I’ve aspired to having a beautiful, tidy, but above all else, windsandbreezes type home. Elements of this have been hard but today, I cleared the dining room table.

I suffer from flat surface syndrome and the dining room table is just inside the door of the apartment. This means that lots of things wind up on the table, post for previous tenants, junk mail, stuff I bought but have not got a home for yet. I resent the post for previous tenants of course; they get far more post than I do although most of it lately has been from their bank. But they seem more popular than me.

But I know deep down that in fact, I sleep better if a) the table is clear and tidy ready for next use and b) the kitchen is tidy and I have not run out of teaspoons.

I confess, I ran out of teaspoons this morning. I am drinking tea that does not require a teaspoon because it has a string and a label. I don’t take sugar. And the dishwasher is on at the moment.

So I’ve cleared the table mostly – there is one cup of tea, and a sketchpad. Sketchbooks and sketchpads are the bane of my life but I’ll come to that separately.

My family laugh when I say things like “I want tor educe the amount of clutter in my life. They are, I think, scarred by just how many different varieties of tea were on offer in my house in Dublin. Most of my kitchen stuff is in storage and mostly the problem is an out of control art supply and stationery problem. And books. I lack self discipline on the book front. It’s probably lucky that because of Apple Music I don’t buy CDs any more; there are 300 plus of those also in storage. I don’t like my life being in storage but this is a thing I may rectify next year. Moving swiftly onwards.

Life is full of small jobs that together, take a lot of time. We let them stack up because ultimately, life is full of some big things that tire us out, sap of of time and energy. Every time I sit down to make a list of the things I do, I get depressed. It is out of control and although one million self help and youtube influencer videos cannot possibly wrong, I am question whether in fact, making a list is exactly what we should be doing. Apart from clearing the dining room table, one of the way overdue jobs which I will start on today is the Great Battery Replacement.

Possibly not obvious to readers of a blog which I broadly neglect, I have a few watches. I own a sports watch because apparently I swim (I don’t have time lately but moving swiftly onwards), although I wear that on my right wrist and mostly I don’t use it as a watch except during the night because well it does light up. I otherwise have two watches that do not require batteries and then there are the various things that I bought at times I could barely afford them, which are definitely not automatic and weren’t, with one or two notable exceptions, manufactured in Switzerland. The last time I did the batteries was before I left Ireland. As the average battery tends to last around 2 years, it’s a safe bet that absolutely all of them need new batteries. As I’m DONE with them all running out at the same time (despite having 3 other watches which do not require expensive trips to a jewellery store) I have decided to stagger the battery replacements. THIS IS IMPRESSIVELY HARD because I work in IT, am quite systematic and would like to do this battery replacement trip in an optimised manner by only having to go to the jeweler once.

In fact, apart from fitness trackers, I have not bought a lot of watches in the last few years. The solar watch I wear frequently now, I bought less than a month ago. The automatic which I wore all the time until I bought the solar watch was a gift 5 years ago. The last watch I remember buying I bought in Paris as a memorial to the job I had just quit and that was 8 years ago.

Against that I own 3 Mercedes Benz promotion watches of which I definitely bought one at least 25 years ago. I have a Fossil which was a gift. I think there is one RipCurl watch which I bought in Tarifa around 12 years ago. Watchbuying seemed to be something I did occasionally but not expensively. Aside from a basic Tissot, none of these watches cost more than around 30 euro or the equivalent in Belgian Francs at the time. IF you watch watchYoutube, I don’t know how they would call them (apart from cheap) because the ones they deride as fashion watches (the ones that are fashion labels rather than watchmakers) aren’t anywhere in the ball park of a 30E watch with a 1999 Mercedes Benz logo on it. I don’t think even Mercedes flog watches that cheap.

But this is not an essay on watches, but on being organised and the sad fact is I cannot possibly wear watches that do not tell me the time. So I need to get my act together and get batteries for them and arranging that is an organisational issue. There is a jeweller less than 50 metres away.

All I have to do is go there.