No such thing as a confined space

I calculated my body mass index a few weeks ago. Apparently I need to lose about half a stone, or grow two inches taller. In an attempt to become fitter, I’ve begun playing badminton regularly. This is proving excellent exercise for the stomach muscles, as I repeatedly bend over to retrieve from the ground the shuttlecock which I have just failed to hit.

Thankfully, badminton is something which I enjoy, as I’m not so anxious to lose weight that exercise is an attractive enough end in itself. Although I will confess to having a fairly unrealistic concept of the scale of my body anyway. Not in terms of my weight, but simply that I too frequently fail to entertain the notion that I might not fit through a gap down the back of a desk when plugging in a printer, or sticking my arm under a couch to retrieve a runaway malteser.

When idly strolling around, I will all too often find myself wondering if I could curl up and fit into a nearby cardboard box, or get my whole body through the hole in the back of a chair, when in reality I probably couldn’t even get my head through it.

Even when the space is big enough, I seem incapable of actually remembering that my body is wider than my head. I’m probably clipping a hip or shoulder off a doorframe a good few dozen times a year. This is nature’s way of telling me I should be living in an open-plan barn, if not a vast, empty field.

One of the most frequent forms of spacial unappreciation comes when lazily trying on shirts in department stores. It isn’t that I try on items too small for me, it’s that I take them off by simply undoing the two top buttons and try to pull them over my head, an act that fails to take into account the fact that I have arms and shoulders. Rather than resulting in the swift removal of the shirt, this act simply results in it getting stuck inside-out over my face, with the collar still around my neck and both arms held in the air on either side of my head. At this point, I always seem to instincively do the same thing. I turn around.

I’m not sure exactly what this is supposed to achieve, whether I expect that I might magically change shape when facing in a different direction, but invariably it just ends with me bashing at least one arm off the wall of the cubicle, and in some instances bouncing my head off one of the clothes hooks.

The shirt gets pulled down, I undo the buttons properly; the whole process takes six times as long as this simple task of undressing should have required. And I learn nothing, doing the whole thing again at some other point in the near future. I am big, but I’m not clever.

Domestic index

The other day, I found a spirit level I’d borrowed off a pal a few months back. It was in my toolbox, with my hammer and my three pairs of pliers, and various screwdrivers and spare fuses and a hand-held metal detector thing that tells you if there are any wires in the wall that you’re about to take a whacking great drill to.

When the government draws up a list of household items that indicate levels of inflation, the items themselves also give a nice indication of current buying trends and gadgetry. Years ago it was all Sony walkmans and Sodastreams and neon t-shirts, which later gave way to ice-cream makers and blank CDRs and Turkey Twizzlers and hooch, and then laptops and viagra and home waxing kits and i-pods and portable hard drives and quite possibly neon t-shirts again and so on and so on.

Anyhow, 150 words in and I finally get to my point, which is that my slowly expanding toolbox, and other items of maintenance-related equipment, may give some indication of my own development as a grown-up. I’m aware that none of this will be as telling as my use of the phrase ‘grown-up’ rather than simply the word ’adult’, but bear with me.

As a student, I had simply a few screwdrivers that got kept in a drawer, along with some electrical tape and probably the aforementioned hammer. Now, a few years later, I own a toolbox and a hand-held metal detector, although I don’t own my own spirit level. Still, Early signs seem to show that I’m progressing along the road of grown-upmanship quite nicely.

Consulting the ‘Shed index’, I also own hosepipe, a vice, a ten-metre extension cable, and a fairly good spade (or as the label clarifies, a ‘digging spade’). The garden fork has seen better days, having proved to be not quite as stout and sturdy as the roots of a deceptively resilient rose bush. Plus points all round though.

The presence of a lot of these items is out of necessity of course, rather than any particular desire on my part to shape up and bear tools. As an adult, I’m now much more responsible for my environment. As a child living with my parents, I was concerned principally with the kitchen and my own bedroom, and only felt any real responsibility for the latter.

That’s not to say I actually contributed to its physical upkeep, but then it rarely needed it - the walls never required redecoration in all the time I was there due to the proliferation of posters, and thankfully there were precious few areas that required repairs during my years as resident, save for one time when I stood on the radiator to better reach a spider on the ceiling, and pulled the thing off the wall.

