The Paddocks, the Potato, and the Long Wet Dance Floor
Monday arrived and Guinea Pig was back to his involuntary waking hour. He felt refreshed. Much better, in fact, and this, he knew, was not a small thing but a signal. Sleep, when it had done its work properly, did not merely restore the body. It restored proportion. It returned the world to scale.
As he entered the kitchen, the calmness of a clean, tidy room seemed almost to meet him at the door. He wandered into the living room and found the same feeling waiting there too. There was a kind of hush in both rooms, the domestic equivalent of someone having laid a hand lightly on the day and asked it to behave.
But his brain was already darting from thought to thought. The pressure of the unstructured day had begun, very politely at first, to creep down into his shoulders.
He did not really know where to start.
So he began where life insisted he must. The cats, whose relationship to planning was one of total contempt, had thrust their own priority upon him: breakfast. He obliged, partly because it was the decent thing to do and partly because once fed, they would return to their proper role of sleeping companions rather than pestering beggars, loudly maintaining that they had never once in their lives received nourishment of any sort. He smiled as he remembered one item on the Dustbusters sheet: Feed Pets. Try not to forget, he thought. Friday, number three cat and a communicator of rare clarity, would leave him in no uncertainty whatsoever if her culinary requirements were being neglected.
He began his usual breakfast routine and then paused. No, he thought. A proper breakfast. Sitting at the dining table. Not a rushed arrangement at the kitchen counter while the pressure of the day kneaded his shoulders like an overfamiliar physiotherapist. So he went to the freezer, took out a bag of home-made bread, boiled an egg, put the bread in the toaster, assembled a chopping board, made coffee, and carried the lot into the dining area. The day was peaceful and promising. It seemed only respectful to meet it in the same spirit.
During the night, a message from a client had arrived, cancelling the 09.30 appointment. The client he usually met at 08.00 was on holiday. Guinea Pig therefore found himself in the rare position of not having to answer to anybody before eleven o’clock. Luxury, he thought, though with the caution of a man who knew that luxury was often simply the name given to an empty patch into which three new obligations would shortly fall.
Still, it was the perfect opportunity to get the challenge underway: Doodlehorse and work routines. The busy mum, except that while he was indeed busy, his busyness was not that of a mum but that of a professional trying to help a ten-year-old start-up limp, trot, and occasionally gallop into a viable future, while also trying to learn Doodlehorse.
Not that Doodlehorse herself had been around for ten years. He had jokingly criticised her for her late arrival, to which she had merely shrugged and said, “But I’m here now.”
Her sense of realism was, at times, frighteningly obvious.
To settle the tangoed waltz of his thoughts, Guinea Pig got out his notebook. He needed a plan. A structure. Something to guide him through the day and, by extension, through the week. He knew this would be the first of two transition weeks. This week: learning to Doodlehorse. Next week: learning to Doodlehorse with his wife back after three weeks away. Then, early April, he would transition to Doodlehorsing alone. Then things would flip-flop again. The arrangement was not unstable exactly. It was simply alive.
Structured flexibility.
He was tired, meanwhile, of the corporate habit of pretending that ordinary life could be improved by renaming it. He had no desire to optimise cadenced windows or align deliverables with strategic rhythms or whatever phrase was currently being used by people who had not had to wipe down a shower after somebody else had left it looking like the aftermath of a municipal flood. As he had discovered on Sunday, cats inhabit time. Humans invent schedules. The question, then, was whether the two states could somehow be made to coexist.
Instead of creating time windows, he created paddocks.
From 08.30 until 20.00 he drew ten of them, empty at first, waiting to be filled. Then came the priorities. Half a paddock was given over to maintaining the new standards Doodlehorse had so gently thrust upon him: sweeping and mopping the downstairs area, meaning the living room, kitchen, and corridors. Two rooms and the downstairs toilet remained undeep-cleaned and would have to wait. Upstairs, the bedroom too would be tackled later. The bathroom was to be cleaned as one went. The rule of the house was that whoever had last used the shower was responsible for wiping it dry and leaving the washbasins in a condition approaching newness. All very democratic, he thought, considering that he was seldom the last person to use the bathroom.
Once he had arranged his paddocks, he sent them off to Doodlehorse for approval. She, as custodian of structure and of all things Doodle, needed to know that phase two of the project had begun. Much to his surprise and joy, she replied that she would be more or less unavailable for the morning. This calmed him. There were certain Monday routines, and it was a relief to know what to expect.
Or rather, what not to expect.
