are straightforward. No sudden movements. No stairs taken at speed. No kneeling without a pre-arranged exit strategy. And under no circumstances attempt to run.

In return I don’t ask it to do anything it might consider unreasonable.This morning it seems fairly compliant.

This is good news.

The Right Shoulder

The right shoulder is new.

It appeared in February with no explanation and no prior history. It doesn’t hurt exactly. It just makes itself known.

A nagging presence, like a wobbly shopping trolly wheel that constantly veers left. It’s decided, at this point in proceedings, to start voicing opinions.

Currently a three. Monitoring continues.

Phase two is sitting up.

Sitting up is where the preliminary findings are either confirmed or revised upward. This morning nothing new was introduced.

Excellent.

I Was Twenty-Three Once.

I got out of bed. That was it, the whole process. No assessment. No negotiation with any of my aforementioned body parts..

I just got up.

I was fine and I didn’t notice I was fine because fine was simply the default and defaults don’t require noticing.

I bloody well notice now.

This morning’s full picture: manageable if I don’t think about it too much.

I stand for a moment taking stock. Then I go and make coffee, which is the only morning phase that has never once let me down.

Today is a good morning.

They’re mostly good mornings, if you adjust the definition of good appropriately.

I’ve got quite good at that.

I own seven umbrellas.

I’ve counted them, more than once, on dry days when I’ve happened to come across them.

There are seven.

There may be eight.

I can’t be certain because they don’t all stay in the same place, and the ones I’m aware of aren’t necessarily the only ones.

I’ve never owned an umbrella deliberately.

I’ve never sat down and thought: I should get an umbrella. I’ve never browsed umbrellas. I’ve never compared umbrellas.

Every umbrella I own was bought in the rain, standing outside somewhere, already wet, in a small shop that sells them for £8 to people in exactly my situation.

I’ve been doing this for thirty years.

The Umbrellas I Know About

There’s a small blue one from a service station near Leicester, bought in 2019.

There’s a large golf umbrella that belongs to someone else, technically, though I can’t remember who. It’s been in our house long enough that the original owner has presumably forgotten about it.

It’s enormous. It could shelter a family of four. I’ve never used it.

There are three identical black ones.

I don’t know where the three identical black ones came from. Nobody in this house bought three identical black umbrellas. Nobody bought one. They’ve appeared, separately, over a period of years, and now they sit together in the hall cupboard like they planned it.

There’s one with a broken spoke that I’ve been meaning to throw away since 2021.

There’s one I bought last Tuesday.

The one I bought last Tuesday is already missing.

The Pattern

The pattern is consistent.

It rains. I’m out. I don’t have an umbrella. I buy one. I bring it home. I put it somewhere sensible.

The umbrella is then absorbed into the house and is not seen again until a sunny day three weeks later, at which point it surfaces in a cupboard I’ve already searched twice.

I’ve tested this. The last time it rained, I went looking. I checked the hall cupboard. I checked the coat rack. I checked under the stairs. I checked the boot of the car. I checked the bag I’d been using the previous month. I checked the other bag.

I found nothing.

Three days later, when the rain had stopped, I opened the hall cupboard for an unrelated reason and four umbrellas fell out.

I don’t know where they’d been.

I don’t think they’d been anywhere. I think they’d been in the hall cupboard the whole time, and they’d simply chosen not to be available to me while I was looking for them.

The Golf Umbrella

The golf umbrella is the exception to the pattern.

I always know where the golf umbrella is. The golf umbrella is too big to lose. It lives by the back door, leaning against the wall, where it has been for about four years.

I’ve never used it.

It’s too big to take anywhere. It's so big that taking it anywhere feels like a public hazard.

The spokes are at eye level for half the people I'd pass.

In any wind it becomes a sail, and a man being towed down a pavement by his own umbrella is not the kind of man I want to be.

It’s the only umbrella I own that works.

It’s also the only umbrella I’ll never use.

