Free The To-Do List by Mike Gayle Page A

she’s just stepped out of a John Hughes movie.’
            We spent a good half hour looking through photos and it was great fun. There were Claire and Charlotte crying after receiving their ‘A’ level results, which was featured in the Leicester Mercury under the headline ‘City teenagers in “A” Level joy!’; me dancing at a barbecue wearing slightly camp red velour trousers paired with a brown jacket; young versions of Claire and me dressed in old clothes decorating the front bedroom of our first house; me in a daft hat hanging out of a tent at Reading Festival while my friend Jackie looked on. It was a history of me and of Claire; of who we were then and who we were now; and it made me feel nostalgic for the past. We hadn’t always been the people we were now.
            Tidying away in preparation for midnight I vowed that I really would sort out the photo albums. They were, to be frank, possibly the worst photo albums in existence. The covers were plastic and the photos were supposedly held in place by sheets of transparent sticky stuff that appeared to be better at sticking to itself than to the photos.
            ‘Sorting this lot was on my To-Do List,’ I told Claire as a flood of unstuck photographs poured out onto the floor. ‘Item 509: “Organise photo albums so that when the kids are older they can see a time before they even existed presented in some kind of order.” Still,’ I scrabbled around on the floor trying to pick up the escaped photos, ‘I suppose I’ve got a bit of time before it becomes urgent.’
            Heading to the kitchen I pulled the bottle of champagne that John and Charlotte had brought out of the fridge and searched the kitchen for the champagne flutes that we’d received as a wedding present from Claire’s great uncle Clarke. It was only after five minutes of hunting through every single cupboard that I remembered we’d managed to break every single one. We didn’t own champagne flutes any more.
            ‘I bet you Derek and Jessica have got champagne flutes,’ I ranted as Claire came to find out why I was taking so long. ‘I bet you they’ve got ordinary everyday champagne flutes and champagne flutes that they keep just for special occasions! And do you know what’s worse? It was on the To-Do List. Item 846: “Buy new glassware so that when people come round we can look like we give a crap”.’
            ‘Come on, Mike,’ coaxed Claire, ‘we don’t really need champagne flutes do we? What about that set of tall glasses from Habitat that your parents bought us a while back?’
            ‘Those things are long gone,’ I replied. ‘We smashed two of them at the barbecue in August, the dishwasher killed another one, two have just disappeared into thin air and the only one in the cupboard has a big chip in it. And before you ask about that set of six wine glasses your mum bought us last Christmas, there are only two left.’
            ‘Two?’
            ‘Yes, two.’
            ‘We’ll just have to make do with whatever we can find then.’
     
    As the four of us stood in front of the TV watching the masses at Trafalgar Square, and I poured out the champagne into two huge red wine glasses and a pair of plastic children’s beakers, it occurred to me that the drinking-receptacle fiasco was symbolic of the mess my life was in. While other proper grown-ups the world round celebrated utilising the correct glassware Claire and I, as a result of our self-inflicted infantilisation, were seeing in the new year with green and yellow plastic beakers from IKEA. How long would this ‘plastic beaker phase’ of our life continue? Months? Years? Decades? Or would New Year’s Eve 2030 see us swigging champagne from saucepans or straight from the bottle? It really didn’t bear thinking about.
            And so as the final Big Ben bongs rang out and Claire, John, and Charlotte cheered and hugged and attempted to clink wine