Creative Writing: "My Year In Lists"

This piece was originally written for Folktales, your slice of story time and folk tunes 3-4pm every Sunday on LSRfm and hosted by the lovely Charlie. It was inspired by "My Year In Lists" by Los Campesinos! which Charlie very kindly deigned to play despite the fact that she hates them. I, however, love them and think you should love them too.
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Here is a notebook. Brown cover, brown pages. Blue writing. Page after page after page of neat cobalt letters, looping under and over and round, putting words to a year. A year in a life in lists. 

Flick through the pages, watch the words blur and smudge…

Stop! Eighth page - to do this week: call Marie, wash red dress, buy Debbie a present (three exclamation marks), pay window cleaner, find umbrella, write article (in capitals, five exclamation marks), see Dave (smiley face, two hearts). A doodle of a monkey eating a banana and a nameless phone number. 

Please turn over. And over and over. Sixteenth page now, entirely given over to the reminder that baking is not something to be attempted ever again. The seventeenth is for shopping (milk, cereal, bread, cheese, pesto, noodles, biscuits, toilet paper). Eighteenth, the letters to post that were probably never posted. Nineteenth, some train times. 

Peel back more pages. See the dates line up and march; one diary entry, two diary entry, three diary entry, four. Two lines each for that which slides from memory lest you pin it down forever with nails of ink. The recordings of important unimportance, written here to stop your mind letting them slip away like sand through a sieve. It’s a good job you’ve got this little brown book with its solid brown pages and sturdy grey lines. You can’t always trust that head of yours. 

Watch the words flash by. The things I should do and the things I should remember, punctuated by the books I should read (Catch 22, The Great Gatsby, The Midwich Cuckoos) and the bank details I shouldn’t have written in here but I’ll forget them otherwise. The people I should call. The albums I should listen to. Dates stretching from November 10th 2009 to… when?

To now. There’s a blank page, right at the back. It seems a shame to waste it. 

Blue ink flows. 

November 8th 2010. To do today: call Mum, call Marie, get ingredients for meal on Tuesday, pick up boots from the menders, take books back to library… 

Pause. I’m sure there’s something else, something important. Just think… 

Oh. Yes. In the same careful blue letters, I write the last three words of the year. 

Buy.
New.
Notebook.