Public Service Announcement: let’s overthrow the system!

Public Service Announcement: congratulations!

Public Service Announcement: a change is as good as a holiday.

Public Service Announcement: this too shall pass.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes it’s not existential despair. Sometimes your free will is being hijacked by your nervous system.

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.