Multi-Tasking as an Art Form

Multi-Tasking as an Art Form                                                            June14th

Our entire relationship long, Steve has slept more hours than me per night.

Mostly I have one or two hours less than him. Another difference between us is that Steve enjoys the occasional lay-in, if he has been working hard and does not have any reason to get up early, he can stay in bed and dream on, or even just lay there resting. That is not something I ever do. If I wake up; I get up.  

I have previously had long periods of spasmodic insomnia, some over quite long periods of time. My daughter bought me a series of Acupressure sessions as a birthday present about five years ago because of that. I was surprised that it helped enormously. I was treated by a practitioner whose name is Feng Wang at Harmony Acutherapy Clinic in Chichester, West Sussex, its close to the Cathedral there, about twelve miles away from our home. 

So I find it to be strange but true, that I have slept very well all through the Covid Lockdown. I seemed to simply to give myself over to the situation and accept the lock down life, trying to remain calm about it.

 

Having completed our home made Triathlon yesterday, to mark the fact that we were missing our favourite UK race this weekend we were both, as expected, tired after doing it. Steve did not set the alarm last night. I woke up at 5.30 am and tried not to disturb Steve on his catch up sleep morning, I got out of bed fifteen minutes later. I fed the cat, made a cuppa and went up to our office/sewing/ironing room upstairs.

Now, about the worse thing Steve says to me is that I am a nightmare. He is such a calm sweet and kind man and is never nasty to me. I have to agree with him on the nightmare name. I am a fidget and I always have a hundred and one things that I am doing at the same time. Sitting down quietly, gazing out of the window is not something that sits well with my ways. I even iron jeans and I mend them or patch them. I have no idea what the idea is behind deliberately wrecking a new pair of jeans to make them look worn. They don’t look worn OK. So it must be to expose the flesh then? Why would you want that? How does that work. Is it just fashion? Is that fashion? There are two sides to everything aren’t there? I will continue with the mending and ironing I think.

When Steve finally surfaced today, he stood at the door, (naked as a jaybird) and asked what I was doing. I told him that obviously I was doing the ironing and making notes for today’s blog but that I was also reading through Bright Star by John Keats repeatedly, (it lay on the settee behind the ironing board) and still trying to learn it by heart. We discussed why it was that I was finding it so hard to slide the poem into my memory banks. I have been trying to get it stuck there for months, which is totally out of character. I love the poem, but I find it most unusual, although it follows all the sonnet rules. I learnt Ozymanias by Percy Bysshe Shelley in a few weeks, which was not at all bad for an old brain like mine.

Steve offered that, maybe it was because I was putting myself under pressure by writing my blog every day instead of twice per week as in the pre-lockdown days and that possibly there was a limit to how much an eighty year old brain can handle at one time, even for somebody who was trying to turn multi-tasking into a new art form. He added that it didn’t really matter anyway. Mmmm. Well it does matter to me simply because I don’t like to let anything get the better of me and this is just another kind of challenge. 

Every now and again this morning I have cast my mind back to yesterday and the Littlehampton Lockdown triathlon. A couple of things that I was thinking about were, that it was unusual for us to have done something suddenly and without completely thinking it out. In particular we both had a bit of a problem because of yet another lockdown job Steve had set himself. He had replaced the cleats on our bike shoes and in my case he had fitted new pedals too. Steve always does all pre-training bike preparation for me. He does everything and puts it all in the van, everything normally checked. In the excitement of the plan, neither of us had tested to new equipment though.

 

The bike section of our home spun triathlon was in fact our standard hill reps course. We both had some difficulty with clicking our shoes into the new cleats. I did get to grips with mine eventually after going up the first hill without getting my left foot and pedal snapped together at all until nearly the top. I got the hang of it after that and although tight, I managed OK. Steve entered the multi tasking competition by trying to struggle with his pedals connection whilst trying not to fall off his bike as he made little videos of me cycling at the same time. We both thought our biking was greatly improved for all the hours on the turbo trainers. We were both very happy about our cycling form. 

Just as a kind of P.S. today. This is more like a confession. I have just watched a video in the Hallé Orchestra’s series: Geek of the Week No 3. It was Simon Davies showing how he makes the reeds for his Contra Bassoon out of Bamboo! I was transfixed and comforted by it.