To Do a Book Review

Pootle List #1: 1 of 250 book reviews.

Now that all the adrenalin from the Maasai Mara safari has been metabolized, I am back to intense-ceiling-ruminations. Two thoughts predominate, how can I ever top my African weekend blog post; and how am I expected to get to my ideal weight without immediate possession of the New and Essential Spiralizer Tri-Blade Spiral Vegetable Slicer? Oh, the pressures!

The phone pings. E-mail from SG who is away on work travel. It is neither an invite to accompany him to an exotic locale, nor is it a little love note.

He has thoughtfully drawn up and mailed me my ‘to do’ list; errands that I need to run in order to keep our electricity from being cut, have clothes to wear, food to eat, and get rid the fridge of green-mutated-life forms.

I burrow down deeper into the book I am reading – Rebecca Tyrrel’s Days Like These and weep a little. I will never be able to write like Rebecca, she uses the semicolon with such ease AND she has self-deprecating humor down to a perfect art. For example:

“..I already have a list, but it goes back decades. A few things have been ticked off over the years, but hundreds, possibly thousands, remain hanging over me. ‘Do English project (Turtles)’, for instance, from 1971; ‘Tidy bedroom’ and Join Pony Club (1968)… I was a victim of my own scrupulous standards of chronological chore-completion.”

Now I am nothing like Rebecca. Instead, I am like Mathew, her husband. For starters, we are both hypochondriacs. If he has had eleven myocardial infarctions, I have had thirteen instances of intense epityphlitis (also called appendicitis), including the one time when the appendix in my left foot got inflamed. Mathew is horrendously addicted to roulette tables, quite like my video games obsession; he has cartographical dyslexia and I am the only person I know who can follow GPS navigation lady’s directions to a T and end up in the wrong state. Mathew keeps thinking of moving to the countryside despite disliking most things related to ‘Nature’ including walks; I have the name of my bucolic bed-and-breakfast-artist-residence-serving-home-grown-organic-food all picked out. Except that everything green I touch, dies, and I have been known to go days without any movement except changing the TV channel. I have a feeling Mathew and I shall get along just fine; maybe we are Siamese twins.

Do read the book if you enjoy humor, ordinary scenes, and Erma Bombeck. Originally a series of newspaper columns, each chapter chronicles ordinary happenings in the life of Rebecca; Mathew (who you already know very well) and their son Louis; her imaginary psychotherapist called George Sanders who lives in a shed at the bottom of her garden, and sundry animals.

I give it a very respectable 4 on 5 rating.

Ignoring SG’s list for me, I create one of my own:

Draw up a to-do list
Go back and pepper blog post with semi-colons. Moan when I don’t know where to put them.
Put on T-Shirt with rice fields of Bali on it, as a hint to the universe
Wonder as to how the universe understood my spiralizer longings but delivered one to Mindy Kaling instead. Call Universe’s Customer Care and rant.
When the time for my next yoga class rolls up, hold head in hands and rock gently a la Mathew and ask, ‘I’m feeling very tired, so tired, unnaturally tired. Do you think I am very ill?’