What I’m Listening To Today, Episode #15
By: Jon Scott
Tags: Humor, Ladders, Success, Music, Productivity

What I’m Listening To Today, Episode #15

Ladder Of Success, Skeeter Davis

Two ladders lean up against my neighbour’s house, a sure sign of his industry that throws an unwelcome spotlight on my sloth. One ladder, okay, but two? I gaze up resentfully and think: what ambition!

I have not had a single moment of enthusiasm or vision in the home improvement department this year. I have instead watched over the summer as he has gone up and down the ladder. Sometimes clipping away plants, other times with a tin of paint or a heat gun, or in one case, a cup of tea, as though drinking from the top of his artificial precipice afforded him some closer relationship to god, while the beasts next door squirmed and rolled in their own dust and filth far below.

Every time I look at my house or its contents, I fall into an apathy-induced lethargy. I don’t know what to do with any of it, except throw it all away and start again. And then I being to ache with hope, because maybe I can keep some of the growing cardboard avalanche in my outbuilding, it would be such a shame to throw all of this stuff away. I love clutter and I hate clutter. I love order, but I’m a mess. I’m sorry I put you in the outbuilding. I put you there because I didn’t have anywhere else to put you. Maybe one day we’ll move and I can put you somewhere better. Let’s wait. Let’s wait until it’s later, and we’ll either have moved or I will have found a use for you. That way, I have a good reason for doing nothing.

The last great push towards modern good living began in January. Looking hard over the forty year old kitchen, I concluded with the heaviest of sighs that the job was beyond my YouTube tutorial apprenticeship, and so I went to a kitchen showroom and we picked out something we hoped would give our 500-year old cottage a modern facelift without ruining the period aesthetic.

People were milling about the showroom happily. My four year old was plotting the downfall of some complimentary cookies on the designer’s desk top, and we were trying to balance cost and style while also attempting to appear sane to the poor woman who was putting together a 3D render of it all.

On the radio, there were some reports coming in of a strange outbreak in China, but we thought nothing of that. I put down a deposit, shook her hand and we wandered out into a rainy afternoon.

Contrast this with a few weeks later, when I went in to sign the rest of the paperwork approving the work. Lockdown was not yet upon us, but it wasn’t far away. The lights were off in the showroom, and I wondered if I had gotten the appointment time wrong, until someone came to the door to open up for me. I walked in and told them who I was there to see.

By now, we had some small understanding of what was going on, and so I sat away from her, but we passed papers back and forth and shared a pen, so, as I say, a small understanding.

I handed over a large chunk of cash and then the pandemic really got going and with some naivety, I thought they might give the money back and just call the whole thing off. Instead, I got a call a few weeks later to tell me that everything was going ahead, as planned.

What?

The entire country was in lockdown. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house unless I was seeking food or medical aid.

And yet, it was somehow going to be fine for a couple of guys to deliver a kitchen to me, and then have a team of people invade my cripplingly small house for a week to install it.

By now, I felt we really did have a pretty good understanding of what was going on, so when they came, they put up a sheet of paper in the kitchen (which was also the living room and the reception room), which read:

THIS IS A SOCIAL DISTANCING WORK ZONE.

We lived upstairs for a week and a half, the three of us. I would come downstairs every now and again to stick the kettle on and make coffee for the builders (you’ve got to keep them on your side), and invariably get drawn into a conversation about how terrible people are (you’ve really, really, got to keep them on your side). I have encountered few better ways of rapport building than to make and distribute hot drinks to parched lips.

I think in the end they grew more irritated about working in the cramped, shitty little house that I haunt, rather than with me, and I can say that we parted company on good terms, because they had delivered a kitchen, as promised, and I had paid them 25% more in additional subcontractor costs.

One evening I arrived home to find my neighbour on the other side hacking away at a bush for no good reason.

That bush is there so that I don’t have to see you when I walk outside.

I felt up until that moment that I had a good handle on the complex social dynamics of living mid-terrace. Now people were breaking down barriers on one side and looking down on me from the other.

They had emerged from isolation with a desire for things to be fresh and new. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were in the relatively less sorry state that existed pre-2020.

Dropping socks while carrying out my laundry to the machine, two overalled men perched high above peer down.

“You missed one”, my neighbour says, cheerfully. He is drinking tea again on his improvised balcony.

“Thanks,” I reply.

Maybe it’s time I bought a ladder too.

As I step into the outbuilding, I trip over my son’s bicycle and my dirty laundry flies out of my hands and then the cardboard avalanche lurches menacingly above me for a second or two before crashing down on my unproductive head.

This is what happens to hoarders, you know. This is how they end. Surrounded by their own disorder.