Staying Focused

It is said that men and women have very different approaches to work. Women are adept at multitasking while men focus on the task in hand to the exclusion of all others. Far be it from me to suggest that this rule applies to all women and men but it certainly applies to Nellybert.

I’ve been really busy this week as I have the first of three teaching practice sessions this coming Tuesday. I’ve been working on it for over a week now and even took two days off my paid work to get stuck into it. Of course I ended up spending one of those days sailing Matty round the country visiting poorly sisters and so on. When the pressure is on my patience with Matty wears thin. Everything takes forever when she’s involved. If she sees a queue she gets in it – the longer the better. It must be a consequence of having lived through The War. And she keeps wandering off and when I do find her she’s usually squandering our inheritance doing a scratch card. By the time I got her home it was far too dark for a nice brisk sanity-restoring walk and I was just about ready to kill somebody. Bert?

Meanwhile Bert is totally focused on a manly task. Time hangs heavy on his hands during winter and this month he’d already restored his childhood rocking horse and learnt three new things on the clarinet when Bap called round. And Bap saw the staircase. And Bap was very cross indeed.

Bap is in his mid-fifties and I’ve known him forever. Like many of us he was one cool dude in his younger days but now he’s turned into ‘Yer Da’. It must be a consequence of having two 20 something sons who, despite being real cool dudes themselves, need a lot of fatherly advice about keeping their motors in order and so on. Anyway Bap starts on Bert.

Have you never sorted out those banister rails yet? I don’t know how you can live with yourself! I’d not rest until I’d three coats of varnish on those!

Bert laughed it off to Bap’s face. But it was only a day or two later he got stuck in. And he’s been doing it for ever now. And he’s so smug about it. Thinks he’s a helluva fella. But it is all he does. Cares he not a bit for filthy floors, empty grates, starving kittens, menopausal women or Christmas. He just leaps joyously out of bed every morning at around 10 and sands and varnishes and sands and varnishes. Then he plays the clarinet all evening.

And there’s me trying to learn the lesson content, prepare a lesson plan, do laundry, shop, clean, cook, blog, walk the dogs, go to work, mind my Mammy and all the rest of it. Sometimes I really do wish I was a man. Life would be so much simpler.