LOCKDOWN. TIME TO DO ALL THE THINGS YOU MEANT TO DO? FORGET ABOUT IT.

It’s not even a week since the UK Lockdown began, but it already seems like an eternity. Experts advise to make the most of our new spare time. They say to catch up on all those jobs you keep deferring. Really? How expert are these experts?

Most of us have a mental list of things we'd love to do. Many of these dreams occur in faraway places. However, it’s tough to get excited about Bora Bora when the great outdoors is closed.

Fact is, when your dreamscape shrinks to the size of your living room, it’s time to think small. Very small. All those tasks you never got round to doing? The ones that will never make it to your bucket list? Well, it’s time to put them on your fuckit list and forget them once and for all.

Let me show you what I mean…

1.      Discover why the central heating sets its own rules.

No matter how often I set the thermostat to the ideal temp, the central heating makes a unilateral decision to change it. Common sense and a wish to save energy says I should get to the bottom of this insubordination, but have you seen the manual? Are you kidding? It’s written in Esperanto. Just put on a sweater or open the window. Tech is far too hard.

2.      Finish the nine books I have ‘on the go’.

There’s just something really tedious about having to read a book to the end to find out what happened. I’m the kind of guy that drops out of the next big thing on HBO at the penultimate episode, so why would I read that last couple of chapters? Anyway, there’s a new cat video just come in – this time, a tabby plays the xylophone.

3.      Make that wonderful Greek dish you had on vacation eleven years ago.

It was great in Corfu. Has to be great now. That’s the rationale. Total bollocks. The only reason it was great then because the sun was out and I’d drunk two bottles of retsina for breakfast. There’s no way two overbaked sardines, some raw olives and a hunk of feta are gonna make it onto Great British Menu, so why even try?

4.      Clean the fish tank.

Who put this on the list? Yes, the neon tetras are wearing facemasks and the water is the colour of the Thames, but does it really need cleaning? Are the fish complaining? No, thought not.

5.      Sewing buttons on all the shirts that have lost buttons.

We all have these – they’re great looking shirts, but they suffer from shitty production values. One wash, and voila, there go three buttons. The first to go is always the one that lets the shirt gape above your waistband – giving fellow bus passengers a great view of your hairy belly button. I have maybe a dozen shirts like this, but only three buttons. The task of deciding which gets what is just too tough. Put on a tee instead.

6.      Polishing all your grubby shoes.

This ranks alongside sewing buttons. Five different coloured shoes, one colour polish. Does black work with tan coloured sandals? I’m indoors anyway. I’ll stay barefoot.

7.      Catching up with the relatives.

I’d do this. Yeah, I would, but truth is, they all hate me anyway, so why antagonise them? I can now service my Christmas card list with one six-pack of cheapies from Paperchase. That’s how few people really want to hear from me. The way I see it, the less I communicate, the quicker they’ll forget me. Pretty soon I’ll be able to go to family events and nobody will have a clue who I am.

8.      Finishing the 3-D jigsaw of the Eiffel Tower.

This was a joke birthday gift five years ago. I built it as far as the first stage, then construction stopped. There’s just something quite sad about looking at a miniaturised version of the restaurant on the first floor and remembering the shitty meal we had at the real thing 25 years ago. I simply don’t have the stomach to go any higher, which is pretty much how I felt after those awful moules mariniere.

9.      Starting a prison wall calendar.

You know what I mean. You scrawl a ‘I’ for day one of confinement, then it’s ‘II’ for day two and so on. At day five you have ‘IIII’ and then you start again. Pretty soon, your wall looks like the inside of a pharaoh’s tomb – all hatch marks and strike throughs. I liked the idea of this, so I taped a sheet of paper to the fridge and marked day one of Lockdown. However, something went wrong around day three, because I think I forgot to add a mark or two. To compensate, I added too many. Now I’ve already been in isolation for 43 days and it’s driving me nuts.

10.  Backup the laptop.

Quite simply the number one item on the ‘who gives a crap’ list is backing up your data. Yes, McAfee might tell you do this every time you boot up, but life is just too short. I am resigned to the ‘if I’m gonna get hacked, I’m gonna get hacked’ outlook and believe I’m better off doing something else – and hey, hey, look at that, another cat video just came in.