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.