The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  Was it possible that I had subconsciously thrown away the To-Do List because I didn’t want to carry on?

  And if my subconscious was indeed trying to sabotage my efforts to defeat the List, what did this mean for the future?

  I cast my mind back to the last time I had put the newspapers in the recycling box. It had been a Sunday evening, and, tellingly, it had been around the time that the List had gone missing, which ruled out my wife’s involvement in its disappearance. I’d been attempting to plan my future week of To Doing before the Sunday Night Pub Club and not feeling too well disposed towards it. In a bid to kick-start Item 423: ‘Find out what all the fuss is about Pink Floyd’ (which I had been avoiding like the plague) I resolved that I was no longer allowed to listen to any non-Pink Floyd-related music until I had worked my way through all fourteen of the band’s albums. This wouldn’t have been so bad had it been a normal weekend but that Saturday in a bid to tick off Item 519: ‘Buy more new music so that you don’t end up one as one of those sad blokes who only listens to stuff that they liked when they were twenty’, I’d spent well over a hundred quid in Polar Bear records in Kings Heath on CDs by The Hold Steady, Kate Nash, Richard Hawley, Amp Fiddler, Mice Parade, Iron and Wine, Calvin Harris, Ursula Rucker, Sammy Davis Jr, Laura Veirs, Mavis Staples and Beirut. Instead of listening to all this new music I was having to wade through Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets which, while I could see some people might like, I could never imagine, even with the doors of my mind wide open, ever voluntarily putting this CD on again. The list was ruining my evening and as Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk came on I’d had enough. Switching off the hi-fi and tidying up a bit, that must have been the moment when I’d scooped up the List with all the weekend newspapers littering the room and took the whole lot out to be recycled.

  Maybe Claire’s right, I thought, staring at the ceiling, maybe I was trying to sabotage myself.

  I picked up the List and balanced it in my hand. Did I really want to carry on? And if I did, where to start? I needed a good place to get stuck in. Some ticks that were tough yet satisfying would put me and my subconscious back on the straight and narrow. For a moment or two nothing stood out and then suddenly it hit me. The items on the list with scribbled red question marks against them indicated tasks started but yet to be finished. This is where I would begin. My next course of action would be to visit the ghosts of tasks incomplete and try to exorcise them once and for all.

  Starting with the previously abandoned Items 861 and 1277: ‘Clean all downstairs windows so that you don’t have to have the lights on in the middle of the day’, I battled my way through a good dozen ticks like Item 588: ‘Tell Dad that I love him while I still have the chance’, (which from him prompted the anxious question from him, ‘You’re not dying, are you?’); and Items 555-560: ‘Archive all the video of the kids onto DVD before you end up simultaneously losing a tape and their entire childhood in one go.’

  Achieving these ticks had the effect of making me feel more positive about the List. This was no longer me cherry-picking the easiest ticks, no, this was me, head bowed, taking on the List like a raging rhinoceros. I was invincible. Or at least I was until I went for a mid-week drink with Danby and Henshaw who decided to take me down a peg or two by pointing out the one item on the List that I had attempted and failed at least twice.

  ‘And it’s not going to get any better with you drinking this stuff, is it?’ Henshaw gestured to the pint in my hand. ‘You must know that beer’s full to the brim with calories, mate.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘It’s the diet equivalent of chocolate for blokes. If your Missus claimed she was on a diet and you caught her out snaffling a four-pack of Crunchies wouldn’t you think that she wasn’t taking her diet very seriously?’

  ‘Claire doesn’t need to diet,’ I replied.

  ‘Deviation!’ crowed Danby. ‘We’re talking about you, not your Missus. So don’t try getting off the subject.’

  ‘Fine. Just tell me what the subject is and I’ll stick to it like glue.’

  ‘You don’t really want us to spell it out to you do you, mate?’

  ‘We could spell it out “Give us a Clue” style,’ suggested Danby, and he stood up, with virtually everyone in the bar watching him, and proceeded to mime.