The Most Recent Failure

I was out last Tuesday when it started raining.

I stood in a doorway for a while, conducting the mental inventory I’ve already described, and concluded that none of my seven umbrellas were with me. I went into a shop and bought an eighth.

It was £8. It was small. It was blue, like the one from the service station, which I suspect I bought from the same chain of shops at a different location and point in my life.

I used it to walk to the car.

I put it on the back seat.

The Friday After

My wife was in the car with me on Friday.

She opened the glove compartment to get something out, and an umbrella fell into her lap. It was small and blue.

She said: “Is this yours?”

I said it might be, it could be the one I bought on Tuesday.

She said: “Where did you put it on Tuesday?”

I said: The back seat.

She said: “This was in the glove compartment.”

I said yes I saw that.

She said: “How did it get from the back seat to the glove compartment?”

I said I didn’t know.

She said: “Did you put it there?”

I said no, I’d put it on the back seat, definitely, and I hadn’t moved it, and I hadn’t been in the car between Tuesday and Friday.

She held the umbrella up. She turned it over in her hands.

She said: “So it moved itself?”

I said it must have done.

She said: “Right!”

She put the umbrella back in the glove compartment.

Neither of us mentioned it again.

The Forecast

Tomorrow is forecast to be sunny.

I know where two of the umbrellas are. The golf umbrella is by the back door. The small blue one is in the glove compartment, allegedly.

The other five are somewhere in this house, doing whatever umbrellas do when they’re not being used, which is apparently most of the time.

I’ll go to bed tonight knowing roughly where the umbrellas are.

I’ll wake up tomorrow to a dry day.

It’ll rain on Thursday and I’ll be out.

I won’t have an umbrella with me. I’ll stand in a doorway for a while. I’ll think about the seven umbrellas I own.

I’ll buy an eighth.

Or is it a ninth?

I’ve lost count.

I’ve reset the same password eleven times.

Not eleven different passwords. The same one. The one I keep trying to set and being told I can’t use because it’s too similar to a previous password.

A previous password the computer claims it can’t show me for security reasons.

But can apparently remember well enough to reject.

This is where it starts. Not with forgetting. With the reset.

You go to log in and type what you’re fairly confident is the password. The page shakes its head. Wrong. You try again. Different capitalisation. Still wrong. You try the one you use for everything else. Wrong.

You click Forgot Password.

This is the moment the system has been waiting for.

The Rules

The new password must be at least ten characters.

It must contain an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, and a symbol.

It can’t be a password you have used before.

It can’t be similar to a password you’ve used before, though what constitutes similar is never defined, leaving the system free to reject anything it finds conceptually adjacent to your previous choices.

It can’t contain your name, your username, or your date of birth.

It must be something you’ve never used, never thought of, and can’t write down because writing it down defeats the purpose of having a password.

You must remember it.

Forever.

I typed my new password.

This password is too similar to a previous password.

I changed two letters.

This password is too similar to a previous password.

I changed the symbol.

This password is still too similar to a previous password.

Here’s what I want you to understand. The computer can’t show me my previous password. It’s encrypted. Hidden. Protected for my security. The computer has absolutely no idea what my previous password was.

And yet it knows this one is too similar to it.

The computer knows exactly what my password is.

It’s always known.

It’s not protecting me. It’s testing me.

The Security Questions

While resetting, the system asks me to confirm my identity via security questions.

What was the name of your first pet?

I had a goldfish when I was seven. I don’t remember what I called it. I’m not sure I called it anything. It was a goldfish.

What was the name of the street you grew up on?

I grew up on six streets. We’d moved six times before I was nine. Which one did I put? I don’t know. I set this account up in 2019 and I was a different person then.

What is your mother’s maiden name?

This one I know. I type it.

Answer incorrect.

I apparently don’t know my mother’s maiden name.

The New Password

Eventually, after negotiation, I create something the system accepts.

It’s fourteen characters long. It contains two uppercase letters, a number in the middle, and an ampersand. It doesn’t resemble any word in any language, completely unguessable.

