I despise ditherers and their snowflaky ‘Ooh, should I?’
Say someone were to free up two years of your life and hand it back to you, how would you spend it?
If you can immediately answer – a tour of coastal Nissen huts, perfecting your bloomers for Bake Off 2019, or even just growing out that disastrous Katy Perry pixie cut – then, well done. You shall have your two years. In fact, they are already yours.
If, however, you ummed and ahhed and raised your eyes heavenwards, then you are guilty of dithering.
Aside from being very annoying company, you will never again see those two years that research shows you have wasted vacillating over what to watch on Netflix (four minutes spent every time you turn it on), what to wear to the restaurant (four more) and, so help me, another six melodramatically agonising over the merits of the sea bass or the risotto.
As you may have gathered, I am not given to shilly-shallying. I despise ditherers and their snowflaky “Ooh, should I? Or shouldn’t I?” self-indulgence, because that’s what it is: look-at-me self-importance masquerading as self-doubt.
Some of us – the ones juggling full-time jobs and fuller-time children and dogs and a chameleon and a gecko and organising the summer holidays and the weekends – haven’t got enough give in the
system to accommodate indecisiveness.
My husband, on the other hand, has elevated faffing to an art form, and tends to respond to any suggestion with the eminently reasonable-sounding but infuriatingly noncommittal: “We could do…”
Shall we get tickets to the theatre? We could do.
Shall we get an electrician to sort the kitchen lights? We could do.
Shall we plant pampas grass out the front and hold a swingers’ party? We could do.
I’ve long since realised it’s a stalling technique that translates as “I couldn’t possibly be expected to make a decision about something so important, but if you do it I will obligingly buy the ice cream at the interval/fetch the stepladder/ throw the car keys into whichever bowl you have bossily chosen”.
The upside is that I get to do things my way. The downside is that I sometimes make mistakes (the pampas grass springs to mind), but I’d rather occasionally be in the wrong than bogged down in a permanent quandary.