  ‘One word,’ said Henshaw barely able to breathe, he was laughing so hard.

  Danby tugged his ear.

  ‘Sounds like . . .’

  Danby mimed a man putting on a hat.

  ‘Sounds like . . . helmet,’ offered Henshaw, giggling like a girl.

  Danby shook his head.

  ‘Sounds like cap,’ wheezed Henshaw.

  Danby shook his head again.

  ‘Okay.’ Henshaw attempted to recover his composure. ‘Last try . . . sounds like hat.’

  Danby touched his nose with his finger in affirmation.

  ‘Okay,’ said Henshaw. ‘Let’s gather together what we know. It’s a single word that rhymes with “hat” that describes something obvious about our comrade here that he seems to need some help with. Could it possibly be described as a feminist issue?’

  ‘Too right.’ Danby spluttered into his Grolsch.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I sighed. You’ve had your fun. Now let’s move on.’

  ‘But I thought you were tackling the List head on like a . . . what was it?’

  ‘A “raging rhino”,’ I replied sheepishly, rueing my first and undoubtedly last mention of a horned animal as metaphor in the public arena.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Henshaw. ‘A “raging rhino,” and yet so far you’ve tried to diet, bought a bike, joined FatBusters! and had an all-over-body MOT to scare yourself into getting fitter and how much weight have you lost?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And how much have you gained?’

  ‘I dunno, I don’t weigh myself every five seconds, do I?’

  Danby laughed. ‘That sounds to me like the response of a bloke who has put on a pound or two since his last weigh-in.’

  ‘Three, okay?’ I could take no more. ‘I’ve put on three pounds since I started dieting.’ I looked at my pint and with more than a touch of remorse pushed it away.

  Henshaw pushed my pint back towards me. ‘Like the Garfield poster that my sister used to have on her bedroom door says: “The diet starts tomorrow so why bother messing up today?” ’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But I’ve had my fill of diets. I’m going to do something completely unrelated to the world of diet and exercise.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like getting on a plane and taking myself off to the other side of the Atlantic,’ I said triumphantly, picking up my pint. ‘I, my friends, am going to New York.’

  Chapter 26: ‘Every once in a while do more of the things you do for love.’

  ‘You’re going where?’ asked Claire the following day when I broke the news to her in the kitchen.

  ‘To New York,’ I replied. ‘It’s a List thing.’

  ‘What kind of list thing? I thought your To-Do List was about you doing ordinary things.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘So why has “Wind up wife by announcing that you’ve got to go to New York”, suddenly appeared on it?’

  ‘It hasn’t, “Go to New York” has never been on the To-Do List.’

  ‘So what possible reason could you have for going?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look, you’ll just have to trust me. There’s nothing dodgy going on. I’m not running away or trying to squeeze in a trip without you and the kids or get up to anything sneaky. But I do have to go and I do have to go quite soon.’

  I attempted to give her a little hug but she went all stiff, wriggled free and fixed me with her sternest stare.

  ‘Who else is going? Are you taking your Sunday night mates with you?’

  ‘Nope, I’m flying solo on this one.’

  ‘When would you go?’
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  ‘Towards the end of the month.’

  ‘And how long for?’

  ‘I’ll be gone a day, two max.’

  ‘Let me get this right. You’re flying all the way to America just for a night or two?’

  ‘I promise I’ll explain everything when I get back.’

  ‘And will I understand then?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ I suddenly felt slightly less sure of my answer, ‘At least I think you will.’

  ‘And this is really that important?’

  ‘Absolutely. And, when this is all done and dusted I’ll take you to New York whenever you like for as long as you like. But this thing . . . well it’s really important.’

  ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘You go and do whatever it is that you’ve got to do. Just so long as you know . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me and the kids will miss you like crazy.’

  Two weeks later just after eleven in the evening, local time, I found myself landing at Newark airport. On previous trips I’d managed to get through customs, jump in the back of a yellow cab to whichever hotel I was staying at, check myself in and, given that this was the city that supposedly never slept, still had plenty of time to indulge in my little I’ve-just-arrived-in-New-York ritual: CD shopping at the Virgin Megastore near Times Square in the middle of the night.