I log in.

I feel briefly victorious.

Three weeks later I need to log in again.

I type what I’m fairly confident is the password.

The page shakes its head.

I try different capitalisation.

Wrong.

I sit for a moment looking at the screen.

Then I click “Forgot Password”.

Why isn’t the system surprised?

We’ve been here before.

It knew I’d be back, it was just a matter of time.

I remember back when you couldn’t see a photo right after taking it.

You pressed the camera shutter. Something happened inside the camera. You moved on with your life and had to trust the process.

Whether the photo was good, whether anyone had their eyes open, whether your thumb was partially over the lens.

All good questions that wouldn’t be answered for seven to fourteen days.

This was how photography worked.

The ritual was specific. Exciting and anxious at the same time.

Twenty four exposures per roll. Sometimes thirty six if you were feeling ambitious or had an upcoming holiday.

You used them carefully because each one cost money and there was no checking afterwards to see if the photo had come out properly.

You pointed the camera. You pressed the shutter. You moved on.

At the end of the roll you rewound the film, which made a satisfying mechanical sound that meant you’d done something real.

You took the little canister to Boots.

You filled out a small envelope with your name and address, popped the canister inside and handed it over to a person who accepted it without any particular interest.

Then you waited.

During the seven to fourteen waiting days the photos existed somewhere between the moment of pressing the shutter and the moment of collection, in a state that was neither good nor bad.

There was absolutely nothing you could do about it either way.

In retrospect, this was probably the most relaxed we’ve ever been about anything.

The collection date arrived.

You opened the envelope in the car park outside Boots, or sometimes on the bus home if you couldn’t wait, or if you were incredibly patient, until you got home. Most people I knew never waited until they got home, including me.

Twenty four small prints. Slightly glossy. Smelling faintly of chemicals.

Most of them were wrong in some way.

Blurred. Dark. Someone had moved at the critical moment.

An entire roll from a birthday party where every single photo had caught people mid-blink, like the camera had specifically waited for the worst possible fraction of a second before firing.

You looked through them anyway. All of them. Carefully.

And then you put the good ones, typically three, maybe four, occasionally as many as six if it had been a good roll, into an album, or a shoebox, or a drawer, where they stayed for twenty years until someone found them and couldn’t identify half the people in them.

Including, in one case, me.

I’m in the photo. I know I’m in the photo, not because I recognise myself, because someone wrote my name on the back.

I have zero memory of that person.

Now I take a photo and see it immediately.

Then I take it again because the first one wasn’t quite right. Then again because I blinked.

Then four more times until I have seven versions of the same moment and have to choose between them, which takes longer than the moment itself took to happen.

The criteria for choosing is completely arbitrary.

Marginally better light. Slightly less unfortunate expression. A vague feeling that this one is the one, which is indistinguishable from just wanting it to be over.

I go with the “less terrible” option

It’s fine.

I feel nothing in particular about it.

The thing I didn’t understand then, and only worked out recently, is that the waiting was the point.

Seven to fourteen days.

Without being judged. Without being retaken or filtered or immediately deleted because the angle was slightly wrong.

Just a moment, preserved somewhere, that you’d get to see eventually.

You couldn’t improve it. You couldn’t undo it. It was already done and somewhere in a small chemical process it was becoming real without you.

That’s not how anything works anymore.

I’m not sure I’m better off.

Though I do have seven nearly identical photos of a jacket potato, so.

We have fourteen pillows on our bed.

One is mine. One my wife’s. Functional. For sleeping.

The other twelve exist for reasons I’ve never been fully able to establish and have learned not to question.

I want to be clear, I didn’t buy these pillows.

I’ve never bought a decorative pillow in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start.

I can’t ever remember knowing that decorative pillows were a category of thing that existed until they began arriving in our bedroom one by one over a period of time.

None of this is accidental. There is a logic to it. But not logic I can access.

