Things have been really busy
here at JANIE CROW lately, what with the crochet club, workshops and some other
new ventures which I will tell you about soon, so with all the activity of the
past few months I decided it was time I took a couple of days off to give
myself a chance to recharge my batteries and get my head in a good place ready
to start again with all the things that need to be done next week. It was a
spur of the moment decision yesterday morning to add an extra day to my weekend
and put all things work related to the back of my mind and spend the day
officially ‘off’!
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| tidy shelves |
Usually when I have some time
off, over the weekend for example, I plan what I am going to do. I make plans
for haircuts, cleaning, shopping, visiting, decorating – all those things that
don’t fit into my working week. I will invariably have a lie in on a Saturday
morning and go for a swim session on a Sunday morning. I will always try to
schedule in a family meal – where we all sit down and eat at the table TOGETHER
and AT THE SAME TIME, usually polishing off Sunday evening with a movie on the
TV and a few glasses of wine. Weekends are busy and filled with things to do, its
not that I don’t enjoy them, but they are never particularly restful, not
really what I would class as ‘me time’ or ‘time off’.
So there I was yesterday
morning, feeling a bit like a naughty child who had bunked off school. I spent
the morning feeling a bit smug – I went back to bed for a bit, caught up with
the Sunday supplements which had been piling up for a while, even reading the
reviews of TV programmes I had missed, cursing myself for not setting Sky to
record them even though I rarely get time to watch them (I have the whole 3rd
series of 6 feet under taking up a stupid amount of space on the hard drive
because one day I might watch it). I took a rather long leisurely shower, had
breakfast/lunch then sat and contemplated the day ahead of me – all 12 hours of
it - what to do, what to do, what to do….?
Having an unexpected day off
meant that I had no plans to fall back on and had to come up with something
that was going to fill my day. I made a decision that the ‘thing’ that I was
going to do should not involve the computer (Facebook, Pinterest, surfing etc.),
was not to involve yarn, a crochet hook or a knitting needle, was not to
involve cooking or washing and was not to involve spending money! Easy! Dressed
and ready for my day, I wondered about my little house thinking about what to
do, absent mindedly picking up bits of dirty washing from bedroom floors, clearing
up coffee cups and empty crisp packets (why cant kids put packaging of any
description in the bin?), running the duster along the picture rails, bleaching
the sink, I ran the vacuum cleaner over the carpets, cleaned the mirrors and
did the recycling; all this whilst still thinking about what I was going to do
for the day.
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| no piles of paper here |
I came up with a few ideas; I
could go into town and see an exhibition, I could take the dog for an extra
long walk, I could ring a friend and go for a coffee, I could start a new
painting. All these options appealed to me and just as I had made the decision
to take myself into town for a few hours (after all there is only so long that
a girl can keep herself away from the lure of John Lewis Oxford Street and
Anthropologie on Regent Street even if the trip was bound to involve spending
money) the key turned in the front door and Summer was home from school! How
could this have happened? How could doing silly little jobs like dusting,
bleaching and sweeping have frittered the day that had stretched ahead of me
away? 4pm! Blooming 4pm!
‘Crestfallen’, ‘disappointed’
and ‘cheated’ are all words that spring to mind and so very ‘annoyed’ at myself
for letting the chance of a day ‘off’ slip through my fingers. There I was –
4pm in the afternoon, certainly not in a cheery frame of mind, snappy and
irritable with yet another dilemma - it was now too late to do any of the
things I had considered, the galleries would be shutting, the tubes would be
full of people coming home from work, the friends who might have gone for
coffee where probably beginning to think about Friday night dips and glasses of
white wine and it was definitely not an option to start a painting as the light
was beginning to dip from the back of the house. By 5pm my daughter Summer had
left the house once more for a sleep over and since I was now alone again I
still had a few hours of time ‘off’ to decide what to do with.
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| everything all put away |
By 5.30 I had made my
decision at long last. I would spend what few hours I had left of my ‘off’ time
finishing off the jobs I had kind of started whilst contemplating my day
earlier on, but instead of fiddling about with a little bit of dusting and
titivating I would do my full blown spring clean – how exciting! What a
marvellous decision!I moved beds and scrubbed down the walls, cleaned the
architraves and paintwork and even managed to move the chest of drawers in our bedroom
and re-organise the drawers. I washed the windows and rearranged my shelves; I
packed away some yarn and changed the duvets. By 8pm I’d had enough so I made
some soup, watched the movie ‘Captain America’ (absolutely awful by the way)
and got myself ready for bed.
I am not the world’s greatest
sleeper; I tend to over think things and spend lots of time wakeful in the night.
This used to worry me, but over the past few years I have learnt to accept it.
I have periods where I feel really tired and have to do a ‘long haul’ sleep,
but mostly I use my wakeful time in the night to good advantage and often think
about design work, planning and logistics. So, as I lay there last night
thinking about my day, I recalled a conversation I had with a few of the ladies
at last week’s crochet club workshop where the guilt factor of our knitting and
crochet habits was discussed. I have lost count of the number of times I have
heard people say that they only sit down and crochet or knit once all their
other chores are done, others that have said they allocate a certain allotted
time of the day to work on their projects, and even those who don’t do it whilst
their partners are around due to the ‘guilt’ factor. I looked back on the last
10 hours and realised that the decisions I had made (or not made) about my day
were also subconsciously based not only on the guilt factor, but on the
necessity of me completing a job which at some point, be it sooner or later,
would have to be done (because of course the world would stop turning if we
didn’t all do our spring cleaning).
This made me think - WHY do
we do this to ourselves? Why do we constantly feel the need to do stuff? Bet
your bottom dollar that if a man had a day ‘off’ he wouldn’t spend most of it
agonizing over what to do. He wouldn’t find himself categorising ‘things to do’
by necessity or have a guilt trip about following his hobby. I know that if
Andy (the lovely Mr C) was planning a day off he wouldn’t think twice about
doing what he would call ‘nothing’ – this surmounts to watching TV, reading his
book and drinking a few bottles of cider. So why do I beat myself up about
always having something to tick off the mental (in my case also physical) list
of ‘things to do’?
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| new bunting |
I don’t have an answer. I am
resigned to the fact that I will live my life according to lists and timetables
and that there will always be something that needs to be done. That time ‘off’
is in fact a figment of my imagination and that next time I even contemplate
‘bunking off’ I should think long and hard about the decision. Whether this is
a common trait in females or just a personality thing is not the point, I have
to accept that I am unlikely to change - there will always for me be this
conflict over the fact that I believe ‘time off’ only exists if we physically
take ourselves away from home. For now I have a clean house and perhaps the
therapeutic benefits that went along with doing a really good cleaning session.
I have a sparkling sink and neat shelves, clean duvets and less dust, my domestic
efforts of yesterday have physical proof – the family can see what I did with
my day ‘off’ and I can sit back a bit today and enjoy the fact that we can see
through the windows properly and there aren’t wafts of dust when the dog wags
her tail enthusiastically against the rug!