Everything is great! This toothpaste is great! That phone company is great! People in advertisements are great! People on social media are Super Great! Being great is great. If you’re not great, maybe you need to get great. Get fit, get smart, get pretty, get real. Buy this, read that, watch this. Work at being great! Strive! Harder!

On the other hand, that could all be rubbish. It could be that everything is not great, and I don’t want to worry anyone but that’s probably okay. Without the terrible, the sad, the inane, the frustrating and the plain old depressing, nothing would be to scale. Without first dipping, what would it mean to soar? There are, it is always good to remember, little things that persist, despite everything, as a reminder that loveliness abounds.

Adjust your scale. Find the littlest things first. This is a public service announcement.

Find your favourite photo. Hold it in your mind. It’s yours.

Everything the worst? Have a shower. Wash your hair. Things might still be the worst but at least now you have clean hair.

Have a drink with mint in it. Seriously. How good is mint!

Remember the urgent, confusing, fraught, retrospectively excellent business of having a crush on someone you don’t know super well yet. 

If you have that feeling right now and you wish it would go away, remember this: movies steal your mind for hours and put it to work imagining. So do podcasts. And plays. So does exercise. And dancing. Fill your restless mind and know that one day you will feel transformed.

Google “puppies snoring”.

Think of a friend whose face watches yours while you speak, who listens, who uses your name in a way that feels like a compliment. 

There are more friends like that in the world. You might not have met them yet, but you will.

Recall your favourite teacup.

Consider the fact that humans have made the arrangement of flowers an art. That there is something universally uplifting about a bunch of outdoors in your lounge room.

Turn up the music. 

Listen to the conversation next to you. Feel the edge of someone’s life rub up against yours. 

Remember the feeling of cutting a piece of paper with scissors? Cut, slide, cut, slide. Now think of this: someone invented scissors! Before that, this simplicity did not exist.

Find a way to be generous. Not necessarily financially. Conversationally maybe. Ask questions. Be curious.  

Think of your favourite song lyrics.

Think of sand. 

Think of the smell of a sharpened pencil.

The feeling of being a kid, somewhere, upside down.

Think of someone laughing in their sleep.

Think of an orchestra. All the separate parts, working together. Think of the pauses.

Think of silhouettes. How pretty they are, how clear but inexact. How a silhouette of a pile of rubbish looks like the Taj Mahal. 

Find your favourite pen and a piece of blank paper. Give yourself three minutes with good light and maybe a cup of something with steam coming off it. Watch the ink flow from the pen onto the page. Congrats on being from the same species that came up with that.

Listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto.

Consider the cartwheel.

Wonder at the majesty that is the shell. 

Parcels in the mail are usually excellent, even if they’re the contemporary equivalent of a nice package in the mail from someone you love, i.e. a nice package in the mail from yourself containing something you ordered on the internet six weeks ago and had forgotten about.

Snicker. What a word. The word snicker exists! Amazing.

When something happens and you urgently need to tell someone: who gets the message? Send that person a message now. For no reason.

Beanies are pretty excellent.

Ducks are nice.

Afternoon mist is okay.

Staring out a window for a bit can be useful. Windows are good like that. Doesn’t matter if what you’re looking at is ugly or boring. Just look. Let the universe spin on like a hard drive while your cursor blinks away for a bit doing nothing. Having a bit of a blink is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.

Also, never forget: toast. I mean really. Sometimes humans make mistakes, but then there’s toast.

So maybe you’re not so great. Maybe the universe owes you a break. That’s okay. Your time will come. Send yourself some mail from the internet. Turn up the music. Find the small and adjust the scale. This has been a public service announcement.  

This article is from a fortnightly column in The Big Issue. Support The Big Issue and look out for the next Public Service Announcement there.

“Ooof”, says someone, throwing themselves down on a couch, “I’ve had it”. It’s a beautifully simple expression, “I’ve had it”, because it’s so vague and yet so thorough. It does not invite or even accept argument.  I’ve had it with this day. Had it with work. Had it with the traffic. Had it with the world. I’ve had it with you. Had it with him. Had it with all this.

