OK, so it appears that I might have upset my ‘old man’ just a tad by implying that he spends his ‘days off’ laying on the sofa, watching the TV and drinking cider! I watched his face as he read my last blog post (Spring Cleaning) on Sunday morning over breakfast and I could see as he read it that he was not too impressed at my description of what I believed to be his relaxed attitude to things that need doing on days ‘off’. It appears that like me he thinks the only way to truly be ‘off’ is to take a trip away from home, be it to the beach, the park or the pub, and that this is the only time that we can distract our brains enough to not be thinking of just what jobs need to be done next. I agreed with him that he is a hard worker and that he does spend a lot of his free time doing stuff and it’s true, he does work hard and is always busy, but just to be sure that his belief really did hold up I decided to keep my eye on him for the rest of the day! Alright, so TV did feature in there somewhere and a few bottles of cider were consumed, but these activities where intermingled with grass mowing, washing up, vacuuming and quite a long period of time that involved various pieces of wood, a tape measure, pencil, paper and what appeared to be detailed calculations - which hopefully means that he was busy plotting the summer time garden project which this year may involve the building of a new patio and gazebo which of course meant that he was busy planning something else to do and therefore add to his list!
After a day of (rather guiltily) spying on the lovely Mr C, I realise that I need to be a bit more careful about making assumptions about poor old men (such as mine) and that it was naughty of me to portray their sex as a group of stereotypical 1950s shirkers! The drive to be constantly doing ‘stuff’ and always having things to cross off the list is not determined by our gender, but simply by our way of life. If we lead a busy life and have loads of interests then there will always be more ‘stuff’ for us to do. What is the saying? If you need something doing – ask a busy person to do it for you.
