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³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Alone
As a student Ted Bruning spent drunken days and nights down the pub. So when his family left him home alone for nine days, he thought this a good opportunity to relive those days. But, his friends all grown up now, he was forced to find 'alternative' forms of time wasting...
I’VE finally discovered what TV is for. It’s not meant to keep you entertained or amused, let alone informed. It’s an "off" switch, or at best a neutral gear, designed to maintain your brain activity at the minimum necessary to sustain life, so you can’t get into trouble in between being at work and being asleep.
I discovered this not especially profound truth earlier in the summer when my wife – who is a teacher and gets several weeks’ more holiday than I do – decided to take the kids to Devon for a few days while I stayed at home to tackle a backlog of work.
For nine whole days I was to be on my own. Nine days! Sometimes I feel I haven’t had nine minutes to myself since the kids came along, let alone nine days; and although it’s not actually true – in fact I get far more time on my own than my wife does, even if most of it is spent sitting in traffic on the A1 on the way to work and back – I suspect it’s a feeling shared by many family men of my age.
The prospect of nine whole, entire, 24-hour days seemed like an incredible luxury. OK, so there was all that work to do; but I’d crack through that easily enough, and then there’d be plenty of time to … to … to do what, exactly?
Why, to revisit my carefree bachelor days, of course! To smoke in the house! To go to the pub whenever I wanted and drink as much as I could! To have obscenely vast takeaways! To sleep in late! Not to do the washing up until the kitchen was heaving with it! In short, to relive the self-indulgent days of studenthood again, 20 years after I thought they’d gone for good.
So the minute I’d waved goodbye to my family, I was off down the pub. Alas, it was Thursday, and although Thursday may be the new Friday in London, it certainly isn’t here. In fact it’s the quietest night of the week, and after half an hour’s desultory chat with a couple of good old boys at the bar, I found myself draining the last drops of my second pint and heading home, utterly undrunk and unself-indulged.
Something was missing. What was it? Ah, yes – mates! The essence of a good night out in those heady student days was mates, as drunk and daft as myself; but somewhere along the years they seem to have gone missing. Not that I don’t have friends, of course; but like me they lead fairly restrained lives nowadays – and unlike me their wives and children weren’t away for nine days. I won’t say I didn’t enjoy a few beverages more than usual; but it really was only a few. The pub is, frankly, too expensive these days to treat as a second home, and the solitary joys of fizzy canned lager are, frankly, not all that joyous.
So I gave up on the idea of wild nights of debauchery and cracked on with the work. Unfortunately I cracked on rather too fast, or maybe the backlog wasn’t as big as it I’d thought it was; for by the beginning of the week I was having to ration it to make it last. And as the nine days wore on, my fantasy of bachelorhood revisited began to wither somewhat.
The first thing to go was smoking in the house. I’m a recent reconvert to the weed after years of abstinence, and I find waking up in a house in which someone has spent the previous evening puffing away is frankly disgusting, even if it was me doing the puffing; so it was back to surreptitious drags in the garden.
The long lie-ins didn’t last, either. As a student I’d stay in bed until I had a lecture: if my first lecture was at two, I’d lie in till one. But 20 years of getting up at 7.30 has set my body-clock pretty much irrevocably; and once I’ve woken up it seems daft to force myself to stay in bed doing nothing. So out went the late lie-ins.
As for the giant takeaway, it never materialised. I don’t quite know why. There was nothing to stop me. It was just that suddenly I had a mental picture of my 20-stone self hunched over the dining-room table surrounded by stacks of half-empty foil cartons, stuffing my fat face with lamb rogan ghosh and keema nan in a one-man orgy of gross overindulgence. It wasn’t a pretty sight, even to me.
That’s when I discovered the truth about TV – that three or four evenings of doing nothing but watching the box does your head in. Eventually you become incapable of absorbing what you’re watching, and even the good programmes turn into a stream of disconnected images accompanied by a jumble of random sounds.
The only relief was the evening phone call from Devon – "Hi, Dad." "Hi, son. What’ve you been up to today?" – much the same conversation each time, granted; but human contact at least.
Anyway, I’ve put my bachelor days behind me for the second and, I hope, the last time. I’m not a mad, debauched roisterer any more, and the village I live in isn’t really the place for a mad debauched roister anyway. No, I’m a husband and a dad, and that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it.
If you've been left home alone
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