Ben Elton, in his early career, did a very funny sketch around the problem of emptying the kitchen dustbin. He talked for twenty minutes about every conceivable excuse he would come up with in order not to take the bin liner out and dispose of the contents.
One of his evasion tactics was to start a conversation with his flatmates about the late Queen Mother. At this point he knew he was running out of things to talk about.
My version of this happened this week. I had to do the final page of my portfolio and managed to think of numerous excuses not to. In the end, I decided to weed our garden. This was truly desperate. I filled a black wheelie bin to the top, shaken down, with dead forget-me-nots. My ankles were eaten to pieces by mosquitoes and I was covered in burrs from the plants, but I did feel good about the spaces created after the blue carpet had been removed.
The superiority didn’t last long. The gaping hole in the jaw of the portfolio awaited me. I have run out of glue, I reasoned. It will have to wait until tomorrow when I can borrow a glue stick and laminate the last page.
But in the middle of looking for an unrelated piece of paper on my desk (another diversion), I found more glue, so I fixed the page and went to bed feeling positively virtuous.
Now, I have to catch up on a week’s worth of housework, and the bin isn’t emptied until Tuesday morning, so I would have nowhere to put the weeds, even if I did dig them up (only a quarter of an acre to go).
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