Distracted

All week I've been working from home, knocking my way through a spreadsheet. The aim is to splatter 150 words of colour onto a list of ideas that would probably be misconstrued as a threat to any teenager who chanced upon it.

Once I get down to business, once I've dribbled orange juice down my front and sprinkled toast crumbs on my laptop, once I've blogged and twittered and BBC News-ed; once the TV's turned off and the kitchen's been tidied and I've remembered to have a shower, brush my teeth, and do something with my hair (all of which I forgot to do yesterday); once I've got dressed in the sort of clothes you reserve for hangovers, scoured the fridge for the strange smell within, investigated the freezer's ongoing hum and booked a pilates class for next Tuesday;

once I've checked my watch and seen it's lunchtime, cooked sausages, eaten them, stacked the plate on top of the others, decided it looks messy and washed them all up; once I've sat down and opened Excel, opened Word and opened Google and typed in the next place on the list...

...once I've done all that, and started feeling overwhelmed by the task ahead because I'm hopelessly behind schedule and attempting to sound all clever about places I've never visited, once I've realised that I have the attention span of a toad, something that isn't helped by the ongoing rumble of music and radio presenters, interspersed by hourly bursts announcing the 1, 2, 3, and 4 o'clock news from the flat upstairs, or is it downstairs? Once I've put an ear to the floor to find out, stomped back and forth, thrown a pen at the ceiling just in case, then retreated to the bedroom only to find the sound stops minutes later, forcing me to relocate back to the kitchen table,

Then, and only then, do I start actually doing the work.

...before stopping to blog about it.

This, my friends, is a problem.