If you're dappy and you know it

Apologies for being horribly remiss in keeping up this week. I’ve been drowning in deadlines and such… I meant to drop a short note to explain earlier in the week, but I forgot. Actually, I opened up the create post thingy, wrote half of it, remembered something else I had forgotten to do, then shut my computer down without paying attention to what I’d been doing. Then I forgot.

This sort of thing happens quite a bit – I’ve often said that if I was to be hit on the head, or in many years to come lost my marbles, no one will know the difference because I will be just as dappy as I have always been. A few weeks ago, after a night out, I waited for a tube at Liverpool Street Station to get the Circle line to Embankment then Waterloo and on home. I’ve been through Liverpool Street Station a million times, and am perfectly aware that a couple of other tube lines run from the same platform (Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City.) I’ve done this a million times and it has never posed much of a challenge. So I wait on the Westbound platform, happily engrossed in my Ipod, a million miles away. A tube comes along and I get on it. It isn’t until we’ve gone a couple of stops that I notice that I’ve managed to get on a Hammersmith and City line and we’re at Shoreditch. Rolling my eyes at my idiocy, I get off, cross the platform and get the next tube back to Liverpool Street. A couple of stops later, I jump up… only to discover that I didn’t catch the next tube back at all, but got on a District line going further in the opposite direction. I am now at Bromley-by-Bow, right in the East End, and have just missed the second to last train from Waterloo. Bollocks, I think, berating myself for not paying attention. Carefully I get myself to the correct platform to head back to Liverpool street, and sure enough 15 minutes later, I am back on the Westbound platform ready to start anew. A tube comes along and I get on it. And find myself, on the Metropolitan line, at Algate. Back at Liverpool Street yet again, I suddenly remembered that I’d never had this problem before because I usually get on the Central line which is at an entirely different platform. Just an average (hour and a half without gaining so much as a station in the right direction) commute in the life of Claire. In case you’re worried, I did make the last train out of Waterloo by the skin of my teeth, and it was the right train!

They say that absent mindedness is the mark of a creative mind, and I would like to think that’s true. That I spend hours at a time wandering in and out of various rooms in the house wondering why I am there, or answer the phone and go off to tell the person that the call is for then get distracted and leave teenaged girls hanging on the phone for minutes wondering why my brother won’t speak to them – until someone picks up the phone to make a call and is perturbed to find someone on the end of the line, that I miss train after train in the morning looking for my shoes… that are on my feet… because my mind is so filled with brilliant creativity that it has no room for the minutiae. Maybe – my dad is definitely pretty intelligent and yet he showed up at Heathrow airport a few weeks ago for a flight to Dubai… only to find that his flight was leaving from Gatwick and he had my brother’s passport with him.

I suspect that it might be an attention span thing. I am often accused of not speaking in full sentences, never mind thoughts, during a conversation – my mind races so far ahead of my mouth that I forget that the poor person listening to me is only as far as my mouth is and skip ahead so they hear: “Yesterday, no wait… there was an email… and it’s my birthday!... but I don’t know about Oslo…” which must be a bit like listening to half a phone conversation. I was once so intrigued by the girl sitting in front of me on the bus arguing with her boyfriend that for days afterwards it would pop into my head and I would wonder how he justified himself… sorry, what was I saying?