Bloganuary Day 13: Entering the realms of fantasy…

What does your ideal day look like?

I’ve had longer than usual to think about today’s prompt. Normally, I first see it in my inbox when I wake up at the usual time, but today I found myself awake in the small hours, so took an early sneak peek at what fresh challenge awaited.

Interestingly, the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that my ideal day is actually pretty close to my typical day, just with bells on. But then, when you no longer have to go out to work for a living, you can pretty much dictate your own agenda.

If we take a day as running from midnight to midnight, then I would be quite content to sacrifice the entire initial third of it to sleep, in order to awake refreshed and raring to go at the respectable hour of 8 a.m.

Ideally, though, this would not be the signal to leap energetically from my bower ready to take on the world and all its manifold challenges. No thank you: I’d much rather ease myself in with two leisurely cups of tea, to be taken in bed while perusing social media, trying to follow the news (in French) and getting cross with the gods of Bubblemania. Although if this is to be a truly ideal day, I might actually sail through a few levels while sucking up the Earl Grey.

Ablutions and dressing would naturally follow. Thereafter I would descend to the rez de chaussée (that’s ground floor to you) and assume the position in my armchair to partake of a decent coffee while ticking off the various tasks I have mentally set myself that help to persuade me that I’m not completely vegetative: so I’d read a few articles from the Times Literary Supplement and from Le Monde. On an ideal day I wouldn’t even need to resort to the vocabulary look-up function on my tablet, although that hasn’t happened yet. But what is life without aspirations?

By now it’s getting round to brunch time. On this putative ideal day, this would inevitably involve bacon and brown sauce. The rest is detail.

There would then follow a tea-accompanied pause in order to allow the digestive processes to get under way smoothly, before I turn to the main business of the day. This is, of course, blogging, be it researching a song lyric, combing through my photo library or, more likely, a bit of both. And if we’re thinking about a really ideal day there might even be an interlude of a delightful hour or so for some sybaritic dissipation.

At some time after five o’clock (we do try to adhere to a certain amount of self-control), the sun will be declared to be over the yardarm and it will officially be Apéro time, with pastis heavily backed to be involved at some stage of the proceedings.

On an ideal day, dinner would then be a properly spicy curry, taken on a tray in front of the early evening quiz shows, where I would, naturally, know all the answers – perhaps even to the totes emoji round, although that might be a bridge too far, even in the most ideal of worlds.

Then comes the evening’s entertainment. This would ideally be a televised football match in which the mighty Liverpool FC put a bunch of lesser mortals (i.e. any other team at all) pitilessly to the sword while I toy with an agreeable Speyside malt and run through my repertoire of blood-curdling oaths in the form of advice for the referee.

And so to bed. Rinse and repeat.