Below the Waste
Week 23 of 2025 sees me discover what really makes me hulk out…
If you’d asked me just one hour in, I’d’ve said the moral of this week would be, Always read competition requirements fully, far in advance of the closing date. I had my novel and synopsis ready a full 12 hours ahead of the Times/Chicken House deadline. But then.
Turns out they required a 1-page author bio too. D’oh. I thus didn’t make it to bed till 1am Monday morning.
Despite this, I felt oddly fresh when I hopped out of bed a mere three hours later. Indeed, I filled that Monday with more artistic zest than a cocktail bar.
If you’d asked me one day later, I’d’ve said the moral might actually be, Too much too soon?
That Monday afternoon, in return for the tour we gave her and her volunteers back in February, the unparallelled Evelyn Glennie gave Ermma and me a tour of her unrivalled collection of over 3,800 percussion instruments from around the world.
The exquisite rumbles when we stroked a massive tamtam, the unearthly aural wanderings when a bow was drawn across a waterphone, the nostalgia of a laser gun sound effect made by a spring in a cardboard tube sold as a kids’ toy from the ‘90s… Encouraged by Evelyn, we delighted in just picking up objects and seeing what sounds we could get from them.
That sense of creative play spilled into the conversation afterwards, during which I found myself brimming with ideas for how they could raise awareness and funds for their collection, some of which my company could help with. But it was fuelled by the immeasurable awe of being with Evelyn herself.
It was just so easy to forget she’s profoundly deaf. She holds eye contact with you, feeling the reverberations in the air from your speech to support her effortless lip-reading, and then responds fluently with inspiring stories from her travels. She essentially interacts with you in the same way she interacts with her instruments. She’s amazing.
“I filled that Monday with more artistic zest than a cocktail bar.”
For Ermma and me, the creativity continued into that evening, when we met with our own brilliant volunteers – our ‘Pepys Posse’, Cherry and Sarah – to brainstorm further fundraising events for Pepys House, with a view to making them even more successful than the previous week’s scavenger hunt.
As we got into bed that Monday night, I noticed a mark for this day in my calendar. Back when Gaggy had lived in Lincolnshire, it had been a 2nd of June when he’d said something uncharacteristically optimistic – so I’d joked with my brother Jazz that we should hereafter call it ‘Optimism Day’.
Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Times/Chicken House had set their deadline for this year’s Optimism Day. There and then, it felt like pure serendipity. I closed my eyes, ready to take this energy into the week ahead. Nothing could slow this train.
Note to self: It is really dangerous to use rail-based metaphors for verve when you live in the UK.
Tuesday was an expectedly less active day, as I needed to stay at home and prepare a new online presentation for delivery the following morning. This was the penultimate step of the ‘Writing For Pleasure’ commission my company received from English Hub back in February, and indeed had been on the same invoice as their WFP training back in April.
However, when I joined the video call on Wednesday, I was told they were expecting a presentation on Reading For Pleasure; that’s how they’d described it for their teachers.
This wasn’t a problem; I just opened up the RFP presentation from the year before. But afterwards, I was kicking myself over the bars. That mistake had cost me a whole day.
The mood of my week went into rapid decline – and yet, by Friday evening, I’d hit five further deadlines.
What was going on? What was the moral of the week now?
“It is really dangerous to use rail-based metaphors for verve when you live in the UK.”
I had no choice but to plaster positivity onto my face on Saturday morning, though, since I needed to attend a meeting at a local facility about a community project. When I say ‘needed’, I’d actually been asked to set up the meeting – but the Project Leader asked me to be there, since I would know everyone present.
Fair enough, I thought. I pay to use that facility, and I get on well with the trustees who manage it. The community project seemed noble, and I’d likely benefit through my use of the facility too. I expected I’d just link up the two parties at this meeting, and then walk away.
Instead, I became a buckle. For entirely understandable legal reasons, the trustees weren’t able to agree anything right away – but the PL was just as understandably upset because they were effectively being told to curb their enthusiasm.
Sensing some confusion from the PL, I offered to write a summary of the meeting. Everyone gratefully accepted. I told the PL that I’d run it by the trustees first, just to make sure my understanding of their reasons wasn’t flawed. Within 15 minutes of the meeting, the trustees had my summary in their inboxes.
That afternoon, while still waiting for agreement from the trustees, the project leader emailed their summary of the meeting, asking me to check that with the trustees.
I shrugged, but forwarded it on anyhoo.
The trustees still hadn’t got back to me the following Sunday, when Ermma and I were out shopping with Mum and DadDad Sutcliffes, when I received another email from the project leader to the effect of,
“Are you going to respond to my summary, Chip? You seem to have a typing speed of one word an hour…”
One… what?! That was cheekier than a baboon’s arse!
I bit my lip. “Please bear with me,” I tapped into the Gmail app while queueing for a till. “I have a full-time job, I’m a custodial tenant for a heritage property, and I volunteer for the village flood group and our parish council. Even so, I did summarise the meeting right away. As promised, I sent it straight to the trustees for them to check. I’m now just waiting to hear from them.”
Within an hour, the PL replied with an unapologetic one-liner:
“Oh dear, Chip. Have you perhaps taken on too much?”
That was it. I exploded – albeit still via my thumbs into my mobile. “Thank you for your concern, but I have plenty of time for the activities I choose to take on. It’s the ones that come to me, and which are using me as a middleman, for which I think one day is a fair minimum for a response.”
In an attempt to defuse my ire, I added a “$;-)” to the end.
He didn’t reply.
“That was cheekier than a baboon’s arse!”
Later, I reflected. I wasn’t sorry for my response – that project leader had been impatient and ungracious.
But… really all I’d needed to write was, “I’m still waiting to hear from the trustees.” Why had I bothered to say the whole bit about how busy I was?
Had I taken on too much? Had spending 15min on summarising that meeting tipped me over the edge?
Then it hit me. I hadn’t needed to summarise that meeting. The PL had gone and written their own. Writing my summary had been a waste of my time – just like the entirety of my Tuesday.
Completing tasks, only to have the point of that completion crushed.
That was my black kryptonite.
Of course, I learned this right at the end of the week, so the question remains: Will this knowledge empower me to overcome this side of me?
Watch this space…
In return for me sharing these words with you, please pay just one word of yours. What does it take to turn you into the evil version of yourself?
Want to know why I’m asking for this? Flip back to this post here.
Let’s share tales again soon. In the meantime, ciao for niao…
$;-)
What does it take to turn you into the evil version of yourself?