Town Mouse

Good intentions

THERE has been some discussion of New Year resolutions at home. Revealingly, they’re generally expressed in one of two ways: the first person singular or the first person plural. The former can be taken at face value as good intentions, but the latter are really indirect instructions to someone else. For example, arriving home this week, it was correctly observed that ‘we’ really ought to get round to repainting the front door. In the particular division of family labours that applies in our house, however, that resolution might more truthfully have been addressed to me in the second person singular.

One of the children, meanwhile, has welcomed 2019 with a weekly timetable. The grid has been drawn with a ruler (an outstanding mark of care) and it begins well: Monday 7am ‘Get up’, 8am ‘Get dressed and leave house’ and 9am ‘Start working at school’. Considering that the regular reality is 7am ‘Groan sleepily in bed’, 8am ‘Complain that you weren’t woken earlier’, 8am to 8.40am ‘Dress slowly and nibble ineffectually at breakfast’, 9am ‘Arrive puffing at school gates’, it all sounds promising. The problem is that, after 9am on Monday morning, the rest of the timetable is a blank. Clearly, they don’t want to make unrealistic promises. JG