Concrete Pencil: Thinking is hard labour
Dan Bourke is preparing for life as a father by wandering around and looking confused
I am writing this on the day my wife is due to give birth, so at best I've got two weeks to read the rest of Ulysses, get a full motorbike licence and learn how to play the harmonica.
You'll have to forgive me if you read a sentence that doesn't finish - either I've been called away on urgent business or else I've just got...
Distracted.
I've been getting distracted a lot lately. And quite tetchy - even more so than normal.
Nothing feels quite as it usually does. The scene out of the commuter train window that normally so absorbs my small mind - the overgrown backstreets of Drayton Park and the saris and Subarus of Shadwell - now seem at once quite new and utterly boring.
Colleagues expecting useful and serious dialogue go away even more disappointed than normal. I don't very often do serious, but right now I can't even do sentences.
Friends expecting pleasant email discourse get blunt and vulgar dismissals, again even more often than is usual.
And that's all very strange, because no thought of what is going to happen has really been in my mind, not my conscious mind anyway. Even now, trying to write about it, it is impossible to visualise.
Of course there has been no shortage of vivid descriptions and hushed warnings from presumably (I'll still just about giving them the benefit of the doubt) well-meaning acquaintances.
And I'm sure that, well locked away in a dark corner of my empty-matchbox mind, there are furious worries and great hopes wrestling around.
All I know is something is stopping me functioning as normal, and seeing as my normal operating speed is pretty damn slow, that's resulting in some staggeringly lacklustre working performance.
All I can do is look forward to paternity leave, and hope that somehow during the resultant five years or so of interrupted sleep and neuroses, I will find a way to become just slightly useful again.
(You don't want to get too useful or they will want you to be there even more than you have to be already.)
If that doesn't work out, I'll just have to distract them by every now and then bringing in the child and letting it be sweet at them, or be sick over them.
And until then, if I were you I wouldn't ask me to do much.
And if you do you, might want to check what I've done for glaring misspellings, missing paragraphs or mistakenly inserted cusswords.
If you want to talk to me I'll be wandering somewhere on the Wharf, looking nervously at my mobile, urging it to ring then praying it won't.
This sort of thing also happens at blogs.mirror.co.uk/opposite-of-work.
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