Free The To-Do List by Mike Gayle

either of those,’ complained John plucking the box from his wife’s hands. ‘Us boys need something to rock out to. A bit of Whitesnake, AC-DC or maybe even some of Motorhead. What do you say, Mike? Are you ready to rock out to Motorhead?’
            ‘Yeah, why not?’ I yawned and stretched as Claire lined up ‘The Ace of Spades’ through the controller and Charlotte handed me the blue microphone. ‘I could definitely do with a bit of Motorhead to liven myself up.’ I braced myself to rock out to the classic heavy metal anthem but before I could even put the microphone to my lips a strangled cat scream filled the air.
            ‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Claire.
            ‘No, it’s my turn. You sorted the last five times.’
            ‘Are you sure?’
            I handed her the microphone. ‘Motorhead are all yours, babe.’ Up in our bedroom, I propped my daughter against my shoulder and patted her back. Was it Derek and Jessica’s fireworks that had woken her? Or was she hungry? Or was it colic? Or was she simply over-tired? Or was she under-tired after that long nap she’d had this afternoon? Too many questions and not enough answers but I was definitely glad that I had given up on the To-Do List.
            A huge weight had been taken off my shoulders; I could get back to the business of being me: a crumpled, slightly overweight thirty-six-year-old man with a tonne of things to be ignored for as long as possible. Every time the wardrobe door jammed (Item 984: ‘Fix wardrobe sliding door’,) I just smiled, relieved that it wasn’t a high enough priority for me to bother with; every time I glanced up at the damp patch in the bathroom (Item 125) I just shrugged and carried on showering; and every time I was heading up to work and Lydia asked me to ‘play babies’ with her (Item 3: ‘Spend more time with number-one child so that she doesn’t grow up to be attracted to emotionally distant men’) I just sighed and carried on up the stairs to my office.
            After all it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been plenty of things that I had given up on in the past. In my early twenties I got it into my head that I wanted to be a model when some quirk of fate resulted in me featuring in a catalogue and cinema advertisement for Benetton. Not for a second did it occur to me that the fact that I was only five feet eleven inches tall, had a slightly chipped front tooth and possessed the kind of physique that came hand in hand with a diet that regularly featured Jammy Dodgers would stand in my way. No, in possession of the kind of self-belief that you can only possess in your early twenties, I marched into a modelling agency, handed them a 4"×4" picture of my face taken from the campaign and told them to ring me. The call never came. In fact much to my shame I had to call them in order to get my picture back. And since then, I had managed to give up on a multitude of things (wanting to be a TV presenter, the music and artistry of the band Radiohead and the third book of Lord of The Rings to name but a few) and in doing so I felt I had become richer (at least in terms of time not wasted fannying about) rather than poorer, so as far as the To-Do List was concerned that really should have been the end of my efforts.
     
    It took me roughly twenty minutes or so to calm Maisie down and as soon as she was drifting back to sleep I headed back downstairs for karaoke fun. But instead of being bombarded by appalling renditions of classic Eighties hits, the TV was off and Claire, John and Charlotte were sitting on the sofa huddled around a photograph album.
            ‘Motorhead did us in,’ explained Claire looking up, ‘so now Charlotte and I are taking a walk down memory lane while John laughs at our hairstyles and the size of our glasses.’
            ‘You should see some of these pictures of your wife when she was in the sixth form with Charlotte,’ said John, ‘she looks like