Windmills of my mind......

So last night, we’re sitting on the Other Half’s marvellously squishy sofa, watching telly. All normal, nothing to see here. At some point during the evening’s programming, there’s a (very) random reference to Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat. All of a sudden it’s as if I’m channelling Pam Ayres – I’m helplessly reciting the first verse while the Other Half looks on with that combination of pity and horror that you never want to see on the face of someone you love, particularly if it’s you that’s put it there. This happens to me all the time, and is part of the reason for this blog. At any given point on any given day, my brain is endlessly generating reams and reams of pointless information, triggered by anything I might see or hear. The reason I know the poem about the fucking cat (yes, I know Pam Ayres didn’t write it, however she is responsible for the deeply marvellous “Spare a Thought for Hedgehogs”) is that we once had to do something cringy and self-conscious (the details of which fortunately escape me but I know there was a piano involved…..) with it during a drama lesson in the third year at school. This worries me. I’m thirty two years old, for crying out loud – why do I need to be blessed with almost total recall of something that happened nearly twenty years ago? I find this particularly galling as (although I really don’t need to) I can’t remember what I did yesterday, or where I’ve put the piece of paper that details term dates at Small Person’s school. You’d think my brain could run some sort of rudimentary filtering system but no, apparently it’s more important that I can remember that we once rubbed kiwi lip gloss into Lee Piggott’s hair during a quiet moment in an English lesson in 1987 (he was endlessly entertaining in a passive sort of way), than whether or not my daughter should today be receiving a formal education. It happened to me again this morning – someone sitting at the desk behind me mentioned a surname, and before you can say “just lie down on the couch, madam” I’m frenziedly Googling in an effort to confirm my suspicions that there was a character with that name in obscure eighties camp-as-christmas film “Earth Girls are Easy”. Turns out it was Wiploc not Diplock, but you see what I’m up against here.

Fortunately the Other Half is as mental as me, altho he’s loathe to admit it. As far as I see it, a man who systematically sponges down the shower while he’s still in it, and thinks his obsession with the vertical blinds in his house (apparently they must be closed in a certain direction….who knows which one…..I always guess) is perfectly normal is hardly in a position to comment on my hoovering fixation or my strongly-held personal belief that the best place to store important documents is in the bread bin.

Trust me, we’re a match made in heaven.

You know what I want to eat right now? Toffo’s.