I deviated

I’ve mentioned procrastination before – but I can’t quite remember if there is such an actual thing as procrastinationitis – because if there is I suffer from it, and have done most of my life. I think as a child there was less opportunity to procrastinate because parents, teachers, situations didn’t particularly allow for it. However once I was more independent, that’s when I can remember me missing out on things or getting in a muddle because of it. Thinking back to school I don’t ever remember not doing my homework or being late handing it in, I wasn’t lazy and would do what I was supposed to do – but I do think the other trait which has led me astray began to manifest itself – not listening properly. My mind would wander while I was being told something – for example homework tasks, or my thoughts would jump to something more interesting and I’d write the wrong thing. I wasn’t lazy, just easily distracted from the task in hand.

Obviously I don’t have homework now, but I do have home-work – so I might be doing an ordinary domestic task and deviate to do something else so the first task isn’t completed. Having deviated, I might realise I wasn’t doing what I meant to be doing – and deviate back to the original task – or even a different one!! Chaos! This does’t matter that much if I was hoovering and suddenly thought I ought to water the houseplants or clean the fish tank, but if I had put some scones in the oven and then decided to go round and empty all the bins in the house because the binmen were due the next day… There was the famous damson crumble incident which I’ve never told the family but have shared here… We were given some beautiful damsons – a favourite fruit, and I made a fruit crumble which I put in the oven, forgetting we were supposed to be taking the children swimming. We piled into the car and it was only as I dropped husband and kids by the swimming pool in the next town and set off to find the car park that I remembered. I raced home, rushed into a house smelling strongly of charred crumble and overflowing fruit baking onto the floor of the oven.

You see here. I began to write about procrastination and have deviated into writing about something completely different. The thing is, I also do procrastinate – I think “I’ll just do this first…” and in my heart I know I’m doing it to put off doing what should be prioritised. Sometimes it’s almost a rabbit in headlights thing – “I should do this – yikes!! Panic!! I’ll do this other thing first!!” When I was in my very early twenties and living in Manchester, a friend who I’d known from first going to infants school aged four, unexpectedly wrote to me. I’m not sure now how she had my address – had we kept in touch when I had moved away from my home town when I was sixteen and then on to Manchester when I was eighteen? However it was, she wrote to me out of the blue. I had studied English and history, she’d studied English and art and now, both of us working, she was writing to me with a proposition.

My friend’s proposition, remembering that I had always loved writing, was that we should collaborate on a children’s book. I would do the story line and narrative, she would illustrate. I’m not sure if she was married at the time – but her husband was from an internationally renowned family, and there would have been connections in many areas of the cultural world, no doubt including publishing. So she wrote to me, and I was stumped. I tried desperately to think of a story, a children’s story – at that time I didn’t know any children, I just remembered stories I had read as a child. Did I write back to her? Did she pursue it with me? We didn’t have a phone in the flat we were living in so I couldn’t get in touch with her except by mail…

I didn’t write a story for her to illustrate, I just kept worrying about it and living my life and eventually i stopped worrying. But if I had thought to myself “Get a grip Lois, just write a story!” would I have written anything worthwhile? Would my ideas have coincided with hers? Who knows. A couple of years later I had three stories published in ‘Honey’ magazine – if I’d got my act together I could have written more… no doubt my mind wandered to something else…