The Nightly Removal

Every night before bed the pillows have to come off.

This is not optional. You cannot sleep under or on fourteen pillows. You cannot get into a bed occupied by fourteen pillows without first relocating them to somewhere else.

So every night I remove twelve pillows from the bed and place them on the chair in the corner. I’ve yet to be given the reason why this falls to me.

They don’t stack. They don’t cooperate. Several of them are different sizes and shapes.

There are cylindrical ones, small square ones, one that is inexplicably the size of a dinner plate, and they have to be moved individually with the care of a man handling objects he fundamentally doesn’t understand.

Then I can get into bed.

The Morning Reinstatement

Every morning the pillows go back on the bed.

All twelve of them. In a specific arrangement. There is a correct order and a correct position and a correct orientation for each pillow and I have learned these things the way you learn anything in a long marriage. Through tuts and pointed corrections and of course the look.

The cylindrical one goes at the back. The small square ones go in front of it. The dinner plate one. I don’t know what it’s called.

I’ve started thinking of it as Gerald. Gerald goes slightly off-centre to the left.

I do this every morning.

The Asking

I asked once what the pillows were for.

The answer was that they make the bed look nice.

I’ve thought about this answer for a long time.

The bed looks nice for approximately fourteen hours a day. The hours between when it gets made in the morning and when we dismantle it again at night.

In between there’s nobody is in the bedroom.

We are downstairs. Living our lives. Unaware of how nice the bed looks.

The pillows are performing for an empty room.

I reinstated Gerald this morning at 7:15 AM.

Gerald has an audience of zero.

Fourteen pillows, twelve somehow seem to be my responsibility every morning and night for the rest of my life.

I can’t say I even like Gerald.

But every morning there he is. Slightly off-centre to the left.

Apparently, exactly where he belongs.

We have a drawer in our kitchen.

In that drawer there are, at any given time, between seven and thirteen pens

None of them work.

This is not an accident.

The pens don’t stop working randomly. They stop working at the precise moment they become the only pen you actually need.

Before that they’re fine. Sitting there. Full of ink. Completely unbothered.

The moment you pick one up for something important, a form, a number, something you need to write down right that minute, it produces a faint scratch and nothing else.

Every time.

The drawer is a pen hospice. They go in working and come out as dry husks that exist purely to disappoint you at critical moments.

The Good Pen

At some point in every household a pen gets designated.

Not formally.

Nobody holds a ceremony. But a pen arrives, usually from a hotel, occasionally from a bank, once in our case from a man at a conference, I didn’t know who he was, and it writes beautifully.

Smooth. Consistent. Reliable.

Someone picks it up and thinks “oh this is a good pen”.

That’s it. There’s the moment right there. The countdown begins.

Within a week it’s gone.

Not lost. Gone!

There’s a difference. Lost implies it might come back.

Gone means it has entered a dimension specifically reserved for designated good pens and you will never see it again.

We’ve been lucky enough to have had several very good pens.

I know where none of them are.

The System

A good pen doesn’t work alone.

I’ve identified a network of household objects that operate on the same principle. The moment you designate something as the good version of a thing, the designation itself triggers the disappearance.

The good scissors. You buy proper ones. Keep them in a specific place. Tell everyone they are not for craft projects or opening packages or cutting hair.

Within three months they are being used in another room, not returned and then simply gone.

The good plastic containers. You buy the set with the lids that actually seal. Airtight. Stackable. The lids vanish almost immediately.

The containers ….. never!

The good charger. The fast charging one. Gone.

In its place are several chargers I’ve never seen before.

This is not a coincidence.

This is some kind of intra dimensional infrastructure.

The Evidence

I know what I’m talking about because I tested this.

I bought two identical pens.

One I designated as the good pen. Told my wife. Put it in a specific place. Made its status clear.

One I put in the drawer without comment.

Within four days the good pen had vanished.

The drawer pen is still there. Still works. Has been used by nobody for anything.

