The Mystery of the List with No Logic
There are normal lists — the kind made with purpose, structure, and sensible thought. And then there are other lists. The kind you rediscover months later, stare at in total confusion, and wonder whether you were a genius, exhausted, or briefly possessed by a very organised ghost. Today, I found the second kind.
It was written on the back of a receipt for something I don’t remember buying, in handwriting that was definitely mine but also somehow looked like it was written by someone in a hurry to escape a thought. At the top, no title, no explanation — just a lone link: carpet cleaning woking. No context. No date. Just a silent digital breadcrumb from the past.
Underneath it, like a sequel nobody asked for, came upholstery cleaning woking followed by sofa cleaning woking. At this point, I started questioning whether I once made a dramatic commitment to the cleanliness of every soft surface within a five-mile radius. Did I ever follow through? Absolutely not. Did I intend to? That’s between me and the receipt.
Then came the most mysterious entry of all: mattress cleaning woking — which suggests something happened to that mattress, and I’m not sure I want to remember what it was. And as if completing a ritual, the final link appeared: rug cleaning woking, the ultimate finishing touch to the world’s most oddly committed list.
I stared at it for a while, waiting for my brain to offer answers. It didn’t. The receipt just sat there, wrinkled and smug, like a time capsule of thoughts I abandoned the second I wrote them down. But maybe that’s the beauty of it — humans don’t only document important things. We document half-thoughts, incomplete plans, and ideas that made perfect sense for exactly 11 seconds.
Maybe I was planning a full-scale fabric revolution. Maybe I was procrastinating by pretending to be productive. Maybe I just copied links for the satisfaction of seeing order on paper. Or maybe — and this feels most accurate — I was simply future-proofing my laziness.
I didn’t rewrite the list. I didn’t throw it away. I folded it up, slid it back where I found it, and decided it deserves to live on as a delightful unsolved riddle. One day, future-me will find it again. And future-me will also have no idea what I was doing.
Some notes are reminders. Some are instructions. And some — like this one — are just proof that the brain loves to wander, even while holding a pen.
Not everything we write down needs a purpose.
Sometimes, it’s enough that it simply existed.