Warning: This May Surprise You

One character quality a lot of people assume I have. Can you guess what it is? It is not terribly exciting or interesting or fascinating. A lot of people assume I am an extremely organised individual.

True, in some areas I am. Anyone who has ever travelled with me knows how scary I am about being on time. Surely it's correct to be at the train station/bus stop/airport at least an hour before departure, right? If I don't have the relevant tickets or documents on my person, I get very panicky and insist the other person shows me them at all times. Until they get sick of my constant asking and eventually hand the bloody things over to me.

But that, my friends, is where it stops. I am a truly awful and forgetful person when it comes to things. There have been times friends have rang me and asked "Where are you?" and I have forgotten we were meant to meet. I have tried putting this information on my mobile, my iPod, even a traditional paper diary. But nothing seems to work.

Another crime I am guilty of is procrastination. The Internet is partly to blame for this. After all, where would my urge to suddenly look up Unity Mitford or find out what capers look like go? Possibly channelled into something more productive, like posting that important letter or writing that essay. As a result I can spend an hour going from Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article and truly wonder where the time went. The refresh button is my friend on the evils of Facebook, Gmail and other such wonders.

Also, and this is down to being lazy, I am a really untidy person. This is partly due to wanting to hang onto most of my crap such as theatre tickets, leaflets for theme parks and other useless information. Plus my slightly scary obsession of having lots of books about the place. Despite wanting to be an archivist (which, let's face it, part of the job involves being quite a tidy person) I am not very good at tidying things away at home (and sometimes at work...). Sometimes I blame the smallness of the flat I live in. True, it's small but Him Indoors manages to restrain his scatter tendencies and keep them in his own room.

I should also face up to this fact that this blog post is providing some escapism away from tidying up the living room and kitchen. Gawd bless you internet!