At such times, the things we have not had (“up to here”, is usually the measurement) should be called to the front of the mind. They’re scant, they’re often just glimpses, but they’re crucial. The small treasures. The real highlights. Let us know praise those. This is a public service announcement. 

Consider that smell when you come home and someone else is cooking and you say “oh wow! Something smells amazing!” and the person says “it’s onion and garlic”. How great is onion and garlic!?

Consider the slow, cautious work of scientists changing the world. Inventing life-saving technology, developing new medicines, preventing diseases. Incredibly gradually, not using magic, not with ideology, but with boring old science. Consider the manatee - those kind of dopey-looking floaty chubby sea creatures. You know what happened the other day? They were taken off the endangered list. In the 1970s there were only a few hundred left. Now? Over 6,000. Still not enough - they’re still a threatened species - but people, who do a lot of terrible things, have also done this. They worked hard and were smart and they prevented a whole species of sea dude from becoming extinct. 

Consider how many dramatic metaphors are set in the kitchen. The metaphor of the pressure cooker. The melting pot. The slow burn. A recipe for disaster. Maybe stay out of the kitchen. It’s scary in there.

Consider the number of times you’ve become friends with someone not because of their values or their history but because of something you both found funny. This speaks well of everybody involved.

Consider the smiley gasp of finding an old photo you had completely forgotten. The way you murmur to yourself alone in a room.

Consider marmalade.

Consider the life-affirming sense of perspective provided by public spaces.  I know. Bear with me. It doesn’t always happen. Most of the time, public spaces are the definition of The Absolute Worst. There is something, though, usually, in an airport or a hospital or even a Centrelink office to gently remind you that there is human generosity of spirit in the world. People holding the lift for each other with a resigned smile. Someone helping two people whose map is sideways. In the children’s hospital recently, there was a man in a suit with a straight back and pointy shoes rushing to catch a lift. He was clutching a large stuffed meerkat. With their straight backs, big eyes and anxious expressions, he and the meerkat seemed related. He patted it absently in the lift but caught himself doing it and stopped. One floor up, a kid with a prosthetic leg got in. “I really like your meerkat” he said after a minute. “Thank you”, said the man. “You’re welcome”, said the kid. “Nice eyes”. Public spaces can be okay.

Consider plasticine. Dig your fingers into it in your mind. How great is that stuff!

Consider how liberating it is sometimes to be lonely in a new place. Like when you’re in a room that isn’t your own, in a town that isn’t your own, and the cars swish by in the wet night and the shadows make shapes on the ceiling and nobody really knows you and yet you are still you, possibly even more you than usual. And maybe you feel wobbly, or sad, but the only person who can move you away from that is you. So: in the morning, clean slate. You can be any version of yourself you like. You can go anywhere. Do anything. Starting, may I suggest, with a bookshop.

Consider how, of all the types of clean we fetishise, the best combination of clean is unarguably: sheets + pyjamas + hair. Sleep the sleep of the gleeful.

Consider the fact that in order to be someone’s friend, or to gain someone’s trust, psychologists say the best thing to do is to let that person do you a favour. There’s something so fragile and hopeful about that.

So maybe you’ve had it. That’s okay. Just pause for a moment and consider. This has been a public service announcement.

An edited version of this column appears each fortnight in The Big Issue. Please support them whenever you can. 

Studies show that making a decision is really hard, but that the best bit of making a decision is having made a decision. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the wrong decision most of the time. So long as you’ve made it, so long as you’ve stopped second-guessing yourself, you’re in business. You’re decisive. You’re in charge. You’re you.

Decisions need to be made. So here. Make some. This is a public service announcement.

Decide which is better: rain on what surface? Tent? Roof? Rain jacket? Car?

Decide: do birds think “OMG I’M FLYING! WEEEE!” or do they, like humans, who have managed to stand up on two feet and propel themselves into cities and aeroplanes and up mountains and through the sea, think life can be dull and they haven’t achieved anything and why is their nest always a mess?

Decide: why is the moon sometimes surprising?

