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Pat's Lists

Like most middle-aged men living alone on the brink of sanity, Pat could compile one hell of a list. This page collects the shorter ones — the countdowns that did not merit a week of their own, or that were abandoned partway through and filed here rather than thrown away.

Pat's own preface to the compilation is preserved at the foot of the page, and should be read after the lists rather than before, for the same reason you read the ingredients after you have eaten.

Top Five All-Time Greatest Sounds a Building Makes When Nobody Is In It

1. The refrigerator stopping. Not starting. Stopping. Everybody knows the starting. Nobody talks about the moment it goes and the room gets four decibels quieter and you look up.
2. Pipes, one floor above, at an hour when nobody should be running water. Somebody else is awake. You will never find out who.
3. The heating expanding. Two knocks and a long slide. Any building over forty years old does this and it is the closest a building comes to speaking.
4. A door closing three floors down and travelling up the stairwell as one soft flat note.
5. The hum. Every building has one. You cannot hear it until you have lived there four months, and after that you cannot stop.

Top Five All-Time Greatest Objects Left Behind in a Rental Return

1. A shopping list, folded twice, with the last item scratched out so hard it has gone through the paper.
2. A single earring. Never two. In eleven years, never two.
3. A photograph of a dog, in a car, at what appears to be the beach.
4. Money. Rare, and it does not feel the way people assume it feels.
5. A note that begins “I know you said not to write”. I did not read past the first line, and I want that on the record, and I have thought about the rest of it every day since.

Top Five All-Time Greatest Ways to Be a Passenger

1. Silent, with the window down two inches, in weather that does not justify it.
2. Holding the map after the driver has stopped needing the map.
3. Asleep, but only convincingly. Anyone can be asleep. Very few can be asleep in a way that permits the driver to think.
4. In charge of the radio and exercising the power sparingly, which nobody does.
5. Not commenting on the route. This is the whole of it. Everything else is decoration.

Top Five All-Time Greatest Kinds of Rain

1. The kind that starts while you are already outside and already committed.
2. The kind you can hear on a skylight from a different room.
3. The kind that stops for ninety seconds and then does not stop again for a day.
4. Sideways.
5. The kind at the end of a very hot week, which is not really a kind of rain but an event, and which I am including because this is my list.

Abandoned: Top Five All-Time Greatest Chairs

1. The one at my aunt's.

I could not proceed past this entry and I would ask that nobody write to me about it.

A note on methodology

Readers occasionally ask how the rankings are arrived at. I am always glad to be asked, as the process is rigorous and is, I believe, without parallel in the field.

Each candidate is scored against four criteria, which are weighted. The criteria are durability, availability, effect on the room, and whether it holds up on a second look. The weightings are reviewed annually. They have never changed, but they are reviewed, which is the part people skip.

A candidate may be disqualified for any of three reasons: it is famous, it is expensive, or somebody has already written about it well. The third of these has cost more entries than the first two combined and I have no intention of relaxing it.

Ties are broken by the older item. This is not sentimentality. It is that the older item has survived a test the newer one has not yet sat.

Finally, and most importantly: a list of five is five. Not four with a note, not six with an apology. Five. I have received a great deal of correspondence on this point over the years, some of it heated, and I have never once been persuaded.

Yours in rigour,
Pat Freestone

Editors' note