In defiance of the Dustbusters, and out of a wish to visualise his workflows and tasks and all the rest of life’s cluttered furniture, Guinea Pig had begun a management system involving post-it notes. He had shown it proudly to Doodlehorse, who may very well have thought: here I am creating dustbuster sheets, and what does he do? He fills coloured post-it notes. Despair, he reflected, could travel infinite distances.
Still, he persisted.
For some reason, it had proved impossible to acquire a proper cork pinboard, which he wanted for other sheets Doodlehorse was perhaps thinking of preparing. He grudgingly accepted that he might have to use some ugly magnetic boards he had bought several millennia previously. He searched the house for them, but they must have felt neglected and quietly moved out.
“Make your own pinboard,” Doodlehorse had suggested, with the sort of gleeful practicality that can feel, at the wrong moment, like an imaginary knife being given an extra twist.
He thought briefly of the graveyard of abandoned projects from Sunday. The idea had merit, but perhaps not today. So instead he took two A3 sheets of paper, pinned them to the wall, and covered them with his post-it collection. Thus the Doodleboard arrived. The authority of paper, especially the pink notes dedicated to Doodlehorse and the Doodlehorse project, began to fill the office like a spirit newly released from a lantern and determined to stretch its legs after a very long confinement.
Satisfied, Guinea Pig dedicated the next two hours to his first proper priority. The previous week, in a fit of relentless automated efficiency, so that more time and energy might be preserved for the things in life that actually mattered, he had created a process by which producing a weekly journal now took about five minutes. The drawback was that the result hit its two readers on this planet as a hefty PDF file which, by sheer physical and moral weight, risked stunning them before they had even reached the second page.
This would not do.
The PDF had to become a feather.
This required the services of a Fruitbowl, who would guide him through the labyrinth of mysterious languages supposedly designed to make things easier. Easier for whom was never entirely clear. Still, Guinea Pig relished the thought that within two hours a kind of literary nirvana might be achieved.
This was true, in the same way that many noble ambitions are true until other people begin having their own.
By some unusual burst of foresight, he had asked the Fruitbowl to list all the necessary steps to reach nirvana. Then, together, they would slowly, step by step, gracefully ascend.
Except that somebody, somewhere, had clearly put oil on the ladder.
Guinea slipped.
The Fruitbowl, observing this, reached out with a solution, but solutions had their own leisurely pace. And the line of paddocks had already begun to wobble. After ninety minutes, the important part of reaching nirvana had indeed been completed, but the path stretched ahead and he knew there would be a gate at the end of it. This, oddly enough, was where his earlier foresight saved him. He knew he could not finish it all now, but it did not in fact need to be ready until Thursday evening, Friday morning at a push.
There was time.
This realisation came only after he had briefly panicked and thrown the meal plan into disarray. What had possessed him, he could not imagine, to organise a tuna tray bake for Monday lunch, requiring cheese when there was none in the house and shopping was strictly forbidden? It was an absurd plan. The meal plan suggested tortelloni for Thursday evening, so he swapped the two meals and the day was saved.
Civilisation, he thought, rested on such adjustments.
The eleven o’clock meeting came and went. Important information was given. Congratulations were extended. The future was pondered and some questions, as ever, were left unanswered. Lunch and siesta, slightly abbreviated, were managed. A breath of spring air was inhaled with suitable seriousness. The two o’clock meeting came and went, pleasantly enough as it always did. The necessary documentation was completed and published. Time for tea.
And then came the curious realisation that life south of the Sahara was rather quiet. He looked at the space where Doodlehorse was planning to announce their joint efforts. It was empty.
But not to worry, he thought.
The weekly invitation to lunch had not arrived either, but there was always the next day. Flexibility. One needed it at home and at work. There was no point having a philosophy that only functioned in one room.
The next priority, delayed though it was, was the review and forecast on their combined effort to conquer the universe. He had allocated two hours to it. It sat there like a half-baked potato in the oven, and he imagined that the finishing touches would be done quickly.
Guinea Pig and thinking, however, had never been a simple partnership.
He continued working, piecing the fragments together, but an uneasiness had begun to creep up his back. It affected the result. And when it was all done, the potato had become not fully baked but perhaps two-thirds baked, which was in some ways worse. A thing unfinished had honesty. A thing two-thirds done suggested both effort and insufficiency in equal measure.
And then there was the question: was this even really the priority? The silence around him, the silence hitting him, might have been telling another story. Were priorities aligned? Was reality aligned with them? What, beneath all the effort, was actually necessary?
