Bothered?

There is a bunch of flowers on my desk that is slowly dying. The flowers have been there for four weeks now, given to me as a leaving present when I quit my job to go freelance as a writer, and the slowly decomposing petals and leaves metaphorically represent my dreams of being financially solvent ever again. But I really cannot be arsed to throw them out.

Every time I visit the bathroom I stare aimlessly at a growing collection of toilet roll tubes on the floor. There are seven now I think, of various sizes and shapes. They are taking up a considerable amount of floor space in my bathroom, but I really cannot be fagged to scoop them up and deposit them in a bin.

There are lots of other things I am finding myself weirdly reluctant to do. Like admitting I can’t bake. I’ll spend an entire morning painstakingly burning three dozen meringues because my oven just doesn’t have a ‘low’ setting, experimenting with leaving the door half open, and adding extra trays to block the heat, in the hope of making something that isn’t so carcinogenic it’ll lower my life expectancy by several years. But I won’t cheerfully toss the lot in the bin, stick two fingers up at Mary Berry and go and buy a Sainsbury’s pavlova. I’ll forget the whole episode, and then waste another two boxes of eggs a weekend later in an attempt at macaroons.

In the meantime I’ll accumulate a ridiculous amount of Active Kids vouchers (I don’t have kids, and highly doubt they’d be very active if I did) that I’ll never redeem, and box up leftover lasagne and spag bol into tiny tupperware boxes in the fridge, only to throw them out three weeks later when no one’s eaten them and they’re threatening to spontaneously combust. And I’ll click ‘not now’, for the 36th time, when my computer warns me it urgently requires an update or I’ll lose all my work and friends.

So what sits behind my reluctance to do these things? Clearly, the flowers represent a connection to safe, secure income – a time when I didn’t wake up each morning and wonder just what insane part of me ever thought it would be a great idea to attempt to make a living out of blogging – and thus I am scared to throw them away, and be left, flowerless and powerless and staring at a P45, with barely an intelligible or creative thought to put to paper. Plus, I know the water in the vase will really stink.

But the loo rolls? I don’t have an attachment to toilet rolls. Not since I was seven and made a colourful desk organiser at school, with a special little pot for my pencil sharpener and an extra tall tube (from a kitchen roll, and designed to store spaghetti – I had only a hazy idea of what should be organised on a desk, and to be honest, there are times that I’ve wished my writing environment housed some easily accessible carbohydrates) have I had quite such a collection of bog roll inner tubes.

The meringue thing is clearly just stubbornness. That oven was expensive, and I refuse to believe that just because we had to convert it to Calor gas in order for it to run on the boat, it now cannot cook at less than 300 degrees. It just needs fiddling with.

Maybe it’s just apathy. Why do today what can comfortably be put off till tomorrow, and there are quite clearly so many other things to do – like play Words with Friends and watch entire series of The Big Bang Theory, back to back, and claiming it’s educational cos there will come a day when I really need to know about string theory.

But I’d be interested to know if it’s just me. Do other normal-in-every-other-respect people hoard loo rolls because there is a distance of some fifteen feet between the bathroom and the nearest bin? Have stinking foliage blocking the sunlight from their desk? Refuse to accept Paul Hollywood will never wink aggressively and say ‘Good work Davies’ as he tucks into a perfectly risen, char-free meringue? Please let me know. In the meantime I’ll go and water that plant that seems to somehow survive despite my almost pathological refusal to give it any attention, and download an update for Words with Friends. Don’t want that giving up on me.