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“Wretched excess is an unfortunate human trait that turns a perfectly good idea ….into a last-minute frenzy.” Jon Anderson, Musician (Lead singer of Yes, Collaborator of Vangelis etc etc)

I have good intentions of being prepared. I have even better attention s of being early. These intentions are justified… after all who likes charging through the ticket barrier and running down the platform just to watch the train sail off without you?

As the scouts motto goes… “Be Prepared”. Actually, they went as far as to give each letter of the motto a word to go with it - Bravery, Enterprise, Purpose, Resolution, Endurance, Partnership, Assurance, Reformation, Enthusiasm and Devotion. I’m not a scout, and I’ve never been a girl guide either…. but I do get the point. Just get mind, body and action organised to do a task so that you reduce chance of failure. I know this… I mean to achieve this.

Like I said… the intention is there.

The reality?

The train sails off without me. I am a huffing, puffing, doubled over mess, glaring angrily at it, feeling indignant that it couldn’t wait 1 minute for me. Whilst doing the walk of shame back to the concourse, it always occurs to met that the damn world does not allow for my particular brand of spontaneity and impulsiveness. Not that this recognition actually makes me DO anything about it!

For instance, I know 25^th December is Christmas day… I do… honestly. I know this from January the first of any given year (being that Christmas day at that stage was but a week before).

But when the first Christmas advertisement appears on TV (for my non-UK readers …that means the last week of August) I sneer at the TV saying “Pah! Summer is barely over and LOOK!” Come September when the first piece of tinsel appears in the shops… I up my game from indignant to moderately outraged. By October it is impossible to buy your favourite perfume unless it comes in a gift pack with a key ring, soap on a rope and a hand cream. Now I’m screeching like a banshee about the commercialisation of Christmas. Come November and every high street looks like the Las Vegas Strip and it become impossible to use public transport (for every seat with a person in it there is another full of bags). By December, all the shopping centres have gone 24/7 and ‘Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree’ is on a permanent loop-tape. So yeah… there have been visual and social clues that maybe I should be engaging in some preparation for the season ahead.

And yet… let me give you a snap shot of my Christmas Eve.

Oxford Street 4pm…. Jax… running around Selfridges in a ‘Supermarket Sweep’ style frenzy. High Street 9pm… Jax… charging round Sainsbury’s with trolley on the verge of tears as they have no fresh turkey and the frozen ones will take 48hrs to defrost.

And yet, I had been complaining about Christmas being forced into my consciousness since August Bank Holiday.

You see the quote I began this with says it all… wretched bloody excess.

In my case, it is excess of time. If I know I have something to do and it isn’t to be done in the next 5 minutes… it goes on the list. The famous Jax To DO list… which never actually never gets done till I am in a howling slightly hysterical panic.

We all recall my trip to Barcelona was fraught with tasks not done till the last minute… and I’d love to say that was a one off. But No. I have done nothing for the Latvia trip either. In fact I dare say, I have done even less. Despite the fact I have known about this since May, I still have no idea how I am to get there, let alone make arrangements this end. We all know in the end I’ll be throwing random things in a bag the morning I go. (Consequences will include clomping around the Baltics in odd shoes) If ran a travel company it would be called ‘Seat of Your Pants Tours’… cause basically that is how I scrape past the finish line … by the seat of my pants!

If something isn’t to be done right now, surely spending right now preparing for it will be time badly spent if it turns out the task gets cancelled. Maybe I have been exposed to too much fiction where our heroine spends ages organising something just for our hero to arrive late. I just don’t want to be Samantha, who spent hours on valentines day, lying on the table covered in sushi just for our hero to arrive extremely late (having been delayed at work) saying he had eaten on the way home! Now if I were Samantha that scene would never have happened as I wouldn’t even start making the sushi till I heard the key in the lock!

Also to me, it almost seems like tempting fate to prepare by doing sensible things like consulting what some people think is useful information. I always think that things will just come right at the last moment and to do stuff in advance will just jinx a positive outcome. It always stuns me when I am exposed to the fact most people don’t live like that.

Last night on our way back to the city from visiting with a friend in the country, I was amazed when my travelling buddy looked up my connecting train on the wap function of their phone. I was perfectly content to do my usual running around the terminus in a panic looking for my train and platform. Of course having looked up the information, my friend advised me that I’d never make my connection and could provide me of an alternative route instead.

The information was spot on… our trains arrival time meant I had missed my connection and it was wise to change terminus and go another way. I was even furnished with the departure time and platform of the new routing. The information meant I didn’t have to panic… it even gave me enough time to pick up a Japanese take-away enroute.

But would it have occurred to me to use the internet on my phone? NO. Left to my own devices, I would have ran across Victoria Station to a random platform I think my connecting train may possibly be scheduled for, make out of breath squawks at the platform staff, then slink embarrassed over to the information desk who would inform me of what my friend managed to tell me from the comfort of the previous train… you’ve missed the last Victoria train, go to Charing Cross. Avoidable entirely it was proven – but THIS is how I live.

