I’m bored. I’m the chairman of the bored

I can’t wake up. You know that feeling when you’re 15 and you just. Can’t. Wake. Up. Not without immediately wanting to sink back into the pillows and the warm nothingness of sleep, anyway. It’s raining, again. There’s a rage of wind. It feels like we’re on a boat, in a cabin, vast waters just beyond our windows, travelling somewhere. But we’re not, of course. 

My husband gets up and opens the blind. The sky is lilac-grey. Smoke drifts from houses, too lacklustre to billow. A siren, the first sounds of the children, the thought of breakfast: pancakes, maybe. It’s Saturday. Good things happen on Saturdays. They’re busy with the kind of energy that comes before a party or the opening night of a show. Bustle. Busy happiness - or should that be happy business. Either way, it’s a good feeling. Weddings happen on Saturdays and kids’ parties and friends and shopping. Saturday is all the colours of the rainbow - with glitter on top. If Saturday were a person, she’d be Shirley Bassey or Cher or Barbara Streisand. Life’s candy and the sun’s a ball of butter. 

But not today. There are no morning sports clubs, no late lunches by the river, no promise of getting dressed up and going out out  - or even just out. I yawn ‘Whyyyyyy?’, kick back the duvet and shout: ‘Who wants pancakes?’

Once undulating with mirth and merriment, weekends have become the flattest of landscapes: just endless sand and the mirage of a horizon somewhere in the distance. But as Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park: life finds a way. The hours are long and cruel, but if you’re dedicated, you can fill that void. And if you’re too exhausted and demoralised to come up with ideas, fear not. 

Here are 5 weekend boredom busters to help you while away the hours and have more fun than you could ever have imagined.

1. Have a clear-out

Do a Marie Kondo by pulling out all of your clothes and heaping them into a towering pile in the middle of your bedroom. Stare at the horror you’ve just created for 10 to 15 minutes wondering what possessed you to open this can of worms. Your children will be screaming: ‘Daddy, daddy, come and see what mummy’s done!’, as if you’re having a psychotic break and have just smeared shit on the walls. 

After this, they’ll take it in turns to leap from the bed onto the pile of clothes. When you eventually muster up the mental strength to tackle the heap, dodging the dive-bombing bodies, you’ll realise a substantial amount of your knickers are older than your marriage and look like they’ve been chewed by rats. You sit on the floor, amidst the jumping children, and the clothes (now spread across the room) and frantically start adding knickers to your online M&S basket. The mountain stays there for three days before you admit defeat and spend half an hour shoving it all back in your drawers. Along with the three packs of brand new knickers.

Hours spent: at least 2

2. Have an argument

Pick at all the little fraying threads. You know the ones you’d normally leave for fear of a major unravelling? Don’t. Then you can have exchanges like this:

‘Of course! Of course the dishwasher needs to be left open!’

‘How can I empty it without it being open?’

‘You’re always emptying it. Why are you always emptying it?’

‘Probably because we keep using it’. 

‘It just feels like it’s always open. I nearly tripped over it’. 

‘You poor thing. It must be really hard for you’.

‘Why are you so obsessed with the dishwasher? Maybe you’ve got a problem.’

‘Someone has to empty it. I know it’s not going to be you.’

‘Pig’.

‘You’re the pig, pig’.

‘You love me’. (and sashay away)

These types of pointless arguments are sport for our times; they’ll keep you entertained and help you take out your anger and frustration on someone else. 

Hours spent: 10 mins - 20 if you sashay back for round two.

3. Make dramatic statements

‘That’s it, no more booze’; ‘If people don’t tidy the toys away I’ll have to put them all in the bin’; ‘We’re having a screen free day tomorrow’; ‘Maybe I’ll shave all my hair off’. 

Making dramatic statements is an exceptionally rewarding pastime. It’s fun - and for a moment you can kid yourself that you have some control over your own life. It’s ok, this is lockdown - nobody is actually going to expect you to do any of these things - you can just say whatever you want to fill the time. And the chaos that ensues will kill at least 5-7 minutes - longer if you persist with the screen free day. 

Hours spent: Anywhere between 5 minutes and 5 hours. It depends on your commitment. 

4. Eat a meal in a different room

Why not transform an upstairs bedroom into a restaurant for the night? You’ve got nothing else to do and it’ll create the illusion of eating somewhere other than your house. Get the kids to make a menu (with only one option on it). Cook the food as usual but when you’ve finished, don’t carry it to the kitchen table. Instead make sixteen trips up and down the stairs, spilling drinks as you go (something to keep you occupied later). Squeeze the plates onto a tiny table, squeeze your arse into a tiny chair, and enjoy. Watch as ragu squelches into the rug and the children try to push each other’s plates onto the floor, like one of those arcade coin shuffling games. When you’re finished, carry all the plates downstairs, spilling dirty cutlery as you go (something to keep you occupied later). I promise you’ll feel like you actually went out to a restaurant.*

Hours spent: 3 (if you include cooking the food)

*I lied

5. Re-decorate

If you’re looking for the ultimate weekend time-filler, look no further. Re-decorating incorporates all of the above into one neat, time-guzzling entertainment package: You’ll wonder why you ever thought it was a good idea, you’ll have countless arguments, make dozens of dramatic statements, and the mess will be infinite. 

You can start the whole thing with a series of dramatic statements: ‘I can’t bear these walls for another second. They must be painted at once or I’ll die.’ Then spend £40 on paint samples - all of them green but ever so-slightly (some might say imperceptibly) different. Once they’re on the wall, you can begin arguing over which colour is best. Cue: more dramatic statements of loathing for the shades you dislike: ‘It’s the colour of a disused Soviet urinal’, and poetic adulation for the one you want: ‘It’s like they took joy itself and turned it into a colour’. It’s finally decided, the paint is bought, the die is cast. You begin painting but as it turns out there’s a way to do it. Paint is spilled, people are blamed, voices are raised. But have you looked at the clock once? No. You’re too busy having the time of your bloody life. 

Hours spent: at least 12.

I shuffle down the stairs, noticing the little blankets of dust on top of the picture frames. Who knows, maybe today will be the day I dust them. In the kitchen I crack the eggs and pour the oats. I ask the children if they want to listen to ‘Bop Bop Americano’. They say yes. But we all know I’m the one who wants to listen to it. We dance. When it ends, I look at them and say: ‘Again?’