Decide: if the only people left in the world were the people in your train carriage or your work or your gym class or within a hundred metres of where you are right now: who is your most likely saviour? Is it the quiet, watchful girl by the door? Is it the efficient-looking middle-aged woman in the glasses? Is it you? 

A woman was walking just ahead of me on the footpath the other day. She was heavily pregnant, wearing a floppy sun hat, and carrying a towel. She was saying into her phone calmly but authoritatively that “we need to stress that the release of this report emphasises the economic imperatives of societies paying for housing for the more vulnerable members of our society”. The towel appeared to be a Dora the Explorer towel. On her wrist was one of those stickers off an apple. The next day, a huge report was released about how it costs governments less to pay for accommodation for the homeless and vulnerable. Decide: what was her favourite book as a child? Is it more likely that she collected insects or rode her bike until someone called her inside for dinner? When she gets really tired, what does she watch on TV?

Decide: bare feet on which surface: sand or grass?

Decide: why is confetti? See if you can answer in a way that doesn’t make humans seem really weird.

Decide: if you could win a basquillion dollars on my made-up gameshow called “Battle of the Super Specific Task Heroes” what crack team would you assemble? Who would be the person you would send to find the best, most amazing thing at a bargain price at a garage sale? Who would you send to pack a small car boot for a huge holiday? Who can fix things with a toothpick, a needle, and the elastic from some old undies? What about you? Really good dishes stacker? Calmer-downer of small children? Cat-whisperer? Recasting the people in your life according to a different hierarchy is a crucial reminder that people are awesome - never underestimate a car-boot hero! Never forget when you have a garage sale genius in your life! Celebrate the stacker!

Decide: what’s your favourite sky?

Decide: if the opening ceremony of the Olympics were designed by a person who was selected by international ballot, and you were selected, what theme would you pick?

Decide: what’s your favourite weekend sound?

And finally… I walked past two blokes giggling and cleaning out the boot of a battered old early 80s model car in a suburban street the other day and they yanked out the following and dumped it on the footpath: a giant roll of wrapping paper, a fishing line, a box of records, a few books, and a car battery. I overheard these fragments of conversation: 

“Remember this though!?”

“Dude. Is that tuna?”

“… some kind of casserole dish”

“This is what I told you!”

“Oooh! Bowie!”

Decide: brothers, housemates, boyfriends, mates?

Decide: cleaning the car out for a camping trip, a music festival or because they’re selling it?

Decide: when they drive the car, when it falls silent, are they thinking of things to say or is it -out-the-window-staringly lovely?

Maybe some of these decisions don’t matter so much in the scheme of things, but they are decisions. Make them. Make others. Decide your way to emotional fulfilment! Or don’t. It’s your decision. This has been a public service announcement.

This first appeared in The Big Issue, which is excellent and which you can buy in most cities and support in other ways here. 

It’s autumn now. There’s no escaping it. You know what’s next, don’t you? That’s right. Winter is coming. Autumn is so beautiful, such a gently paced, gorgeously pitched collage of all that is lovely about the world. It’s also the perfect season for sad and complicated things. For break-ups and breakdowns. For staring out the window and enjoying a quiet melancholy. For sneezing into your elbow by accident on public transport because you’re not quite prepared for that time of year yet. Seeped in a kind of sad nostalgia, autumn looks lovely, but is almost lost. That morning chill (forecasting winter) dissolves in the sunlight (hungover from summer), bringing to mind the transience of this moment right here. Right now. 

This, then, is a public service announcement. The above conditions can be deftly manipulated into a thoroughly enjoyable study of all of the things that make up the world around you. Put your study specs on. Have a look around.

Study birds in flight. Do they realise they fold over like slow-mo bed sheets? Do they realise how well they read the mood of the evening, dancing to the beat of a dwindling day? Is there one bird calling the shots or it a matter of feeling the choreography and not overthinking things?

Study the falling of dusk. Finished with the slow fades of summer, autumn takes the day and breathes darkness onto it like condensation on a window. 

Watch the little orange squares of light that are other people’s lounge rooms ping onto the black canvass.

Smell the air for smoke and other people’s dinner and wet ground and tree bark.

