LIFE OF MY LIGHT

I was already having a bit of a stressful and worrying day when I decided to head upstairs and check whether the scary new quote for the building work had arrived in my email inbox yet. As I reached the top of the stairs, I hit the light switch and, with that familiar and disconcerting “pop”, the spot-lamp bulb blew in the bedroom…

Okay, so I know that it’s not such a great tragedy in the great scheme of things, but it was precisely the sort of thing that finds itself immediately filed in the “bloody typical” column of life.

The immediate difficulty, of course, is that your mind is immediately distracted from the job in hand and is suddenly required to think about something else. Not only that, but it’s a “something else” that has come at you completely unexpectedly and out of the blue.

Not that you can actually see any blue, however…

Whether the original purpose of that journey up the stairs manages to get returned to does now rather depend upon how the next few minutes resolve themselves and, to be perfectly honest, whether or not that tiny distraction has managed to knock whatever it was I was planning to do for a straight six over the boundary and out of my mental list of “things to do…”

Luckily, I could scrabble around in the darkness and find the switch which powers up the desk lamp, and so lighting of a sort was quickly (if precariously) resolved. A quick click on the “power” key and the cool light of the computer screen is adding enough to the limited ambient light to make some corners of the room slightly more visible, and then the quandary remains; Does it make more sense to pursue my original course and just sit down at the keyboard, or is it more important to change that bulb and prevent myself from having to deal with the tricky little problem of having to negotiate the stairs in the pitch darkness…?

The problem of seeking out the bulb was nagging at me now, though, and that thought had become so very prominent in my mind that any other actions immediately became impossible to think about, for the next fifteen minutes or so, it is impossible for me to think about anything else or do anything else, and the old familiar routine of knowing that “I have a spare bulb somewhere, but where exactly did I put it…?” comes into play.

Because, I absolutely knew that I had a spare somewhere for just such an eventuality but…

No.

I couldn’t find it anywhere, despite turning over all of the places where it might have been, and, on top of all that, it was dark and a lot of the places that I wanted to look in were being a lot less penetrable than they normally would be on the kind of bright, sunny afternoon on which I wouldn’t have needed to switch the light on in the first place.

On more than one occasion I click the light switch on the wall because I think that I need more light, and then stand there feeling like a complete idiot.

The fact that I do it again says something about human beings and routines of behaviour and, to be honest, a complete inability to learn from our mistakes and remember other things when our mind is distracted in its focus.

I stand there like an idiot, thinking through scenarios in my mind, knowing that I’ve moved the thing so often over the years but now that I finally actually need the wretched thing, it’s nowhere to be found…

After a while I give up.

Whilst I like to convince myself that, if I had replaced it once already and didn’t actually have a spare, I’m organised enough to have bought a replacement and stashed it away somewhere, eventually my mind conjures up a memory – not necessarily a real memory, you understand - of having changed that light bulb on one long-forgotten grey afternoon and that there’s a very good chance of there not being a spare bulb of that particular type anywhere in the house at all.

And with that thought firmly embedded in my mind, I still walk around the house looking for places where I might have put the elusive spare, but, with an air of resignation, I decide to pick up a replacement or two the next time I go shopping, utterly convinced that the moment I do that, I will, of course, immediately spot the missing bulb sitting in plain sight.

I did mention my theories about the “bloody typical” column of life didn’t I...?