should see my navel, other people get fluff, I've got Tesco trolleys, dead dogs, burnt out cars...

Hate it when I get an idea that I can't make a story out of. The damn thing just goes scurrying around in my head getting nowhere, like a problem that's irrelevant but nevertheless cries out to be addressed. This is my excuse for forgetting to pay the leccy bill, for instance.

So there's a person, and let's stick them right in the thick of responsibility: person has a spouse and kids. And there's work, which is unavoidable, and that takes the most part of person's waking life, and spouse and kids, love 'em dearly, they get the rest, of course they do. But there's other things person would like to do as well, and no time. Nothing spectacular, nor detrimental to spouse or kids. Just, I dunno, watercolours, reading, volunteer work, sitting in the park doing nish, watching daytime telly even, why not?

Let's say person comes into some money, therefore making work avoidable. Not a gigantic stack, just enough to replicate person's salary adjusted for inflation and career progression from now until retirement.

Now it gets a bit difficult: where does the money come from? If it's a lottery win then even if person pulled the price of the ticket straight from his/her pay cheque, that salary was assumed part of the family resources, therefore spending the resultant lottery win is to be decided by the family. Okay, let's try some kind of inheritance - still liable to the presumption that it should be declared and shared at the breakfast table, but less clearly so. Or maybe generous compensation for a non-debilitating injury (though awkward to keep concealed).

Anyway, person can now buy time to do the other things s/he wants, but only by the deceit of pretending to go to work. This lie should sit at the heart of the rest of the story. It's something fundamental. Ongoing tension and plot progression opportunities over whether person will be found out. Simmering moral dilemma over whether person is being greedy by pulling all of the benefit to person's self, a great big full-time employment sized lump of freedom while spouse is still enslaved. Or whether it's perfectly okay because from some perspectives it's person's money anyway and family are getting the benefit as person is still pumping salary equivalent into the pot and person's a lot happier now and more fun to be around?

But I'm never going to get as far as this, because I can't think of a way of getting this far into the story without declaring person's gender. Or if I do it's going to be so conspicuous by absence that the reader will have the varying notions of how this plays according to gender well in mind anyway. Or they'll have assigned a gender to person based on their own interpretations of person's behaviour. There'll be notions of the duties of father and husband, of mother and wife, put through filters of tradition, societal expectations, and reappraisals of these, etc. Not to mention the reader's own lived experience. Can't blame them for that, we'd all do it.

And all of that will distract from the universal, non-gendered elements of the dilemma, slanting the reader's handling of it one way, or the other, or just throwing in so many slants it all gets lost in any case.

So I can't do it. But if I could I probably would have done in fewer words than I've expended above.

None of this gets me out of finding my chequebook to pay Electricite de France their quarterly bite, which I wouldn't even have to do if I'd got around to setting up a direct debit, but I probably got distracted the last few times I remembered it.