The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part Two)

This is going to be one of those blog posts that I write and make public with some degree of trepidation, anticipating a silent response confined to the minds of its readers which will most likely include feelings of pity and disdain; because this is the confession of an uptight and irritable human automaton as to how he spends a typical weekend.  I know what I am, a creature of habit, riled by the insignificant flaws in life’s rich tapestry and spurning all the clichéd measures of what our society deems to be necessary factors in LIVING LIFE TO THE FULL.  I aim my arrows of ambition at a cheap Argos dartboard of CONTENTMENT and demonstrate no interest in reaching for the sky or the stars as Douglas Bader and Steps might have encouraged.

Friday evening I return from work, moistened by an hour’s moderately-paced squash with my friend Tim, consequently confident that my weight-loss app will now credit me enough calories to eat and drink whatever the fuck I like that night.  Routinely, this means wine.  If the “squash with Tim” confession hasn’t already painted a picture of a middle-class bastard, then the suburban domesticity that has led to me unshackling myself from the beer-drinking conditioning of my youth must surely give you a clue.  Secondly – but only every few weeks, because we’re not fucking rolling in it, here in St Albans – we order a Chinese (same order every time) and sit in front of the telly gorging and boozing ourselves into a stupor  (I usually nod off during Graham Norton, despite the garish orange of the set burning into my retinas and the shrill laughter piercing my ear-drums like a maniacal Banshee).  This is quality family time.  Our boy, being 17, is usually out behaving better than this, but myself, Mrs B and our daughter will battle for control of the channels, with me coming out the loser and having to record whatever music shows are on BBC4 in favour of whatever tripe-for-eyes the females of the household wish to relax to.

Saturday morning arrives at about 9 am with lethargy, a dry mouth and a mild heaviness of the head.  Eventually, I will employ myself with the task of doing the housework, just like every modern man who is robbed of his need to hunt and fight and make things and who cannot ACTUALLY relax in a messy house, even though the perpetrators of nearly all of that mess can and would.  Yes, I am sorry to say, just for a couple of hours on these mornings, I fight back the loathing I have for the habits of those I love most, the untidy buggers.

The kitchen is cleared and swept and made in some respect more hygienic than a backstreet abattoir for plague-ridden Medieval dogs, before I move onto tidying and dusting and polishing the downstairs.  I studiously avoid getting any more polish on the new flat-screen HD telly, because within a week of buying the thing (having held out for years waiting for the old cathode ray tube antique to expire), I noticed a cloudy patch covering half the screen, reminiscent of a large piss-stain on a white bed-sheet, a point of ironic misadventure that galls me on a daily basis now.

The sound of dried sweetcorn kernels and other sizeable acrid debris being sucked into the hoover gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction.  I carry my machine of tidy-harmony up and down all three storeys, drumming up a second sweat of physical exertion in 24 hours and then reward myself with a late morning bath.

I measure out the rest of the weekend in laundry loads, the first of which will have hopefully completed by the end of my bath – I say “hopefully” because I own seven pairs of pants.  If it hasn’t completed, then I’ll have to wear swimming trunks or even some old underwear with a perished gusset for the next few hours.  To ensure that I am not rushed to hospital so embarrassingly attired, I avoid traffic for the rest of Saturday; but this is wise anyway, as Saturday afternoons tend to bring out the cunt in most drivers.

I bask in the clean tidiness of our home for the afternoon, devoting myself to work (I’m a teacher and a workaholic), while the football results trickle in and my family engage in more exciting pursuits, like shopping and socialising.  Some weeks we’ll have friends up for the evening, in which case I’ll be truer to my roots and switch to bitter as my booze of choice.  I’ll inflict my vinyls on the visitors for a few hours and congratulate myself on a level of sociable normality that the rest of my misanthropic existence belies.  Most Saturday evenings, however, it’s crap telly, wine and an unhealthy amount of distraction from the social media on my mobile.

Sundays tend to be more laundry loads and more school work and an impending sense of grief that the weekend is dying a slow death, occasionally punctuated by an Arsenal game on telly or the less common venture out of the house for some worthy reason.  If I have washed up the pans from a roast dinner and pulled the last pile of washing out of the dryer before 10 pm, then I don’t wallow in a desolate mood of abject irritation before bed and I reflect upon a weekend of productive contentment and unambitious joy.