Assault by batteries

The war with machines has been a common sci-fi staple for some time now; the notion that one day soon we’ll create artificial intelligence leading to our appliances turning on us with their logically superior but emotionally uncaring mechanised brains and obliterating the human race with shoulder-mounted pulse cannons in a synchronised outbreak of cold global carnage. And that.

But I’m convinced that it’s not artificial intelligence that we should be worrying about, but the bloody energy required to keep even the most basic of gadget going in the first place.

By which I mean batteries. Double ‘A’s. Pesky poison-filled cylinders of unfulfilled promise, that plague my home like rats, deeply and inexterminably entrenched at the heart of so much of my waking procrastination.
Partly I’m to blame for my impatience with the things. Alright, largely I’m to blame. It’s my own laziness that stops me just replacing the damn things in the TV remote when it starts showing signs of invisibility to the television. When even the simplest of commands starts requiring multiple presses of the buttons. Sometimes ridiculously slowly and deliberately like I’m training a house-pet, or trying to convey the word ‘pressing’ in a game of charades.

It’s my fault that I take so long to replace the batteries in the smoke alarm in the spare bedroom that the beeping noise it makes – to alert you to it’s impending inability to rouse you from a smoke-surrounded slumber – has manage to travel downwards through a half-octave by the time I get round to acknowledging its value in my happy home.

And I’ve probably failed to correctly install the software for the cordless mouse sitting beside me right now, which loses connection with the computer approximately once every three minutes. And not the fault of the batteries which I replace on a monthly basis. And – suspecting that they’re not actually the problem – leave sprawling on the other side of the keyboard, intending to stick them in the errant telly remote when it next plays up, just to squeeze those remaining last drops of power out of them.

It’s laziness, I know. But at least none of my robots will have sufficient energy in their pulse cannons to wipe me out.

I lost the cheese tonight

Seriously: I took it out the fridge and cut a few slices while I decided what to do for tea. Put it away. Peeled some potatoes, chopped them into pieces while boiling a kettle of water, and set them bubbling away on the hob. Slipped a pie in the oven. Went to get the cheese back out the fridge for another few slices while I considered additional vegetables. Cheese wasn’t there.

We haven’t got a particularly over-stocked fridge right now, so it’s not like I just couldn’t find it amongst the jostling ranks of chilled and healthy produce. It genuinely wasn’t there. And I knew immediately that I’d put it somewhere stupid.

You know when you go to put on a CD, and you can’t find the case for the one already inside the stereo? And how when you’re feeling lazy you just pop it into the case that’s just been vacated by the album that you’re about to put on? And how after an evening of drunken laziness you awake to discover that you’ve placed ten different CDs into the cases of the ones that were played after them and you can’t find anything? I’m getting this way with food.

The cheese, for example, was in the cupboard that I’d earlier looked into, in search of some crisps. This wasn’t too bad, admittedly. Had I recently changed the bleach block in the bathroom, I might have later placed half a slab of medium cheddar in the cistern alongside it.

In most instances I’m evidently subconsciously cautious, however. Things tend to go into the fridge as a sort of unthinking default. Even bottles of washing up liquid, or occasionally books. But no harm comes to any of them. Certainly not of the kind that might result from unpacking a box of choc-ices into the DVD cabinet, for example, or putting dried cat food in with the broken biscuits.

It’s nice that even when I’m being stupid, some part of my brain is still trying to limit the damage I can cause. But I’m noticing my auto pilot is becoming less and less reliable when it comes to much simpler day-to-day tasks.

I’m finding myself sitting down to dinner, having equipped myself with an extra knife rather than a fork. The other day as I left the house for work, I grabbed my wallet, keys, bus pass, and instead of two memory sticks loaded with files that I needed that day - two lighters.

It’s not just me: a friend recently ran off a list of invited attendees for an upcoming party, counting as he went, and the first two people he said were different nicknames for the same individual. As he carried on to number three, a deep frown crept down his face as he evidently realised something was amiss. As he continued to list names he began to stare accusingly at his sequentially unfurling fingers, but he’d still got all the way to number five before he managed to pinpoint exactly what was wrong.

So from now on I’m going to pay extra special attention to my day-to-day activities, no matter how mundane. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go select some music to play. And then try and determine which case the actual CD is hiding in.

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.