Today is Sunday. I think. I'm not entirely sure. I slept til noon, which would suggest it was a weekend, except I've slept until at least 10.30 for the past 10 days, so unless weekends just got longer I can no longer use that as a day-guide. I'm pretty sure everyone I know is going back to work tomorrow, which suggests tomorrow is Monday and therefore that today is Sunday.
Solved it. For now.
(And have also just made pretty much every friend who is sat at their post-Christmas desk in a post-Christmas funk and reading this as a procrastination technique hate my guts. Sorry.)
It's weird. I am totally losing a grip on time - the way you do when you're on holiday and have nothing to think about other than tide times and sunscreen application - except unless you're on an interminable holiday, you're conscious of it ending in 7, 6, 5....days (Sarah, stop smirking). While I can assure you sunscreen application is not on my timetable (I'm living in leggings, leg-warmers, fluffy jumpers and fingerless gloves and don't move from the fireside unless forced to by my mother), and tide-times are only relevant in that when I'm in my parents' bedroom looking out, I can either see mud or water (it's an estuary), Time has never felt more abstract or less relevant.
I love it.
It's like a breaking free, a reclamation. I could spend the whole day walking down the stairs and it wouldn't matter. Bloody great waste of time and pretty damn boring (not to mention cold - there's not fireplace on the stairs) but I could. I haven't felt that way since exams ended in my third year at uni and the longest summer of all time stretched out before me.
So what am I doing with my time? I hear you ask. Well, so far, nothing much. I wake up, don various necessary layers of clothing and go downstairs to make a latte with my parents' fancy new coffee maker and sit in quiet while I wake up a little. It's generally too late for breakfast so I wait a few hours and then have lunch. Then, if I'm feeling adventurous, I might go with mum to walk the dog. Then I read some more (I've just finished David Mitchell's brilliant book 'Ghostwritten' and have now moved onto Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia', for which she got assassinated for), maybe blog, check email, snoop on facebook, cook dinner for the family, watch TV, read, facebook, email, sleep. If my mum's around then my day is interrupted by demands for me to fold laundry or clean out cat-litter, but that's OK, I have time.
I'm guessing that tomorrow morning when I wake up and realise that everyone's been at work for the past 3 hours, I will feel a twinge of something. I don't think it'll be regret, or even relief, maybe sheepishness and an odd parallel-universe type sensation where everything continues as it always did except I'm not there (my peter pan complex doesn't extend to that particular window though - they're welcome to close it and forget all about me. Especially since if they don't forget me it's probably because I forgot to do something and they're all mad at me).
I like to think that this time of slothism is a necessary process for me to hoard the energy needed to move countries and all that that entails. I do think though that the knowledge that everyone is back to work tomorrow, will guilt trip me into setting my alarm for around 10am and maybe also setting myself the task of beginning to filter through all my stuff to try and condense it down to a few suitcases within the BA weight allowance.
On the other hand maybe I'll just give myself one more day of sleeping until I want coffee enough to get out of bed... friends, don't hate me, I'll be back to working soon enough and all of this will be but a wonderful, long, slothful dream.
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