Sophia Money-Coutts confesses she has reached peak laziness
Enjoying supper and ‘Sex and the City’ with a house-guest, was it really too lazy to order ice cream from my sofa?
Ifear it’s rock bottom. True, a few months ago I ordered a single bottle of Rinse Aid on Amazon, and the other day I ignored a clean load in the washing machine for 24 hours because I couldn’t face hanging it up. But last Saturday, I plumbed the depths of idleness by ordering two tubs of ice cream, via Deliveroo, from Budgens.
It was around 7.40pm when houseguest Holly and I polished off our supper on the sofa. To make matters even more embarrassing, this was also a Deliveroo takeaway. Since Holly usually lives in Hong Kong, we thought we’d order dim sum to celebrate Chinese New Year. And some chilli squid.
Also, two prawn summer rolls, along with a few sticks of chicken satay, which are technically Indonesian but Holly and I agreed it would be sad not to include them.
Dinner arrived, we loaded our plates, wobbled to the sofa and ate while watching another episode of Sex and the City. But we seemed to finish very quickly, and there were still hours of the evening stretching ahead of us, so what to do? I might look into pudding, I told her, reaching for my phone.
Before I knew it, I’d ordered two tubs of Ben and Jerry’s: one tub of cookie dough ice cream, the other Phish Food, which is a light combination of chocolate, marshmallow, caramel and fudge. Just the thing after a Chinese.
Since the distance from my front door to the local Budgens is 0.2 miles, it was a grotesquely lazy decision. In our defence, it was still very cold last weekend, and we were at a particularly good bit of Sex and the City.
Astonishingly, there was room for the situation to become more disgraceful still, since a few minutes after ordering, my phone rang. It was the nice man in Budgens, from whom I normally buy my newspapers, saying they’d run out of Phish Food and would I accept chocolate fudge brownie flavour instead? I apologised profusely for being so lethargic and said that would be fine. The tubs arrived 15 minutes later.
I reflected on this laziness when I read about the postman who stepped over that poor lady lying in the snow. She wasn’t out there sunbathing; 72-year-old Patricia Stewart had taken a tumble but her local postie refused any assistance.
“I can’t help you, pal,” he told her. “I’m knackered.” A tiny part of me has some sympathy. I hadn’t even done a postal round on Saturday; all I’d managed was another lap of the park, and yet there I was ordering ice cream from my phone.
As our worlds have shrunk, have we become lazier or are we merely adapting to circumstance? Muddy walks have started to pall. My Garmin watch recently bleeped with a heart rate warning after a burst of hoovering.
And a couple of weeks ago, I ventured into Central London for a doctor’s appointment and found catching a train, goggling at the sights like a country girl in an Austen novel and returning home again so tiring that I had to take to bed all afternoon with a book.
But since the ice cream incident, I’m starting to worry that this was less tiredness and more my continued metamorphosis into an actual sloth. No jokes about personal hygiene or levels of hairiness, please.