Fordyce Maxwell: 'It appears that I've only spent 32 days out of my life cutting the grass'

Published on Saturday 9 May 2009 19:56

EVEN human dynamos – so much to do, so little time – must pause occasionally to ponder the big questions, such as is humanity about to be wiped out (copyright The Sun) by swine flu, where has it all gone wrong since May 1997, why is Simon Cowell, and will Newcastle United be relegated?

So recently I took a break from my arduous fitness programme – aka gardening, share of the housework and turning newspaper pages – to calculate how much of my life has been spent on Groundhog Day routines, those things we do time and again towards infinity without taking a forward step.

I had been trying to do the sums in my head while working in the garden, but mental arithmetic skills, once honed by hours on a tractor calculating acreages, yields, crop prices, overdraft level, interest rates and the actuarial chances of the bank manager snuffing it before we next met, aren't what they were.

Too much use of a calculator, I guess, too many years in a newspaper office checking governmental claims and other questionable statistics, such as alleged pay rise percentages, are at fault. And coming to the aid of less numerate colleagues such as my friend Chris as he was about to give Scotland an impressive, if unfeasible, badger population of one per square metre.

Addition, subtraction, long division and multiplication can still get me there, but a calculator is faster and I'm experienced enough to realise that, for example, when the figures show I had a batting average of 106.0 in my final season then the decimal point is in the wrong place.

That initial idle calculation led me with coffee, calculator and yellow legal pad to hand – these things have to be done properly – to work out that 83 days of my life have been spent playing cricket. Interestingly, although I realise that might be stretching the validity of the word, I spent only 50 days playing football.

It seemed at the time, particularly to my mother who worried about things like exam results and careers, many more. But, as I argued when trying to nip out unobserved for a third game in five days during a busy youth league and summer cups season that happened to coincide with A-levels, think how much time we waste sleeping.

I've just worked out that a lifetime – only so far, of course, as I have hopes of extending it – at seven hours a night, allowing for insomnia, is 6,706 days asleep. By comparison, it seems time well spent to have driven for approximately 416 days, had just more than five days of haircuts, ten days cutting nails, 73 days shaving and 96 days on the… well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, this poses the question of what happened to the other – hang on while I do the sum – 15,819 days? I thought I had the Groundhog Day answer, but using the most generous estimates in the calculation and taking account of earlier annual starts and later last cuts because of global warming and competitive neighbourliness, it appears that I've only spent 32 days cutting grass.

It seems more in a growthy May when the only time the snarl of a lawnmower isn't disturbing the local peace is when it's raining. Tough choice.