And You're Back in the Room

Hi Zeitgeisters,

I am a lazy person.

How lazy are you Mr Trivia?

I can’t be bothered buying furniture, whitegoods, cutlery or crockery so I rent a furnished and fitted apartment in South Perth.

Okay, not a snappy punchline. Not even funny, but it’s true. I had to move to my present address because my last place (approximately three blocks West from here) was sold. My former landlord had another place for the same rent and he became my current landlord.

Last night I was tidying up and I realised that I have one of those “spatula-shaped” cheese slicers. Y’know, you run it over the surface of the cheese and a perfect slice curls off the top. Maybe it’s a butter curler or it could be an ice cream shaver. Whatever it is, I got one. I also have a jug for fruit juice and about twice the ice cube trays I thought I had.

So like some dork, I have discovered a whole new Narnia Universe of utensils and vessels at the backs of cupboards and drawers, even though I’ve lived here now for nearly seven weeks.

Lazy, like I said. And also unobservant. (And a Capricorn, too, if that’s sounds good. Although my single status is legal rather than actual. I don ‘t live with my partner Miss Pink, but I’ll open up that can of Spam in a later blog.)

The unobservant thing has plagued me all my life. When I was a boy scout in the ‘80s we used to play this observation game that the Boy Scouts’ founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powel, went on about in his ground-breaking tome, Scouting for Boys.

It’s called Kim’s Game and it’s named after a Rudyard Kipling character called Disco Murray (kidding.) The game works this way. You arrange a dozen or so small items on a tray. You get the players to concentrate on the tray for about thirty seconds. Then you cover the tray and get the players to write down what the objects are. The brain tends to remember about five things easily. So most people only remember ten or so of the items.

That probably makes the 1980s sound a little dull for you younger readers. Perhaps if I explain that this usually happened to a blasting soundtrack that included New Order, Flock of Seagulls and Cheap Trick, then it might seem more fun.

I was only average at Disco Murray’s Game. And the older I get, the less observant I become. In my mid- 20s I went to a therapist for about two and a half years. One day near the end of a session I noticed a beautiful floor to ceiling bookcase at the back of his office. I asked him when he had it put in. He said it had always been there for as long as I had been seeing him. “So you’re finally really here in the room,” he said in that inscrutable way psychologists have.

He had a point. I was always in my own bubble when I went in there. Psychologists tend to cost a lot, so you tend to load up on exciting neuroses and “me” tidbits before a session to make sure you get your money’s worth. We had nearly come to the end of all our sessions and so I was more free to take in my surroundings.

Of course, Jeff (who is no longer with us), might have been taking the piss. Maybe the bookcase was put in three days before I asked my question. Too late to find out now. I remember when he died, I had a definite sense of, “So who am I going to tell stuff to?” Charmingly, my first thought was for myself.

It’s still a problem. Where is there for me to ramble on about inconsequential stuff that happens? I need somewhere that I can show photographs of my former apartment with its truly awful fruit-salad curtain that no furniture could be matched to. It’s a tough one. I’ll have to mull it over.

Elevate the Insignificant

Mr Trivia