The system doesn’t want the drawer pen. It has no value. Nothing has been invested in it emotionally.

The system feeds on personal attachments.

The Solution

Stop designating.

I’m serious.

Buy a pen. Use it. Tell nobody its status, good or bad.

Maintain complete emotional neutrality toward it. The moment you feel yourself thinking this is a good pen, put that thought as far from your mind as possible.

Will this work?

I don’t know.

I’ve started hiding one pen at the back of a cupboard with no designation whatsoever.

It’s been three weeks.

It’s still there.

Which either means the system hasn’t found it yet.

Or the system is waiting.

I’m not telling anyone which cupboard.

When I was young, changing the TV channel required getting up.

Not asking someone. Not pressing a button. Getting up. Physically. Walking across the room. Turning a dial.

Every time.

This is apparently hilarious to people born after 1980.

We had two channels.

BBC and ITV.

That was the entire landscape of British television. Two channels, a dial, and the quiet understanding that if you didn’t like what was on, your other option was also probably just as bad.

BBC2 arrived in 1964, which in theory gave us three. In practice it showed a man explaining farming, so really we still had two.

The television itself was positioned, as all televisions were, at the precise viewing distance from the sofa. Past the coffee table.

Beyond the draught coming under the front door.

In a microclimate that was somehow three degrees colder than the rest of the room.

You had to want it.

Bonanza was on ITV. Coronation Street had just started. If you were quick you could catch the end of Emergency Ward 10.

But wanting it meant getting up. Walking over. Turning the dial. Walking back. Sitting down.

Then the vertical hold would go.

The picture would start to roll. Slowly at first. Then faster. The whole image sliding upward like the television was trying to escape.

Your dad would sigh the sigh of a man who had accepted this as simply what life was, walk over, and hit the side of the set with his palm.

This worked. Nobody knew why and nobody bothered to ask.

He’d walk back. Sit down. Watch three minutes of Coronation Street. Then it would start rolling again.

Eleven times in one evening. Minimum.

My grandchildren change channels by talking at the television.

They don’t look up. They don’t move. They issue a command and the television obeys.

I explained once about the dial. About the vertical hold. About crossing a cold room in your socks on a Wednesday night in January just to watch the second half of a cowboy show called Bonanza.

One of them said: “Why didn’t you just watch something else?”

There was nothing else.

There were two channels and both of them were sometimes a still image of a rotating wheel that the BBC broadcast to fill time and called a Trade Test Transmission.

Sometimes we watched that. Something to look at, I suppose.

I would like to think it built character. There had to be some benefit.

Getting up off that sofa, crossing that room, adjusting that dial, took discipline. Right there that was commitment.

That was a man deciding what he wanted and going to get it, regardless of the temperature, regardless of the draught, regardless of how many times the vertical hold would undo all his work the moment he sat back down.

We didn’t have convenience.

We had Bonanza and a faulty picture and the quiet dignity of a generation that never once complained about it.

Until now, obviously.

My grandfather started walking five miles a day when he was 60.

He’s 97 now.

We have no idea where he is.

It seemed like a reasonable suggestion at the time.

The doctor said he needed exercise. He said walking was good for the heart. Someone bought him a pair of proper walking boots and off he went down the road with the quiet satisfaction of a family that’s doing the right thing.

That was 1987.

He hasn’t stopped since.

The first few years were fine.

Five miles a day, back for lunch, cups of tea, normal life. We thought we’d cracked it.

Healthy grandfather.

Everyone was pleased with themselves.

Then the five miles became eight.

Then twelve.

Then he started leaving notes.

Gone walking. Back Tuesday.

Tuesday being, in one memorable case, three weeks later.

He’d been to Scarborough. Why Scarborough, we don’t know because we can’t ask him.. He just kept going and eventually there he was.

The Sightings

By his mid-eighties we’d stopped expecting him at mealtimes and started relying on a network of reported sightings.

A cousin spotted him in Derbyshire in 2019. Moving at considerable pace. Nodded and kept going.

