SOME TIME, NO TIME, RUBBISH TIME, EGG TIME

Public holidays somehow just manage to confuse me. I know that there have only ever been seven days in the average week, as far as I’m aware, but somehow, knocking a day off the end of the working week seems to send my tiny brain into all manner of strange places. For most of Wednesday, I was convinced it was Tuesday and suddenly for most of Thursday, I thought it was Friday*. Much of this might have had something to do with having my entire routine thrown off kilter by the fact that I didn’t have my car available until half way through the week.

I got it back on Wednesday, which was of course Tuesday in my head. On Wednesday, having collected the car, I then went to visit my mother, as I regularly do at some point in the middle of the week, but I went to the supermarket on the way, which is something I’d been trying to do since Saturday, which is when I would normally have done it. Saturday also was the day when I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) transport the garden waste to the tip because I didn’t have my car, and so the refuse collectors (quite literally) refused to take it on Monday. You know that you’ve come to some particular place in your life when you can hear the refuse collectors chunnering and complaining about you outside your own back door. Somehow it tells you precisely where you are on the great ladder of life.  Monday should be their regular collection day although it sometimes slips to Tuesday and it has been known to be delayed until even the Wednesday of some weeks. There was a period a couple of years ago when that Monday didn’t come around for nearly three months, but thankfully those days seem far behind us now.

Still, who knows what day they’ll turn up on over the next couple of weeks with all those public holidays to negotiate…? A Monday collection suddenly gets a bit unlikely when so many of those ‘Monday’s off’ get clustered together, although they do occasionally surprise me by actually turning up on them. Nevertheless, I do still suspect that heaps of bags filled with warm, maggot infested waste products will be cluttering up the neighbourhood for the best part of a month, and pretty soon, because of the lack of those grounding regular ritualistic days that help to keep the week in order in my mind, I really won’t have a clue what day it is, or even what week it is in order to juggle whether it’s ‘green box’ week or ‘brown bag’ week.

Things used to be so much simpler when the Department of the Environment didn’t want us to do much of the work for them. I am aware of the landfill shortfall, and the need to divide and separate recyclable items in order to make them easier to process, but I am left wondering whether all the petrol I use driving to the tip, and all the water I use rinsing out old bottles and tins has a more damaging impact than anything gained from the tiny numbers of  waste cardboard boxes our little house manages to generate.

I seem to be waking up ever earlier, too, which isn’t due to any guilt I may feel about my shortcomings in the recycling department, but more due to the fact that my whole brain seems to be out of whack. Too much daylight in the wee small hours, or too many early nights, or just too many thoughts rattling round inn the vast empty cavern of my brain cavity…? Who can say? I can lie awake for hours thinking about it…

Of course I am an utter idiot. I should have arranged for us to go away over Easter, but, of course, with the problem of transport and the continuing requirements of the aging parent meaning that we’re never one hundred percent sure that it is safe to do so. Somehow time slipped away from us and we never quite got around to organising anything and so the extended break stretches ahead of us with nothing really planned. Now, instead we have to face the prospect of coming out of the other end of this relatively long break with the dreadful feeling that we’ve wasted yet another chunk of our fleeting annual holiday allowances on just sitting around the house and not getting anything done.

Life is managing to slip away from us, I fear.

The year itself is rapidly running away from me anyway, like watching the sand pour out of the top of one of those old-style egg timers, vanishing swiftly into the lower bulb before my very eyes. The year slips away as those significant dates come around again, although Easter itself managed to hang on for as long as it could this time around, but before I know it I’ll have to start wondering what Christmas presents to buy, again, and how I’m going to find the time to get everything done that that requires. Sometimes it feels as if your on a carousel that is spinning faster and faster and making you dizzier and dizzier, and all you want someone to do is put on the brakes and let you relax and breathe slowly for a while, and give you a moment to just look at those magical crystals of sand for a moment before they pour away into the other bulb and are lost to you forever.


*Incidentally, for most of Good Friday I was definitely convinced it was Saturday, so the pattern did continue.