Somehow, the idea of leaving things to the last moment has got confused with impulsiveness in my head.

I have come to fancy that my impulsiveness is a very attractive quality of mine. I thought that meant I must be avant-garde, idiosyncratic, individualist, free and easy. I thought that because I do seem to possess the ability to pull rabbits of hats at the finish line (to mix metaphors) – and nothing ever bad happens because I’m not prepared in advance I was actually pretty cool (if unorthodox is still one of the tenants of cool).

Okay… one year they really hadn’t a spare fresh turkey or goose in the back of the supermarket (I had always kind of banked on someone forgetting to collect a pre-ordered one so I could snaffle it up half price on Xmas Eve night), but it really wasn’t so bad having a traditional Finish Xmas dinner of a mixed platter of meat and fish – which was all they had on the shelves. I styled it out faking a previously unknown Finish heritage and even made my guest do the traditional Finish after dinner sauna followed by visiting the graves of relatives. Harder than you think when you have no known rellies alive or dead in the Greater Plymouth area, which was where I lived at the time. But given that I got away with it and all these years later those people STILL buy me gifts from Finland to remind me ‘of home’ - I have always thought my leaving things to the last minute opened me up to challenges and experiences that just add to life’s rich tapestry.

In fact I would go further and say that I had come to think that to be organised was to ensure a predictable outcome. And Jax thought predictability is something that equates far too easily with dull. Ana to Jax Dull = Boring!

However it came as quite a shock to me that impulsiveness for most people does not mean antonym of boring. To most people impulsive means careless, foolish, and rash. Basically it means not being prepared. And being unprepared for the things in life that are predictable is, in most peoples view, frankly just making life harder for yourself for no bloody good reason!

One only has to look as the debacle around my TV set. I know the programmes I love. But have I ever watched a complete series of anything? Um No.

Again, it’s having to pre plan that dooms me. Even though all I have to do is actually USE the free monthly magazine Sky so kindly send me, and use the programme planner on my Sky box so I can actually catch the WHOLE series of House, Come Dine With Me, Monk or Make me a Supermodel. Errr… that involves actually committing time to something that doesn’t need doing right this minute. So instead I operate on the ‘I think it might be on around now-ish’ method.

I am quite good at remembering the day my programmes come on, but because I never look up broadcast information I usually have no idea of the time. This involves turning over when people are settled into a completely different programme… just to check. Unfortunately I don’t ever make a note of the channel either so I go to all the channels whose names vaguely ring a bell... very upsetting when I find out that yes Hallmark did have House and are rerunning old series, but the new series is actually on Sky 1. I watched about half an hour worth on Hallmark before I realised Gregory wasn’t interacting with ghosts of all his dead ex-staff… it was an old episode and they were still alive! You can imagine how much worse it gets trying to find which of the many Living channels has Make me a Supermodel is on. Living 1-35 with a plus 1hr plus 2 hrs version of each! For the love of monkeys… is this REALLY necessary?! It takes so long to find which version I need, that by the time I tune in… Tyson has done his bit and some anorexic from Kentucky is crying and I don’t know why!!!

Of course programme information is not only available in the free stuff Sky send me, it is in every newspaper, zillions of magazines, and available on all broadcast media. To say nothing of the fact I can series link a programme, whilst watching it, so that I never have to worry about finding something I enjoy again. But I don’t… cause it smacks of pre-planning… which smacks of caring about TV a little too much.

But then I keep hearing that Baden-Scott fellow from the Scouts blathering on that being prepared means that by having thought out beforehand any accident or situation that might occur, you will know the right thing to do at the right moment, and will be to do it. He’s right. My free and easy approach is (if I’m honest) just making life harder for myself for no bloody good reason!

So, I think for the sake of standing firm to my life should be easy ethos, I’m actually gonna give this whole ‘be prepared’ thing a go.

I will admit that running in heels is a great skill of mine… but maybe wheezing asthmatically for the first ten minutes on a station platform is not so attractive. I think for a change, it would be nice to walk to a train station knowing the estimated time of departure of a train.

I do save a fortune on my Oxford Street dash… but I guess those totally unsuitable random purchases are not always a reflection of how I feel about the recipients. And yes, ‘Christmas around the World’ is getting to be a tired theme when it comes to dinner. I think that with 94 shopping days left to Christmas, (at time of going to press) I am actually going to pick up the odd pressie over the coming weeks… and put an order in for a traditional British bird.

And whilst not pouring over TV Quick does prove I am not a slave to the goggle box, I do have to admit that it would be nice to follow the WHOLE story-line of a programme I am watching. I think I may just programme in the few series I really like… besides, I heard Project Runway is back, and I have already missed a few of who are in...and out.

So, given my new resolve, do excuse me if I stop this article… apparently I have to check what the weather in Latvia is like, so I can pack appropriately… and I have heard that it would also be good for me to find out exactly how on earth I am actually gonna get there!

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