I think things can be traced back to my early childhood; Mum’s penchant for Christopher Robin: the need to avoid the cracks in the pavement. Don’t worry, I have already alerted the grandchildren on the necessity to jump right over the lines! At 75, I still do. Take a close look when I am walking down the street, note that sudden elongated step taken just in the nick of time!
But things have gotten much worse. I bought a Subaru. I now count Subaru cars on the road, estimating a number in my head before heading off – I will pass four on the trip to the supermarket, ten to drop the grandchildren off, forty-five on the trip to Daylesford, one way. There are rules too – the cars must be on the road, you can’t count parked cars, or those sitting in driveways! I admit that if things are close, I do include my own Subaru in the count. You’d be amazed at the accuracy of my estimations!
Oh, and then there is the number plate reading. Look at this one, I muse, as I am sitting behind 1AM 5FG. It has a complementary red ‘p’ plate. Later that day I see WHY BHV, a rather cheeky rego for us aficionados.
As soon as my mind registers any repetition, I start to count. It might be a fence – 142 pickets, seven magpies on the corner, traffic lights: wow, I just got five green lights; there’s ten identical cottages in that terrace, 11 pairs of jocks drying on the line, the library has three flights, each with ten steps and the bedside clock registers 4.56am.
SBS’s On Demand film menus are regimented in lines, with nine movies in each; there are 187 longish steps to the Milk Bar – if you start at our front gate, not the front door: that adds an extra 12 steps! I see a picture of a public housing tower – 21 stories and I note that only every second window has an air conditioner sticking out. And so it goes – a never ending cornucopia of things to count.
My MS Word program counts words – I wonder if that was ever somebody’s job? Wouldn’t that be a great way to earn a crust. But it tells me that you can fit about 742 words on a page, if you stick to 11 pt Calibri font. Wonderful really; imagine all the different length words you write, lots of really small ones, just three or four letters long, and then those that run out to nine, or ten letters, some even 14! The word count is pretty consistent! I’m amazed how it all works? I now restrict myself to 500 words to a page.
I sometimes consider whether I am alone with my counting. If I had analytical skills, I could research this, maybe start a support group – a web page for others similarly fixated.
For now, I’ll just spend a moment counting the words in this story. Mmmm exactly 500!
Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Lines and Squares, A.A.Milne