THE HEAT IS ON

I know how many people in the world look forward to the weekend. For those people that actually get them at least, in this topsy-turvy service industry based society we’ve created for ourselves, so many of us send five days yearning for those two days of “me time” in between the hurly-burly of those endless working weeks, and yet I do seem to fritter mine away and, to all intents and purposes “waste” them in doing very little when I really have far too much that I ought to be doing.

Sometimes I spend the weekend in a bit of a “bubble” in which I do very little, see even less, and spend two whole days wasting my time and which finishes with me feeling that it seems almost impossible that two whole days have passed, I’ve achieved absolutely nothing, and now I’ve got to get myself up and head on back to work with very little to talk about and a strange resentment of “my time” being eaten away by the requirements of the corporate world, even though when I do get “my time” I obviously squander it so recklessly on doing nothing much at all.

In the meantime, the world has continued to turn. News stories will have broken sensationalising the world but about which I will know nothing. “Vital” sporting things will have happened about which I neither know nor care, but my ignorance of them will be seen as a symptom of some greater ignorance with which I will be labelled.

Heck! Having followed the Cricket World Twenty20 far more than I expected this past few weeks as it’s been on the radio as I’ve been heading homewards of an evening, I even managed to miss (or forget about) the finals of that on its ultimate weekend so busy was I doing nothing.

You might think that such splendid isolation might get the juices of the imagination flowing, but that’s seldom true as the spark I need is usually only fired up by a certain amount of external stimulation, and so if I go into a “bubble” it’s really like being in a creative vacuum and I find that there’s nothing to talk about.

The odd (and increasingly rare) email or message might spark off enough energy for me to feel capable of conjuring up a reply, but I sometimes even fail to venture towards the keyboard on those kinds of weekends, and sometimes feel so intimidated by the excitement that other people appear to be having that I seriously consider crawling back underneath my rock again and disappearing back to the empty void from which I once came.

Even the telephone seems to be assisting or enabling or conspiring (delete as applicable) to create this sense of isolation. It now only tings vaguely once before cutting off on its incoming messages and if you fail to notice that you miss the call. Outgoing is fine, of course, but as I never really ring anyone, it hardly helps me that much.

I parked the car when I got home on Friday evening and I haven’t seen it since. I’ll head down on Monday morning on the assumption that it will be still where I left it – assuming that I can actually remember where I parked - and hopefully it will still be there and our workday routine will come back into play.

If it isn’t, of course, or if late night revellers have damaged it in some way in their idea of an “amusing prank”, then the working week will start off very badly and I will sense that it’s bound to get worse and things will not auger well as my mood plummets towards the usual despair and frustration, and I will once again be desperate for another weekend to come along just so I can calm down, relax, and let off steam or, as is more likely, fret about how much I have to do and how little I have actually done about it.

What I can tell you about last weekend is that I finally cracked and decided that it was now cold enough to switch the central heating back on. The piles of stuff blocking the flow of heat from the radiators were shifted to other parts of the rooms, the boiler was cranked up and a certain amount of warmish air now circulates during the hours that we need it to. I shall sulk about the bills, of course, but it does at least provide another landmark on the rocky road towards the season of Yule, the end of yet another year and another huge chunk of time wasted on the way to the brass and pine.

I guess that’s an achievement of sorts…