TWOT

A rare weekend containing two cloudless, airless, sunny old days and, because they are so rare, it almost feels churlish to complain, but they did what they did, meaning that I didn't do what I was supposed to do, and those two days passed with little being achieved other than dozing off listening to the cricket, getting seriously ticked off by the attitude of the person behind the counter in the Post Office (You've got two of these… ? I'm here on my own, you know…" - because that's OUR fault, is it…?), getting squiffy on an unprecedented two bottles of white wine on a Saturday evening, and my spirits crashing as the fatigue and melancholy of feeling hot, sweaty and tired, overwhelmed me.

And nothing got done.

Okay, that's not strictly true.

The washing up did get done, the shopping did get done, and the shelf units did get shifted out of the kitchen causing much swearing as we manoeuvred them up the stairs, and much sweating from the old man with the blood pressure issues who was doing the shifting.

Later on I also shifted the old CD shelves back out of the attic where they'd been stored since the big pre-building-work clear out last year, triggering yet more swearing and sweating.

The problem is that, having spent three weekends custom building my shelf units for the bedroom, I took them into the room and decided that I preferred the room without them and spent much of the subsequent time pondering upon a "Plan B" which might involve a lot more work, and whilst I pondered upon that, I thought that integrating the old CD shelving into the new master plan might be an idea, and so much juggling needed to be done.

Meanwhile, my levels of personal despair increased as I realised that I had all but ceased to exist in terms of my interactions with both the real and the virtual world, and that, if I vanished off the planet tomorrow, there would barely be a ripple of acknowledgment of the fact.

This feeling, as ever, came from a lack of response to my wordsmithery and was, presumably, because the rest of the world was out having "fun in the sun" (giving me the impression, at least, that the entire world had ground to a halt) whilst I struggled along with my torpor, fatigue and general sense of accidie or whatever it is, and found that I couldn't summon the energy to string together even the most basic of words and, furthermore, decided that nobody cares anyway... least of all me.

And so we pass into the darkening half of the year, the nights are drawing in, and so it goes, and so it goes. The sun sets on a sky which remains cloudless but for a fading vapour trail or two, and the searing heat of another wasted weekend finally begins to cool, with the prospect of another sleepless night to negotiate, and another wordless dawn to follow.

"Bloody hell!"I find myself ungraciously thinking, "It's far too hot…"

Which, considering the coldness that's to come, seems rather churlish…

But then, nowadays it seems that churlish is what I am.