Let us praise

Hey! Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Forget it. Let it go. Take a breath. Take a moment. Take five. Everything is going to be okay. Right? Well, maybe not everything. Some things are a total disaster. Always have, always will be. All the more reason, then, to praise the quietly spectacular. Here we go. Won’t take long. This is a Public Service Announcement. 

Let us praise a cold drink on a hot day.

Let us praise free neighbourhood lemons.

In the era of mobile phones in the car, when almost everybody in the traffic is taking part in an unseen conversation, let us praise the moment you realise that the person in the car next to you is, in fact, singing, alone, all up inside the music, the bass of which is thumping along with the pedestrian light - WIKAwoopwoopwoopwoop - and music is everywhere.

Let us praise casual cyclists, two abreast, backs straight, deep in conversation.  

Let us praise older couples holding hands.

Let us praise the squiggles in driftwood.

And the words “squiggle” and “driftwood”.

Let us praise the subtle art of traveling in a convoy. The hand signals between the driver of the car you’re in, and the driver of the car behind you, whose job it is to make sure nobody overtakes and gets in between you. The shared outrage when someone comes between you - “no! Go away!” - and finding a way to reconnect. The giggly moments when one car does something unexpected or stupid like has to change lanes at the last second and you can sense everybody in the car behind is shouting, “Oh nice one Dave!”

Let us praise the child at the adult party who is reading a book under the table. 

Let us praise the phrase “put the kettle on”, including the perhaps less frequent but still persistent originating expression “put the kettle on will you darl?”

Let us praise the phrase “have you tried ringing it?”

Let us praise the geography of coffee snobbery. The inner-city lowercase coffee menus. The ludicrous paraphernalia, like a drug lab or a sixteenth century perfumery. The country table cloths. The plastic strips showering down the doorframe. The regional binary: “mug or cup?”

Let us praise lovely handwriting. 

Let us praise folded washing and paid bills and chess pieces and music lessons and mangoes.

Let us praise naked children squealing into waves.

Let us praise old wooden row boats and people in suits who aren’t usually in suits and other people’s picnics - their colourful rugs, their frisbees, their cheeses and grapes and laughter, their limbs sprawled across the lawn. 

Let us praise a blank pad of foolscap paper.

Let us praise the word “foolscap”.

Let us praise the sound of distant church bells.

Let us praise Nutella, for it is mostly sugar and is completely terrible for you, but lo it is delicious.

Let us praise cotton dresses and sliced apple and windmills.

Let us praise the shock and delight of gasping onto the surface of the water from your first dive into the sea.

Let us praise the smell of a bakery early in the morning.

Let us praise ancient Egypt. Not so much the slavery and the death, but the maths, the geology, the hieroglyphics.

Let us praise the word “hieroglyphics”.

Let us praise the undeniable poshness of fizzy water. How you can look through it and watch the bubbles blimp up to the surface like they’re letting go of something and sailing upwards into the world.

Let us praise old books of photos. Peeling, faded, stamped with gold lettering: FAMILY PHOTOS. Great-grandparental children peeping in sepia from tiny squares in front of gleaming new Morris Minors. 

Let us praise the noise at the local swimming pool. The public chatter, the squeals, the occasional whistle, the splash from a dive, the low drone of a pool pump working away beneath it all.

Let us praise the sound of cicadas and the smell of someone else’s BBQ.

Let us praise the smell of rain on a hot footpath, and the sound of it on the roof when you just got home.

Let us praise spaghetti and also almonds and the sound of someone mashing potatoes.

Let us praise the human ability to recognise someone not from the sound of their voice or the expression on their face but, from a significant distance away, from their very familiar walk. 

Look around you. The quietly spectacular. Seize it. Absorb it. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

 

This column originally appeared in The Big Issue. Buy the next one and you'll get my next column heaps early!