By: Patrick
I call the bingo at a local community centre every other Tuesday. Always the same people sat in the same places having the same chats and telling the same jokes. I often wonder what it would be like to break the unspoken rules, to pause for an extra few seconds at one point, to call a number that has already been called, to call a number that is not between 1 and 90. Yet I never do it. The routine is sacred and that is fine by me. The bingo is mundane. I find the mundane both comforting and repellent. We are taught to distrust the mundane. It is seen as synonymous with the mediocre. Yet at its heart, life is mundane, despite all attempts to distract us from this fact. If we spend our whole lives fleeing the mundane, have we learnt anything about life? This evening, I spent the second half of the bingo anticipating going to the new Asda to see if they stocked fresh pesto. Neither Morrisons nor Tesco Extra stock this product and I really wanted to have some. In the end, Asda did not have any, but I took it fairly stoically and bought some tomato and bacon sauce instead. Yesterday I left the house specifically to buy a Strawberry Muller Rice. I am not sure what all this says about me, but it would appear to suggest that I am bored. This seems less admirable than accepting and enjoying the mundane. The mundane seems closely linked to the spiritual and there is not much about pesto or products made by Muller that is spiritual. When purchasing food becomes the crucial predictor of my levels of happiness, or even just basic satisfaction, it is difficult not to conclude that my life is lacking something quite important.