A neighbour’s daughter swears she saw him crossing a field in Northumberland last spring. She waved. He waved back. He was gone before she got her phone out.

My uncle claims he tracked him as far as the Yorkshire Dales in 2021 and then lost him somewhere near Hawes.

We’ve learned not to ask my uncle about this.

What We Know

He has his walking boots. He has a waterproof coat that he’s had since 1993 and refuses to replace. He carries a small amount of cash and what we believe is a compass, though nobody can confirm this because nobody has been close enough long enough to check.

From what we know he seems well.

Better than well, actually. The occasional postcard suggests a man entirely at peace with his situation.

We are less at peace.

The doctor who recommended walking retired in 1998 and moved to Portugal.

Sometimes I think the irony.

We’ve had several family meetings.

The conclusion is always the same - he’s 97, he knows what he’s doing, and any attempt to stop him would probably finish him off faster than the walking.

So what can we do?

We keep the kettle ready. We check the postcards. We maintain the network.

Someone suggested fitting him with a tracker, if we ever get close enough.

He was last seen heading north.

We think he might be in Scotland now.

To be honest, at this point, we’re less worried about him than we are about ourselves.

We told him walking was good for his heart.

Unfortunately it also appears to be good for his legs, his lungs, his general constitution, and his complete indifference to staying anywhere long enough for us to find him.

He’s 97 and he’s somewhere in Britain.

We’re at home.

Worried. He’s fine.

I made a decision that seemed entirely reasonable at the time.

I ordered a takeaway instead of cooking.

To be clear I approached this sensibly. I opened the app, and browsed the options.

I selected something that looked good and confirmed the order with the quiet confidence of a man who has finally got dinner under control.

Thirty-seven minutes later I was in a state.

Not hungry. Not calm. Watching a tiny car on my phone move slowly in the wrong direction like it was doing it deliberately.

This is what I chose over cooking pasta.

The old anxiety was simple. Stand in front of the fridge at 7 PM. Stare at ingredients. Feel nothing. The anxiety was I don’t want to do this.

I outsourced that anxiety. Modern, easy solution. I thought sensible.

Except the anxiety didn’t go anywhere. It relocated. Upgraded. Put on a different suit.

Now it’s Why is my food going to the industrial estate?

The Optimism Phase

Order placed. Estimated arrival: 30 minutes. Excellent. I’m a patient person.

I settle in. Check my phone once. Twice. Food being prepared. This is fine. Civilisation is working as intended.

The Confusion Phase

The little car appears on the map. Moving. But not toward me. I zoom out. Three miles away. In the opposite direction. I understand there are other orders. Other customers.

A logical conclusion.

Emotionally, I’m convinced the driver has forgotten about me entirely. Or worse — he’s decided he likes my Pad Thai better than his job.

The Acceptance Phase

This is not acceptance. This is despair with nowhere to go.

The car stops. Five minutes. Seven. Is he lost? Has he broken down? Is he eating my food in a layby?

The app sends an update: Your order is 10 minutes away.

It’s been saying this for 15 minutes.

I’ve boiled water in less time than this. Made sauce. Eaten. Cleaned up. The pasta would be done. I would be fine. Instead I’m watching a stranger’s route optimisation algorithm make choices I can’t influence.

The app is a liar. The driver is a phantom. I have only myself to blame.

Then the doorbell rings.

Food’s here. Somehow. Despite all evidence suggesting it was heading somewhere else entirely. The driver looks completely normal. Like he hasn’t just put me through the wringer.

Everything’s there. Still warm. Exactly what I ordered.

The anxiety evaporates.

Until I take the first bite and realise I didn’t want this. I wanted the other thing. The one I nearly ordered and talked myself out of at the last second.

Too late. The driver’s gone. App’s closed. I’m committed.

I could’ve cooked. Made exactly what I wanted. No waiting. No map. No little car.

But I chose convenience. All it cost me was 45 minutes of low-level panic and £7.99.

