footled

This is only the 13th time that I have footled about, gone for walks, tried to start other things, sketched hollow-sounding plans for the coming months, stared blackly at the ceiling and generally failed to avoid the constant, low-level nausea generated by waiting to hear.

The Guardian World News AL Kennedy 2011

They bustled along talking to their invisible friends, or stood abstracted on the kerb the fingers of one hand fiddling away in the palm of the other, or, like iAnna footled fanatically with a filmy square-foot.

The Guardian World News 2011

This calm'd his cares, footled with his future feme,

The Works of the English Poets 1779

They learnt to take themes which did not sound exactly like the subjects of a fugue; they laid out their first and their second, and then they did not know what on earth to do, and footled and stumbled till it was time for the recapitulation; so that Haydn himself said the worst of the young men was that they could not stick long enough at anything to work it out, and no sooner began one thing than they wanted to be off to another.

Haydn Runciman, John F 1908

They learnt to take themes which did not sound exactly like the subjects of a fugue; they laid out their first and their second, and then they did not know what on earth to do, and footled and stumbled till it was time for the recapitulation; so that Haydn himself said the worst of the young men was that they could not stick long enough at anything to work it out, and no sooner began one thing than they wanted to be off to another.

Haydn John F. Runciman 1891