My days (and yours too I expect) are made up of a proportion of essential tasks, things that must be done. Like cooking, cleaning and washing. These cold days – yes, it gets cold in Spain! – I add getting out of a warm bed in order to turn on the heating so as to render the house a little less like an icebox.
And then there’s cleaning and setting the fire. As I am not a multi-millionaire I can’t afford 24 hour air-con, so I have to rely in part on the log fire. I have to clean the glass door, remove and dispose of yesterday’s ash and set the fire; all these tasks involve bending down – fine for the young and lissome, but I am neither of these!
And then of course there’s Go fetch the logs! This task has a special unpleasantness; it involves a trip outside into the glacial air to wrestle with large pieces of recalcitrant wood without dropping them on my shins or putting my back out as I lift the log bucket.
And don’t say why don’t you store them indoors? You can’t store a whole winter’s worth of logs in the living room!
But these jobs have to be done. Fortunately they don’t take up too much time, so I urge myself on by telling myself that if I get on with it I’ll have plenty of time left over for pleasant but inessential tasks, like writing.
I don’t have to rely on my scribing abilities for a living, so writing is for me a pleasant task, a treat. I use it as a kind of reward; I dangle it in front of myself as an incentive to get the jobs done quickly, then I can sit down in the warm kitchen within easy reach of the kettle and lose myself in my own little Jos world, far away from reality.
How about you?
Thanks for this brief peek into “Jos World”. Indeed, each of us is bound by those daily chores which get very boring with their sameness. But I, too, look forward to settling in front of my computer to read and write.