Mornings have a simple routine, get up, check the
animals, have breakfast, except for winter when breakfast happens
first whilst we wait for daylight. That’s most mornings. Today
was one of the specials where I needed to be somewhere, on time.
That means add in getting showered, finding clothes with no
significant animal debris on them, and packing in lots of extra jobs.
The clean clothes were already set out. All I had to do
was shower, cook breakfast, get clothes off the rack beyond my
partner’s desk, check weather forecast, nice legs, stroke cat...
Wait. Nice legs? Where did that come from?
Back up. Literally. It was something that caught my
eye on the desk – a piece of junk mail waiting for the decision:
recycle immediately, use as fire-lighter, use as litter-tray liner.
In the semi dark, some unquiet corner of my mind that still remembers
its testosterone-addled youth picked out a dim photo, and nice legs.
It took some staring at the desk to put the pieces together.
The thing is, this was just a passing glance. All that
background stuff in my head, at the subconscious level, picked out a
particular detail – part of the activity we mostly don’t notice.
The same stuff that gets your foot shifting to the brake before you
can consciously paraphrase the Bard – is that a pedestrian I see
before me? – or keeps your fingers out of the way of the knife so
that supper remains the vegetarian option. We spend so much of our
time not actually noticing all the stuff we notice, that it comes as
a surprise when circumstances make us notice it.
The people who do the adverts in the junk mail know it
too, even if they don’t know they know it. That picture, on close
inspection, was an ordinary young couple walking down an ordinary
street. When I pick it up and look at it now, my head doesn’t
instantly say ‘hey, nice legs’, except as an echo of this
morning’s surprise, instead it explores things like do we want
another credit card? No. Or even is this paper too shiny for
the litter tray? But somewhere, in the background, that bit of
my mind is probably still chuntering – nice legs, see, told you
so. So even though I don’t want the credit card, and surely
wouldn’t be swayed by the nice legs, some bit of me
noticed, and there’s no telling how insidiously it might be nagging
the rest.
Hmmm... this reminds me, I must ask my partner if she’s
noticed there’s some junk mail needs processing. Nice
fire-lighter.