He sent off a message. Job done, he said, but he would hold back unless requested.
Then he turned to piecing together the meeting agenda for their global Tuesday morning summit. It was still a little raw, he thought, but there would be time to adapt it to the situation.
A little later the reply came.
Please send it.
And then it happened.
The door opened slightly and a ray of light flooded the darkness of his brain. It was not a dramatic light, not cinematic exactly, but more the sort of practical illumination by which one suddenly sees that the object one has been tripping over all day was there in plain sight. The real realisation hit him with something like a boxer’s punch to the stomach.
Doodlehorse’s day had not gone to plan.
And that had disrupted everything.
When air began to circulate again, the clarity of the situation became frighteningly obvious. In a partnership, both people suffer the messiness of life. This ought not to have been a revelation. It was one of those truths so simple that people often fail to notice it altogether. Doodlehorse was a response to specific situations. But Guinea Pig, in part, had become the enforcer of expectations, the recipient of the frustration implied in that most exasperating question of all: why not?
Yet even in business, it takes two to dance. And even if the dance floor is nine thousand kilometres long, it can still be slippery. Not out of malice. Not by plan. Simply because that is the nature of floors, of distance, of life, of all arrangements involving two people trying to move in roughly the same direction while the world keeps dropping marbles underfoot.
And somehow their work, because they did want to move the same way, would have to accommodate the more important priorities while still trying to reach the desired goals. The sentence was not beautiful, he knew, but the truth in it was.
Guinea Pig had always prided himself on trying to understand the perspective of things that came towards him. He spent the evening contemplating this failure of understanding. Because that was what it had been. He had failed to recognise that a Doodlehorse was just as vulnerable as anyone else, that when a stone is thrown onto the watery dance floor, it sends ripples out beneath both dancers. Staying upright while moving in the same direction would require a few new steps.
It could be done.
That he did not question.
But how exactly it was to be done would need to be worked out.
So he sent a message, warning Doodlehorse that he had slipped up, but trying also to put the matter in context. He hoped she would understand. Hope, he reflected, was often all one had available once the words had been sent.
Then he crawled into bed with several realisations and the subdued knowledge that his last paddock, watching another instalment of 56 Days, would have to wait until tomorrow.
This seemed, in the circumstances, fair.
Monday had not gone to plan. But then, plans were not sacred objects. They were only sketches of intention, useful until contradicted by the day. What mattered, perhaps, was not whether the paddocks held perfectly, nor whether the potato was fully baked, nor whether every task marched to heel in the approved order. What mattered was something less glittering and more durable: that he had begun to see the shape of the dance.
Not efficiency.
Not perfection.
But accommodation.
There were, he realised, two kinds of order. One was the brittle kind, which required every piece to remain exactly where it had been placed and regarded any interruption as failure. The other was more alive than that. It accepted interruption. It bent to weight. It made room for the fact that other people had days too, difficult ones, surprising ones, derailed ones, and that partnership meant not merely dividing the labour but absorbing the shocks.
That was harder.
And better.
The clean rooms downstairs still existed. The cats had been fed and had resumed their lives of soft unconscious principle. The Doodleboard remained on the wall with its coloured authority. Work had advanced, though not elegantly. A truth had emerged, though not comfortably. And tomorrow morning there would be a summit, an agenda, another arrangement of priorities, another attempt to keep one’s footing on the long wet floor between expectation and reality.
This, he thought as sleep approached, was perhaps what Doodlehorsing really was.
Not the elimination of chaos.
Only a more graceful way of meeting it.
Doodlehorse add on: leaving a tidy office in the evening, including gifts given by cats, is a necessary way to close the day.
The Meals
🔥 Spicy Beef Burger Patties (4 large burgers)
Ingredients
- 800g ground beef (20% fat ideal)
- 1 small onion, very finely minced or grated
- 2 cloves garlic, grated
- 1 fresh red chili, finely minced (or 1–2 tsp chili flakes)
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp black pepper
- Optional heat boost: ½ tsp cayenne or a dash of hot sauce
Method
- Mix gently
Combine everything in a bowl. Use your hands but do NOT overwork the meat — this keeps patties tender. - Shape
Divide into 4 equal balls (about 200g each).
Flatten to about 2 cm thick.
Press a small thumb dent in the centre (prevents puffing). - Chill
Refrigerate 30 minutes to firm up (important for juicy burgers). - Cook
- High heat pan or grill.
- 3–4 minutes per side for medium.
- Don’t press them down while cooking.
- Rest
Let them rest 5 minutes before serving.
