QUANTUM RAILWAYS

You’d better sit down. And you’ll need a cup of tea, probably, to cope with the shock (I went for my seasonal favourite of rum and hot chocolate, but you might find something stronger will steel you suitably for what I’m about to tell you).

So, while I wait for the headline writers to get back to me, and the news to spread round social media faster than a skateboarding hamster, I thought I should take a deep breath, still my beating heart, and let you know that tonight, I (fanning myself, as I still can’t quite believe it) actually did do a bit of multitasking.

I know. A quick scan through my diary shows me that the last time I unlocked this ‘hidden superpower’ was March 2016, and of course it’s only been a month or so since the famous toast-bathtub-smoke-alarm fail.

Anyway, tonight I somehow managed to keep my head focused on lots of simultaneous things - I did a load of washing, a stack of putting away, a pasta dish, and the washing up, all while listening to the audiobook of The Chronicles of Narnia. More to the point, I did not put my socks in the fridge or wash a packet of linguine with my light-coloureds. Win!

I’ve often thought of the brain like an engine moving down a complex series of tracks, a deep network of thoughts and avenues and branches that take it somewhere. The train can only be in one place at a time, so to leap from station to station it has to rapidly back up and then speed down the nearest route to get where it’s going, all within a half-a-second!

For me, some tracks are easy (flags, science, music, words) while others are uphill, or seem to have leaves on the line (social, selecting food in a restaurant, putting my keys somewhere findable). It is true then, that I’ve always considered having a single train in lots of places at the same time, just impossible. And yet, at least one of you will be doing that right now while reading this with multiple trains, I guarantee it! And you know who you are.

So, what’s the secret? Quantum railways? Multi-dimensional thinking? Or do you clever people just have trains that are so fast and so deep that you can take them anywhere you like in the network and back, without missing a beat? How’s it done? And why can I only do it in two-year intervals?

I wonder whether the relaxed period of Betwixtmas has taken some pressure off the thought-network for me too? Perhaps there’s a balance, a limit to how busy that matrix of interconnected topics can get. I must confess, I haven’t even thought about work for ten days! I’m as much of a technical writer as I am an astronaut right now! Though, to be fair, neither would be advisable after a rum-soaked hot chocolate. Could that be why I cracked next-level-multitasking tonight?

No news from the papers yet. No ‘Man Completes Five Simultaneous Tasks Shocker’ headlines. Oh well. I can take some solace in the fact that my jeans are folded and ready, I ate well, and the dishes are stacked inside the cupboard. I should take more time off from work I reckon. Either that or figure out a way for all of me to be in two places at once.