THE MAN WITH TWO WATCHES

Well would you believe it. Yet another day of nothing interesting or noteworthy happening at all.

There is precious little to write about. I was contemplating about describing in detail how my wheelie bin got blown over by the wind. But that is pretty much the whole story.

I also discovered this week that I don’t actually even generate enough rubbish for that bin to be given the full tip-up-into-truck treatment by the council. Nope, the yellow-jackets just flip open the lid, reach in, pull my two meagre black sacks of refuse out, and then throw them into the back of the trash-compacter. One of my neighbours, down the road at TwoBinsNumberThirty, came out and wheeled his brace of empty wheelie-bins back to his garden, just after the flashing yellow truck had rumbled off down the road. I bet we pay the same council tax.

Meanwhile, work is still like calculating the balance between the type of people who share cat-pics on Slack, and the type of people who demand a thing by email but never say thank you when you send it to them.

I did solve a tricky problem this week though! I tried explaining it to the Intrepids over our Pre-Advent-Candlelit-Dinner tonight, but I quickly realised I didn’t have the skill to simplify a complex piece of content-management and technical writing to make it understandable or interesting to a wider audience. Oh the irony.

The Pre-Advent-Candlelit-Dinner by the way, is when we have dinner by candlelight, just before Advent. Instead of an Advent Calendar (like any normal family might have), the Intrepids have an Advent Candle, which they light every dinner-time throughout December, until it fizzles to a smoking stub on Christmas Eve. Only, it’s obviously not December yet, so they burned through a bit of the reserve, backup Pre-Advent-Candle tonight while the actual Advent Candle stood waiting expectantly on the mantelpiece.

Also, I met a man wearing two watches today - one on each wrist! I didn’t have the social forwardness to ask him why, though it was (and is) a perplexing mystery. They were very different, but both chunky enough to be classified as classic men’s analog watches, plus, I noticed, both simultaneously suggesting that it was 8:17pm - which, in this hallowed time zone of GMT, it exactly was. Why?

And that’s it. Not much else to write about at all - just a wheelie bin, a slow-burning candle, and the Man With Two Watches. Maybe he just likes watches? Perhaps he’s a fan of time, the passage of the moments, the steady, gentle ticking seconds, the months, the years... as the candle flickers down and the half-empty wheelie bins get blown over by the wind like a treat for local foxes.

I must ask him next time I see him.