Tomorrow I’ll probably do it again.

At least this way, I don’t have to admit the fridge was full the entire time.

I proofread an email 10 times. Perfect. Ready to go!

The nanosecond after I hit ‘Send,’ it reveals a glaring typo.

The send button is basically the ‘Wait for it...’ button..

And I think it’s part of a larger system.

The Digital Humiliation Protocol:

Sadly, because I obviously have nothing better to do, I’ve been documenting this.

The Send button doesn’t work solo.

It’s part of an infrastructure designed to expose incompetence at the exact moment I’m incapable of doing anything about it.

This is what I mean:

I read it once. Good.

Read it again. Hmm maybe change “best regards” to “kind regards.” No… back to “best regards.”

Third read. Tone check. Does this sound passive-aggressive? It might. Rewrite.

Fourth read. Grammar. Commas, right? Yes. Probably.

Fifth read. Final check. Finished.

My finger hovers over Send. Click.

The email vanishes.

It’s instantly becomes a trapdoor for my dignity.

Immediately: “Wait, did I see ‘hearing from you’ or ‘herring from you’?”

I go to my “sent folder.”

“Herring from you, sigh.”

Professional email. About fish.

I read it TEN TIMES.

There was no typo I could see.

Obviously it was hidden by a pre-send perception filter that lifts when the email becomes irreversible.

The Theory:

Before Send: “Draft Mode.” My brain sees what I intended, not what I wrote.

After Send: “Broadcast Mode.” Sees what everyone else will see.

Panic.

But it’s not just the Send button.

The System:

Auto-correct: Lies dormant while typing. Watches. Waits. The moment I send, it changes “meeting” to “mating.” Not before.

The Undo Send Timer: Gmail gives us 5 seconds to undo. My brain needs 6 seconds minimum to spot the typo. The timer gives me hope, then crushes it.

Attachment Detectors: Warns me if there’s no attachment. Brilliant. Except it only works AFTER I send. “Did you mean to attach a file?” YES. BRING IT BACK.

The BCC Revealer: I carefully BCC someone. Check twice. Hit Send. They’re now in CC. Everyone sees them. The system waited until I couldn’t fix it.

Not bugs, features.

They reveal incompetence at the precise moment I’m powerless.

The Evidence:

I tested this.

Email #1: Proofread once. Sent immediately. Perfect.

Email #2: Proofread 15 times. Triple-checked. Sent. Instant typo. Wrong attachment. Wrong recipient.

The more you check, the worse it gets.

The system knows. It waits for confidence. Then strikes.

The Solution:

Stop proofreading.

Seriously.

Proofread once, maybe twice. Send immediately before the system sets the trap.

Will there be typos? Yes. But there’ll be typos anyway.

At least I won’t waste 20 minutes while the Send button plots against me.

I’m typing this now. I’ve checked it four times, which is three times too many.

Which means when I hit “Publish,” something will be catastrophically wrong.

The system is watching.

Three weeks ago I made a purchase that seemed entirely reasonable, at the time.

Anti-aging cream.

I want to be clear that I approached this somewhat scientifically, as far as I’m able.

I read the label.

It said “visibly reduces the signs of aging.” I have signs of aging.

This seemed like a straightforward transaction between me and my face.

I applied it every morning with the quiet confidence of a man who knows what he’s doing.

I’m still aging!

Not slowly. Not gracefully.

Normally, completely unbothered by the cream I keep applying every morning like some kind of optimistic ritual that my face has decided to ignore entirely.

Visibly, Was The Selling Point

I’ve been watching closely. Nothing is visible.

If anything my forehead has gotten worse, like it found out I was trying to interfere and decided to accelerate the whole process just to make a point.

My forehead has always had a confrontational streak. Makes sense.

I’d ask for a refund but of course, I can’t remember where I bought it.

Definitely related to aging.

Three Weeks No Results

My partner suggested I give it more time.

More time. To stop aging. While aging.