Anyway, children – and later teenagers – tend to go out quite a lot, and spend much of their time at home in the spaces they eat and sleep in. While they may well roam into other rooms, and indeed should have every freedom to do so, stumbling upon one in an unexpected area of the house can still cause slight surprise, akin to finding the hoover standing in the middle of the kitchen, or the TV remote in the bathroom.

As such, they don’t spend that much time looking at the guttering on the front of the house, or wondering if that crack on the landing ceiling was that big last week. Now, however, I’ve got a house of my own, and so am responsible for its upkeep, hence the tools and other bits of hardware. I am now a man with a castle, and the necessary paraphernalia to maintain its well-being.

The worry, however, comes when you consider the other things back in my toolbox. For alongside the pliers and such, there also rest a surprisingly large number of allan keys which came free with various items of flat pack furniture accrued over the years. And a load of picture wire. And some spare curtain hooks. And two rechargeable battery charger packs. And, thrown in there because I discovered they were handy for getting a nice edge on the sealant round the kitchen sink, some lollipop sticks.

Forty of them.

Even counting the sink in the lean-to loo, I still only own three sinks. And two of them aren’t sealed into any kind of surface.

And this is where I’ve realised that my toolbox does not in fact paint the picture of a mature and domestic young man, but of a paranoid ninety-year-old hoarder incapable of throwing anything anyway for fear that the world around him will threaten to collapse that afternoon unless he can lay his hands on twelve identical allan keys and a fistful of lollipop sticks.

Bumsocks.

New targets of irritable intolerance

A couple of posts ago I wrote about using the tag cloud to one side of the page to see what sort of content was falling out of my fingers most frequently, and what sort of identity this blog was evolving. (I’ve since removed some posts about music and the internet and may well post them somewhere else – I felt that passionate cultural comment was somewhat diminished if I then spoke with the same gusto and vitriol about biscuits and polar bears.)

One of the tags that did seem to float prominently to the surface was ‘grumpiness’, about which I was slightly wary. I used to think I was fairly tolerant over all. Stuff didn’t really wind me up, and I was reasonably stoic about life in general. Things just weren’t really worth getting worked up about, and problems wouldn’t be resolved by stressing and moaning about them.

But I’m starting to actually find that many new targets of irritable intolerance are actually just by-products of being enthusiastic about other elements of existence.

Take cats.

Previously, I have always been heartily positive towards cats: for the most part they seem calm and don’t require lots of energy. As long as you feed them and let them in and out of the garden, they prefer you to be reasonably inactive so that they can find you easily and sit on your lap. I like all of this. They encourage dormancy and relaxation. I’ve always liked cats.

But I own a house now. With a garden. With a nice pond with plants and fish and gravel along one side.  And a cat living next door. And no matter how charming that cat may be to others who know it, I can’t stand the bugger.

It’s not the pond that’s so much of the issue here – it’s deep and wide enough for all the fish and other assorted life to be safely out of paws reach - but the gravel itself. And its apparent convenience for the neighbour’s cat whenever he fancies going to the toilet. Which nature requires he do quite regularly.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about poo in particular, but more about the fact that I’ve realised that certain simple elements of my life (a big active pond with gravel around it) bring with them a grumpiness towards random factors that marr my enjoyment of them (cats). Random factors which I otherwise had a lot of time for.

My growing animosity towards cats is purely because I’m sick of cleaning up after one in particular; or rather tired of regularly and liberally spraying the garden with lemon juice and garlic to discourage it. But I’m aware that if I don’t acknowledge this, I’m like to end up with a hearty bah humbug attitude to the lot of them. And when grumpiness grows like this, it’s very difficult to reign it back in again (particularly as random bursts of it can be so damn self-indulgently enjoyable).

But I’m not prepared to entertain continued dislike on such a grand scale on the basis of one unpleasant, albeit reocurring encounter. Harbouring resentment towards an entire species seems a little daft, (unless you’ve been formally insulted by the elected representative of all the world’s butterflies or something).

Cleaning up animal mess isn’t a great time to try to calm down with a few deep breaths, but I do recognise the need to remain calm and mature and keep things in perspective. At least, that’s what I try to remind myself, whenever I’m cleaning up the gravel in my back garden.

And flinging cat poo over the neighbours fence.