By now I will have had the most amazing week.
If all goes to plan I'll have been to gigs, exhibitions, a lecture about post-war architecture [1], the seaside, Dundee [2] and the pictures at least twice.
I'll have read 15 to 20 books, watched the rest of the US sitcom Community [3] - I know, I know, that's so 2009, but what can I tell you? I'm a late adopter - painted the living room, scrubbed the shower and cleaned the cat litter tray (though those last three are really optional extras, if truth be told).
As you read this I'll be near the end of a week off. Right now, as I sit here in the Herald office, I am planning to do all of the above. It's possible by the time you read this that I'll have managed maybe one or two of the things on that list.
I see the coming week as a real-life middle-aged equation: X to the power of the imagination minus Y times inertia. My fear is the answer is a negative number and I'll have managed even less than the number of items on my wish list.
The nightmare scenario in my head goes like this. Days will drift by. Teenage daughters will not get out of bed. Before you know it Pointless is on the telly and all your plans dissipate like the Liberal Democrat core vote. Especially if it's wet out.
There are worse fates, I suppose. I have heard J mention the dread word "Ikea" a couple of times recently.
Unless you pack off and head away somewhere holidays can be problematic. There is some notion that you - or in this case I - really should do something even if that means driving somewhere and doing nothing when you get there. I always feel I waste my wasted time if I don't waste it on something, anything.
This is clearly some weird distortion of the Protestant work ethic, though, some S&M version of utilitarianism. One must use one's time productively, even if it's time when you don't actually have to do anything.
And so that completist tendency surfaces. Read these books. Finish that box set. Fill your time.
But, really, so what if I don't do anything? So what if I have spent this last week on the sofa eating Twixes and twisting plastic straws into cat hats? Would that be so terrible? Would the world shun me for indolence? In the cosmic scheme of things, does it ultimately matter that I haven't read the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel? That I might never read the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel?
This of course is my consolatory message to myself for, well, everything in life. It doesn't matter that I've failed abysmally at all I've ever tried because in 30, 40, 50 years, what will any of it matter? And so that wall I tried to paint and gave up halfway through might not even be there after all. Now, where's the remote?
[1] John Grindrod, author of Concretopia, is giving talks in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But by the time you read this they have already happened. Sorry.
[2] I bloody love Dundee.
[3] Not as good as Parks and Recreation but it passes the time.
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