Right, so about this thing we called “toing” and my boyfriend. It wasn’t planned or anything. Just happened one weekend, think it was raining, we were stuck inside. Total boredom.
My boyfriend, Alex, he digs through this old box of junk I got from my grandad. Finds this busted clockwork thing. Doesn’t tick, just makes this sad little ‘toing… toing…’ noise if you force the winder. We laughed about it.
Then Alex gets this look. “We gotta make it do something,” he says. Something totally pointless. That was the birth of the “toing project,” I guess.
Making a Start
So, we just dumped it out on the floor. Took it apart. No idea what we were looking at. Springs flew. Tiny gears rolled under the sofa. Classic us.
- Wiped off years of dust. God knows where it’d been.
- Tried figuring out the ‘toing’ mechanism. Failed mostly.
- Started sticking random crap onto it. Found a tiny plastic dinosaur, it had to go on.
Alex, he’s normally Mr. Sensible, Mr. Fix-It. But he got properly into the uselessness of it all. Spent ages trying to hook up the dinosaur so it’d jiggle when it made the ‘toing’ sound. Watching him, dead serious, trying to make a plastic T-Rex dance to a broken clock… peak comedy.
Chaos Ensued
Place was a disaster zone. Glue everywhere. Little bits of metal you just know you’ll step on later. Paint. We nearly had a row when we couldn’t get the main spring back. He hated my glitter idea. I thought his dancing dino was dumb. Standard couple stuff, right?
But then you’d catch sight of the monstrosity we were creating and just crack up. Ordered pizza. Blasted some old tunes. Kept fiddling. Less arguing, more just messing about side-by-side.
So, What’s the Point?
End of the weekend? We got this… thing. It sits on our shelf now. Wind it up, it still just goes ‘toing… toing…’, and the dinosaur does this pathetic little shimmy. Useless. Doesn’t tell time, doesn’t do chores. It’s just our “toing”.
It’s like our monument to a wasted weekend. But was it wasted? Nah. Sometimes Alex winds it. We hear the ‘toing’, see the dino wiggle, and grin. It’s proof we can just muck about together and make something dumb.
Funny thing is, I remember that weekend better than some expensive trips we took. Just the act of making something, even junk, felt good. Felt like us. You don’t always need a big plan or a point. Sometimes just doing, tinkering, failing together… that’s the stuff that sticks. Beats staring at screens, anyway. Made me think, maybe relationships are a bit like that too. Not always about grand gestures, but about building weird little things together, figuring it out as you go. Even if it just goes ‘toing’.