  Tonight was different. In a post 9/11 world it took three hours to make it through customs, by which time I’d lost the will to live, let alone the will to leave the safety and comfort of my hotel. So, following the ordering and polishing off of a quick room service minute steak sandwich and fries, I shed my clothes, crawled under the covers, flicked through a couple of pictures of Claire and the kids on my iPod, and fell into a jet-lagged sleep.

  Five hours later a truck beeping loudly before bellowing in a Dalek voice: ‘Warning! Vehicle Reversing!’ dragged me from the depths of sleep. For a few moments I couldn’t work out where I was. Thanks to the hotel’s heavy curtains the room was pitch black and as my eyes adjusted I began to pick out the outline of various objects: a chair, my suitcase, the mirror on the wall. I wasn’t at home. I was in a hotel. I looked at the clock next to the bed. It was just after seven in the morning. I closed my eyes then reopened them. I had a vague feeling that the hotel wasn’t in London. It all came back to me. I was in New York City.

  And suddenly I realised that it wasn’t a dream. I really had flown all the way across the Atlantic just to buy my wife a $12 mug.

  Six years earlier, around this very time of year Claire had taken me to New York for three days, as a surprise gift for my thirtieth birthday. We had done pretty much everything that you’re supposed to do in New York. We went up to the top of the Empire State Building, visited the Museum of Modern Art, took walks through Central Park and visited Coney Island but most of all we shopped. And of all the shops we visited by far and away our favourite was the delicatessen-cum-homewares store, Dean and Deluca.

  For those of you who have never been, Dean and Deluca is pretty much the delicatessen-cum-homewares store to end all delicatessen-cum-homewares stores. It’s like a temple dedicated to the creation and consumption of food and is a wonderful way to kill an afternoon if all you want to do is stare and drool.

  Staring and drooling is what Claire and I did over all of the amazing prepared food that they had on display. When we hit the homewares section Claire officially fell in love with a mug, a cream-coloured mug with thick contours and a solid-looking handle. Printed on the side of it in tasteful script were the words: Dean and Deluca.

  I should point out here that Claire doesn’t have many vices. She doesn’t do expensive shoes or handbags. She doesn’t really like shopping for clothes and has little to no interest in jewellery. With the exception of her hair (which she takes very seriously indeed) she is pretty much the definition of a cheap date. Her one Achilles heel, however, is mugs. She loves them. Claire’s idea of a perfect day would be spent perusing the shelves of a shop called ‘Mugs, Mugs, Mugs’, while drinking from a mug only interrupting her perusing/drinking to look through the ‘Mugs, Mugs, Mugs’ catalogue for anything that they didn’t have in store.

  In the eleven years that we’ve been together I have seen Claire buy more mugs than any sane woman could want. She’s bought tall mugs, small mugs, wide mugs and deep mugs; she’s bought plain mugs and mugs with every kind of pattern. But I had never seen her look at a mug the way that she looked at that Dean and Deluca mug. It was mug at first sight. And unlike other mugs that, over time, tended to fall out of favour to be replaced by yet another of its kind, the Dean and Deluca mug was always number one. So when I managed to break it the summer before last by knocking it off the counter while making myself a cup of tea to go with my fried breakfast, Claire wasn’t just saddened by its loss, she was devastated. And though I tried to find a replacement, purchasing several near-identical mugs from Heals, Habitat, the Conran Shop and John Lewis, to Claire’s eyes none of them came close. I even scoured the internet but discovered the Dean and Deluca website didn’t deliver to the UK. And that was when I realised that, excessive contributions to the world’s carbon dioxide output notwithstanding, there was no option but to jump on a plane and get one in person.

  Stepping out of the tranquil air-conditioned calm of the Muse hotel into the hustle and bustle of New York in the morning rush hour was like stepping from an old black and white movie into a full-on stereophonic Technicolor extravaganza. The yellow cabs, the skyscrapers, the pretzel sellers, the commuters dressed for business from the ankle up and for jogging from the ankle down – there was no doubt that I was in New York.

