Planning my own fun

As a child, I loved planning. Special occasions were as much about enjoying the anticipation as relishing the event itself. When our summer holiday approached, I created countdown charts on graph paper. Each square represented an hour to be coloured in. Such was my enthusiasm, when the chart was about half-complete I'd change the axis and redraw it on a larger scale. Eventually, after a few revisions, there'd be a square to fill every five minutes, which meant the time between finishing breakfast and walking to school became an unusually productive time of day. Then there were the library visits to research our destinations, the notes I wrote... I'd pretty much experienced the holiday in advance before mum and dad had even loaded the car.

This fondness for project management was reinforced by the TV shows I watched during the 1970s and 1980s. In Mission: Impossible, the Impossible Missions Force would be given their instructions every week via self-destructing tape. They’d make a plan and would carry out their mission (if they chose to accept it) to save the world from plotters in fictional Eastern European countries. Then The A-Team crashed onto ITV in their GMC van, with Colonel John 'Hannibal' Smith telling us he loved it when a plan came together. Their enemies may have been closer to home but the format was pretty similar: a briefing, some far-fetched plotting, at least one explosion and a wisecrack to wrap things up.

These days, I live in a village where everyone has a plan. Ringmer has a non-explosive neighbourhood development plan that was adopted following a referendum in November 2015. It becomes part of the decision-making process when Lewes District Council and the South Downs National Park Authority are considering planning applications, although sadly it doesn't offer much help when the county council proposes closing the local library. Best-laid plans and all that, as Robert Burns nearly said.

Which made me realise the flaw in all these schemes. All my holiday ideas were at the mercy of little brother, whose fondness for steam railways caused many a detour. The secret IMF team was often at risk of discovery, despite their implausibly effective latex masks. And nothing went as expected for The A-Team, even though they were a crack commando unit. Yet, in all these cases, everything worked out alright in the end.

Could this be a lesson for me? Apparently so. Last Christmas, a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research suggested that having a strict schedule for your weekend wasn’t a good idea. Not only did this reduce the excitement from anticipating your activities, it also reduced the enjoyment you experienced from each event. The best solution, according to authors Gabriela Tonietto and Selin Malkoc, is to keep your plans relatively vague until the day of the occasion. Which means it’s probably best if I put my graph paper away this year.

First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 136 January 2018.