Muddle's Day

By half past nine I had six jobs in my head and they were all shouting.

Wicks. Oil. Something about the glass. Something about the bridge. Somebody had told me a thing about hooks while I was already holding two other things, and by the time I got out of that yard I could not have told you which of them was first, or which mattered, or who had said what.

"Too... many... things," I said, to the lane.

This is not a story about being disorganised. I want to be clear, because fluffs assume. I have more ideas before breakfast than most of this land has in a week. The trouble is that they arrive all at once, at the same volume, with no order, and I cannot get hold of the first one.

Tidy was at the gatepost drawing the day in pictures.

"Stop," said Tidy. "Say the smallest one."

I stopped. "...Wicks."

"Good. That's the top of the plan."

One word. Somebody else picked it, out of my own six, in about three seconds, and handed it back to me — and the shouting went down to a hum.

I held on to wicks like a handle and set off.

And went the wrong way.

It is easy to do when you are holding on to one word. Your feet go where they like. I got halfway down a slope that is not the way to anywhere before noticing that the shed had failed to appear, which is not a thing sheds do.

I stopped at the bottom of the bank, in the nettles, thoroughly lost.

And there it was. Tipped on its side in the wet, lid off, half its contents down in the ditch: a wooden box.

I stood and looked at it for a while, because I genuinely could not work out, for about ten seconds, whether I had found something or was in trouble.

Then I counted what was in the ditch, which took some time, and was twenty-two.

Getting them back up that bank took three trips and cost me both knees. Puzzly met me at the top with a bucket and a puzzled expression.

"Why have you got those?"

"Because I went the wrong way," I said, "to the shed."

"That's not an answer."

"It is today," I said.

Later I was in the barn when Doodle drew the whole path on the big roll of paper — the gate, the three steps, the bridge, the orchard as a row of small green blobs, Winky's house at the end — with every hook on it as a dot.

I stopped dead in the doorway with an armful of ditch-lanterns and wet knees.

"Oh," I said. "Oh. It's all in one piece."

That is what I cannot do in my own head, and that is what Doodle did on a floor with a pencil in about an hour. The whole thing, at once, where you can see it. I have thought about that map more than anything else that happened to me today.

I got to Winky's early and immediately had eleven ideas about the seating, which I did not say out loud, which I count as a personal triumph.

Then I found Tidy by the fire and said thank you for the wicks.

"For the what?"

"You said 'say the smallest one'. This morning. I'd have still been standing in that yard at lunchtime."

Tidy looked genuinely blank for a moment and then said, "Oh — that's just the thing I say."

Which is the whole business in one sentence, really. The thing that unstuck my entire day is a thing Tidy says so often it has stopped being a thing Tidy notices saying.

Beamy read the envelope out and I was on it twice: the box, and went the wrong way on purpose, which is not accurate and which I have decided not to correct.