I’m a billion birds in!

I tell you what, first of all, your butler never  forgets bin night.

Isn’t a sleepless night a tedious thing to endure.

But! But! It is precisely this moralising devaluation of the grumpy bits, the in-betweeny bits, the tired and wan, that I hereby protest.

When you’re inside your own life, you don’t notice how lovely it is to feel a cat move past your leg while you’re making a cup of tea. You don’t notice how the tea tastes just the way you like it. Maybe you notice the way the evening light casts a shadow, but maybe even that bores or irritates you, reminding you of the dust that dances in the shards of light.

It’s my birthday! Big deal, sunshine.

Why did I not wear spectacles when I wanted to be taken seriously in meetings? Just because I didn’t require spectacles? Lame!

Someone will always mention airily over lunch that their grand-daughter just made it to the finals. The finals of what? Who cares! Your grand daughter doesn’t even play netball? You don’t even have a grand daughter? Not the point.

Daydreaming is what mindfulness wishes it was. Sit and have a cup of tea and imagine yourself into something nice.

Not today, folks. Not today the charming reflection on how autumn leaves fall in a way that looks like how music feels. Not today the joy in small connections. No! No, those clouds do not look lovely. The cat lying in the small patch of sun like a satisfied lover entwined with another on the banks of a French river is not lovely. It is an absolute rotter. It is. I can tell. And the old lady in the beautifully matching outfit holding the small child’s hand at the lights is not wise and loving and bursting with pride. She’s a rotter. And also shut up, birds and boo, babies.

Because there is, as we speak, a sea snail, edging so slowly across the sand at a beach not far from you. It has taken, well goodness knows really, a long time, for this critter to nudge its way across the watery sand of low tide. Triggered, occasionally, by a sound further down the beach, woop, sschlupp, back inside it goes, dark and safe and quiet and protected. This will continue to happen regardless of what happens in your stressful meeting.

I can’t remember which of my ludicrous family members would occasionally sign their emails with the fake name ‘Helena Handbasket’, but whomsoever it be, they have forever caused a pavlovian response in me to the phrase ‘going to hell in a hand basket’. These days, some stressed-out burned-out wiped-out adult or other will conclude a blank-eyed rant about the state of the world with a declaration that we are going to hell in a hand basket and I will feel, at the very least, unthreatened. In fact, it feels kind of fun and cute that everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

There is one thing I find relatable about people at award shows collecting accolades and that is the horrified stumbling through halting speeches about how they’re sure they’re forgetting someone.

Public Service Announcement: we’re all forgetting someone.

There are two people in my life who I don’t see anymore, by choice. I have seen each of them once or twice by accident but when this happens I tend to cross the road or leap sideways into a hedge or neatly pin-drop into an open sewer. I cannot coexist with these two people under any circumstances. I am, let’s say, emotionally allergic.

This column is dedicated to the person who turned up to a book signing event at a recent festival and asked me to sign, yes, sure, my book, but also a copy of one of my columns in The Big Issue. This person’s name might have been Bec or she may merely have been Bec-adjacent. But let us call her Bec. Now, Bec is a person, but also a metaphor. I know. I’m sorry Bec. But to me, she seemed like a metaphor for that very  human instinct of connecting with like-minded people.

Public Service Announcement: be a festival of you.

I’m farewelling a friend this week. I shared time with this friend only peripherally, but it doesn’t matter how much someone made you laugh, does it? It doesn’t matter how many times they grinned at you with their whole face or briefly placed a hand on your arm. Social connections are the entire basis of our survival as a species. Public Service Announcement: treasure the good ones.

If you’ve never experienced anxiety before, welcome to this handy info pack. Now, you may have imagined anxiety as ‘feeling a bit worried about something’. That’s certainly what I thought it was, but that was before I actually experienced what I would call ‘embarrassingly unhinged panic’ or ‘being possessed by a ravenous all-encompassing fear’. You know the fear is lying to you, but you’re possessed by it, see. This gluttonous, guzzling fear doesn’t listen to logic. It drives you, like a zombie, to grasp for whatever sense of control you might be able to muser. Let’s say you’re anxious about something to do with work. Your mind will, in attempting to solve the problem, run a whole lot of data about it and all the ways your situation could get… worse! Logically, obviously, these are doomsday scenarios but you’re losing control of your ability to process this. Your very survival mechanism - seeking control by thinking it all through - is feeding the seething mass. I know! So fun! You’re welcome! Aren’t you glad you asked. You didn’t ask? Anxiety doesn’t care.

Sometimes in life, and I don’t know if anybody else have ever noticed this, bad things happen. Sometimes they even happen to you. There you are, thinking you’re starring in a sitcom or at the very least light entertainment, and you turn a corner to come face-first into an approaching meteor, chased by a twister, pursued by a bear.

Public Service Announcement: there’s not much we can control in this life. When bad things happen, small things make a big difference.

I was asked recently, by a child, what colour I saw when I saw the colour purple. There is an obvious answer to this one but it soon became clear the child was asking whether we both saw the same thing when we saw a colour known to us both as purple.

Now, sometimes, as an adult, one finds oneself going through the day ticking things off To Do Lists and responding to emails and forgetting to put the bins out and then out of nowhere one is asked to contemplate the subjectivity of ocular perception. And thank goodness for that.

Public Service Announcement: there is no central narrator. Your perspective is yours alone. Use it wisely.