OK, I’m ready to confess here and now.
I confess that I often send emails to myself.
It’s sad really, like the old song “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter (and make believe it came from you)”. Sad but practical. Sending myself an email is nifty and neat for quick reminders. I know, there is an app for that. I have a smartphone app with a reminder system which will prompt me to put out the recycle bin every alternate Sunday night at 9 pm for the rest of my life if needed. But my app is a bit complicated and I like to keep things simple. Emailing myself is a quick and dirty reminder system. It’s like writing a note on the back of my hand saying “shopping”. Yes, but which shop? What items? Setting a timer on my watch has the same problem. “Ding ding ding”. Is it a reminder to take the pizza out of the oven, mow the lawn or phone a friend?
So instead of scrawling cryptic notes on my hand, I send an email to myself and add a few more details than will fit on the back of my paw. Message sent. Job done. Too easy.
I admit there is a problem if the task is urgent, like taking pizza out of the oven. In that case it’s important to look at my inbox more often than once a week. But no system is perfect.
Yesterday I clicked on a self reminder email from a few days earlier which said simply
“1 bag “
It was a quick and dirty memory jogger, which neglected some critical details.
The problem was, I had no idea what bag it referred to.
Many things come in bags.
After tennis today, over cups of tea-bag tea, we were talking about the old tennis courts which originally had an “en tout cas” surface.
En tout cas is a French phrase which means “in any case”, a sort of Gallic way of saying “whatever”. Crushed bricks, ground snail shells, aged bag-uette crumbs – in any case, it’s all the same.
Rick from tennis told me the club used to buy bags of en tout cas and spread it on the courts by hand until the next shower of rain washed it off the courts and into the car park. But never fear, the club had a big stockpile of bags of en tout cas to rake and spread and roll and water onto the courts after every storm.
But back to my email reminder about a bag. Bag of en tout cas? Seems unlikely as the courts are now surfaced with a type of tennis carpet rather than crushed bricks and clay.
Could my email be a cue to pick up a bag of potting mix? We buy lots of bags of this stuff – cacti mix (sharp, with a very dry finish), succulent mix (not very juicy), and vegetable mix (good for you, but tastes worse than kale). I’ve often thought selling potting mix is a pretty good racket, charging good money for common or garden dirt. But last time I checked we had plenty of bags of dirt and even sand in the shed, so my email reminder surely did not refer to those bags.
There are lots of other baggy possibilities. I have always liked the Irish phrase “bag of weasels” as in “He’s as cross as a bag of weasels”. I’ve never met a bag of weasels but I can imagine multiple weasels would get very angry if piled together into a bag of any sort. To be fair to the weasels, I would be cross too if someone shoved me into a bag with multiple strangers, whether they were furry snarling weasels or hairy smelly humans.
Where would I buy a bag of weasels? The local pet shop?
“One bag of weasels please”.
“Certainly sir. Siberian or Egyptian? Sorry, we’ve just sold out our last lot of Japanese weasels. But I can order some in if you’d like”.
Bag of weasels? I don’t think so. Our guinea pigs were hard enough to get out from under their little hidey-hole shelter, let alone into a bag. Forget weasels.
What about a bag of tricks?
I do have a bag of tricks containing a set of Groucho Marx spectacles and attached moustache, as well as a trick egg and egg cup to make items disappear when placed inside the egg plus a magic wand to distract the audience when the hand is slower than the eye. But I haven’t used that bag for 20 years, so that’s probably not what my email referred to.
Bag of bones? Old Mr Skelletoni down the street regularly says that he feels like a bag of bones but for me to refer to him that way would be callous rather than kind, so we can cross him off the list of baggy solutions to my email reminder.
To be honest I’m not at all sure what the email bag refers to.
However, just to be on the safe side I’ll buy a big bag of potato chips.
We only eat them for medicinal purposes, to keep our salt levels up and our blood pressure from dropping too low.
Otherwise, we might faint.
I’m glad I e-reminded myself. Would you like a chip?
© Geoff Milton 2020
