My brother’s just come back from College, and as he enjoys winding me up so much, his first words were “what do you do all day?” These were undoubtedly supposed to rile me, but in a way he is onto something. After all, what is the answer to that question? As I’ve explained before, I’ve been getting rather bored at home recently, and that means that sometimes I’ll be desperately trying to find anything to fill the voids of time between each meal. If I think about it, my recent days have been going something like this.

Firstly, Mum will wake me up if my alarm doesn’t – unfortunately, even if I do turn him up, Chris Evans isn’t always loud enough to do the job. At the moment, seeing as I don’t start my new job until January, I could have a lie-in. There are a couple of reasons, however, why I decide against this. One is that, to have a successful and legitimate lie-in, you need to be awake to appreciate it. If you aren’t, you’re just sleeping, and that’s nothing special – we all do it every night! The blind needs to be pulled up, otherwise the bedclothes are too enticing and you can be flitting straight back off to the Land of Nod. I drag myself out of bed and look down upon the jewellery Mum’s bought herself for Christmas (I’ll have to re-give it to her on the big day – I can’t wait to see her reaction). At some point I’ll get round to wrapping it, but for now it’s slotted snugly down the side of my bed. When it comes to finding secret hiding places for presents in my room, there’s not that many to choose from!

After this, my priorities are as follows. Before I brush my teeth and tend to my face and hair, I’ll look into the advent calendar only to find he’s already chosen his chocolate (ours is a fill-your-own one), leaving me with what he thinks are the less desirable ones. Fortunately for me, I like the Bounty ones, and it greatly amused him and Mum when I told them that I emit a little squeal whenever I find one. With my chocolate consumed and everything groomed to my satisfaction, I get downstairs and straight onto making a cuppa, being the only member of our family to make sure the milk goes straight back into the fridge (I can still remember it tasting like cheese once when I was 8). Once that’s done, the morning goes by in a bit of a blur, as does the afternoon, and I find it hard to believe that such monotony only really hit home once my brother was chiding me about it. Do I really spend that much time on autopilot?

If I do, then now should be the perfect time to rectify that. Will comes back from university next week, and we need to make plans. I’ve told him that I’m free whenever he is – after all, I have the best part of a month to go before I start my job! Hopefully something will be organised soon. I know another friend of mine, Alex, has proposed a pub crawl, which would be huge fun and as he described it, “banterous”. In fact, it seems like that might not be the only event over the festive season to involve the pub. Deanna could take me along to a pub quiz any day now, and I’d relish the company as well as the challenge!

Mason