I explained that the label said visibly and that I had been watching visibly every morning for three weeks and that visibility wasn’t occurring.

She gave me the look she reserves for moments when she has decided engaging further is simply not worth the energy.

She’s been giving me that look a lot lately.

Possibly also related to aging.

I checked the small print. It says “results may vary.”

I would like to know whose results they used for the large print because that person and I are clearly having completely different experiences with this product.

Is This Really A Character Test?

Apparently some anti-aging creams take up to twelve weeks to show results.

Twelve weeks.

I am being asked to apply cream to my face every morning for three months before I am allowed to have an opinion about whether it works.

That feels less like skincare and more like a test of personal character.

I don’t remember signing up for a character test. I remember signing up for visible results.

I’m going to finish the jar though.

I’ve come this far and I have absolutely nothing else to show for the last three weeks.

The Point That Isn’t The Point

The cream isn’t really the point.

We all buy the cream. Not literally but we all reach for the thing that promises transformation without the boring part.

The supplement, the planner, the course, the app. Purchased with hope, applied with enthusiasm, quietly abandoned when results fail to appear on our preferred timeline.

The label always says visibly.

The small print always says results may vary.

I’m still aging.

At least now I’m doing it with extremely moisturised skin.

I work from home. My commute is 12 seconds. Bedroom to desk. No traffic. No train delays. No roadworks.

I somehow manage to be late.

The mathematics don’t add up.

My first meeting is at 9:00 AM. I wake up at 8:47. Thirteen minutes.

That’s plenty of time, right? That’s 780 seconds. I only need twelve of them to get to work.

But here’s what actually happens:

• 8:47 - Wake up

• 8:53 - Coffee (non-negotiable)

• 8:58 - Find a shirt that doesn’t look like I slept in it (I did, but it shouldn’t look like I did)

• 8:59 - Brush teeth because morning breath transmits through screens

• 9:02 - Finally sit down, realise laptop is in the other room

• 9:04 - Join the meeting apologising for “technical difficulties”

The technical difficulty is me.

Why is it that people who commute an hour to work are somehow less late than I am? They have to account for traffic, weather, and public transportation that runs on vibes and prayer. Legitimate obstacles.

I have twelve seconds and a hallway.

And yet they’re sitting at their desks at 8:55, coffee in hand, looking professional and prepared.

Meanwhile, I’m frantically checking if I’m wearing pants, typing “Sorry, connection issues!” in the chat.

Of course my connection is fine.

The issue is that I thought I could make coffee, find my notebook, and check the news in the three minutes I had left.

Time moves differently when working from home, at least mine does. Twelve seconds should be twelve seconds. But somehow those twelve seconds expand into a black hole that swallows entire minutes.

Where did the time go? What happened in that hallway? Did I accidentally enter a temporal anomaly? Is my apartment built on some kind of time-dilating architecture?

No. I just stopped to check my phone. Twice. Then I remembered I should feed the cat. Then the cat wanted attention.

Then I was late.

I’ve even tried setting multiple alarms.

Alarms to wake up, alarms to get out of bed, alarms to remind me I have a meeting, alarms to tell me I’m already late to the meeting I just reminded myself about.

My phone sounds like a crisis centre now. A symphony of failure.

I’ve even considered sleeping at my desk. Eliminating the commute entirely. Just wake up, open my eyes, and I’m already at work. Zero-second commute. Surely I can’t be late then.

But I know myself. I’d still somehow contrive to be late.

What’s spooky is that I’m always punctual for everything else.

Doctor’s appointments? Early.

Meeting friends? Ten minutes ahead of schedule.

Catching a flight? At the gate before boarding even opens.

But working from home is my nemesis!

It’s become my brand now. People expect it. They’ve built it into their mental scheduling. “Oh, he’ll be with us in a few minutes. And they’re right. That’s exactly how I am.

I should probably wrap this up. I have a meeting in two minutes.

I’m definitely going to be late.