  I opened my map of central Manhattan and tried to get my bearings. As far as I could remember there were only two Dean and Deluca stores in the area. The first was a smaller operation just off Rockefeller Plaza. Claire and I had visited it for lunch one afternoon and I had infuriated many busy office workers behind me in the queue by taking ages to formulate my order because I’d been distracted by the sight of Wesley Snipes walking past. It wasn’t actually Wesley Snipes but just some random bloke who on closer inspection didn’t even remotely resemble the actor in question, but it was enough to make me momentarily forget that I hardly ever imbibe hot drinks, let alone the tall skinny mochaccino that I seemed to be in the process of ordering. The second store, in SoHo, was the larger of the two and the one where Claire had bought the mug. Given that the Rockefeller centre was closer than SoHo I headed there first.

  Walking through the busy New York Streets I tried to adopt a confident strut as though I were a native and not a daft tourist with a funny walk. There’s something about being in strange countries and not being sure of how things work that makes me self-conscious, so in a spot of reverse psychology I try to act the opposite of how I really feel.

  My confident strut and I barely raised an eyebrow on my way to the Rockefeller centre, which I took as a good sign. Pausing outside the shop I peered in: they had mugs, but tall latte-types like the ones you get in Starbucks rather than the good solid diner-style mug that Claire loved so much. I thought about asking one of the girls at the tills, but even though it was only mid-morning there was a long queue and I didn’t want a bunch of New Yorkers tutting at me for holding up the queue. My best bet was to head to SoHo and have done with it.

  Although yellow cabs are a great way of getting around New York, nothing beats walking. The sights, the sounds, the tastes, the smells, they’re all there to be witnessed first hand if you take to the streets. Heading down Sixth Avenue I made my way towards Broadway and then down into SoHo. On the way I passed a middle-aged woman in a fur coat and sunglasses walking six Yorkshire terriers, a group of school children heading into Madison Square Park and a man who may or may not have been the actor who used to play Dr Carter on ER.

  It felt good to be here. Seeing the sights. Hearing the sounds. Walking the streets. And all for a good cause. Claire and I would definitely be back here soon, I told myself.

  At the SoHo store, I t
ook a deep breath and walked in. It had barely changed. There was still the café at the front and the amazing delicatessen counter to the right. Determined to claim my prize as soon as possible I headed to the rear of the store to the mug section and began scouring. I looked high and I looked low, repeating my actions several times over before throwing myself on the mercy of one of the store’s assistants, giving her a detailed description of the mug. But to no avail.

  It simply wasn’t there.

  Chapter 27: ‘No matter how hard things get . . . no matter how fed up you are . . . make sure you don’t give up.’

  As dozens of New Yorkers buzzed around in my vicinity doing their shopping, the magnitude of my folly dawned on me: I’d flown over 17,000 miles in search of a mug that wasn’t there in order to tick it off on a 1,277-item To-Do List that I now felt like ditching on the spot. Having overcome chicken pox, the Bollywoodisation of one of my novels, my wife booking random holidays without my knowledge, and losing the List, my mission was going to come to an end because of a simple $12 mug. It was more than I could take.

  On the pavement outside Dean and Deluca I drew up a mental list of reasons why it would be completely okay for me to give up:

  Reasons why it’s completely okay for me to give up on the To-Do List this close to the end:

  1. I’d given it my best shot.

  2. I missed my kids.

  3. The To-Do List had been a stupid idea from the very beginning.

  4. I was on my own in New York.

  5. It was practically my birthday (and no one should have to work this close to their birthday).

  6. I’d almost reached the deadline anyway.

  7. I could save myself the hassle of having to spend months on end turning the To-Do List into a book.

  8. I wouldn’t have to carry on pretending that I was getting anything out of War and Peace.

  9. I’m already reasonably comfortable with the idea of failure so giving up on the List would be a great way of reacquainting myself with the notion.