Notice the top third. Not the ground. Not the people you walk past or the signs designed to grab your attention. Notice the tops of the tallest trees. The telephone wires snaking through the streets. The tops of people’s houses. That’s where the history hides. 

Contemplate the word brainstorm.

Study the perfect simplicity of the hot chocolate.

Study the lovely incongruities borne of the human pretence at formality, like the man in the queue for a coffee in the middle of the city the other day wearing a suit and bouncing a tennis ball lightly against the bottom of the outside wall like a kid at recess, all the other eyes in the queue going down, up, down, up.

Concentrate on tiny, contemporary moments of levity and absurdism, like when a bloke rides a bike past you and you realise he is carrying a mattress under one arm like he might just bed down anywhere.

Enjoy, for a moment, the curious, blind, hungry enthusiasm of a dog in a new bit of park.

Concentrate on the mental leaps of logic your brain performs for you on a daily basis, like when you’re out walking and you see someone emerge from a side street but you know, from the way they’re holding their body, from their pace, from the way they twist sideways slightly, that a child or a small dog is also about to emerge from behind them.

Concentrate on the out-of-season things. The suburban swimming pool on a cold morning, steam rising up from the blue. Bare feet, but with a jumper. Sea spray on your face in the rain.

Regard, for a moment, the mutual generosity of spirit in the giving and receiving of nicknames. 

Enjoy the persistence of contextually surprising book reading. Someone reading a book while walking for ten points. Reading a book in a bar for five. At a sports match for twenty.  

Contemplate the paddle steamer, lazily cartwheeling through thick water while people on deck drink cask wine and look at the sunset. 

Remember the last time you gasped at human ability. The circus? A documentary about the building of a railway? Yesterday at work?

Listen. For what? Who knows! The life-affirming eavesdropping that is overhearing a snippet of conversation between friends, maybe. The kind of singing that happens when you walk past a stranger and they don’t think you can hear. A familiar tune made tinny in someone else’s headphones.

Keep an eye out for leaves. Crunchy ones. Sunset leaves. Skeletons. Leaves that are maps of rivers and the leaves that have pimples and bends.

Enjoy your autumn. It’s not difficult to do. Maybe you have a cold and too much work to do and maybe it’s not summer and it’s not winter and maybe you’re not on a paddle steamer in years gone by. But you’re here! Well done! Enjoy it. This has been a public service announcement.

A version of this article was published in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue. They're tops.

You missed a call. Your bills are due. Your car needs petrol. You’re out of milk. You have 1,537 unread emails. You must activate your account. Forget your password? You have 6% battery. Session timed out. 

Nope. None of that. Not here. Not now. This is where we enjoy some of the good things life has to offer. Finding the good things a little hard to get a handle on? Let’s look really closely. This is a public service announcement.

Think of the perfect peach.

Think of the platypus.

Think of the simple joy of using a nice sharp pencil on soft, thick paper.

Think of the word ‘cardigan’.

Think of the first thing you knew you were good at.

Think about the octopus. Ever seen the instant an octopus changes colour and shape on a whim? Almost defies belief. It’s a familiar feeling, in a way, the involuntary rush of colour and movement experienced by humans when seasick, embarrassed or drunk, but this huge creature does this deliberately, as a survival party trick. Watch a video of it, seriously, it’s amazing.

How great is popcorn!? Hard little useless yellow things that turn themselves inside out and become flavour-absorbent fluff clouds? What kind of world do we live in?

A moon path on the sea at night makes you want to remember it forever.

That thing where someone says “hang on, let me look into that for you, that doesn’t sound right” and you realise that you have found a person inside a bank/insurance company/healthcare provider/government agency who might actually be able to help you and you want to ask for their personal phone number/birthday/favourite album and buy them flowers and send them love letters and stuff? That rarely happens but it’s good to remember: those people exist! They’re there! Like easter eggs, hiding, waiting for you to discover them when you least expect it.

That thing where you stay at someone’s house and they put out a folded towel for you.

Trees literally eat the bad stuff in the environment and turn it into good stuff. If it were a children’s story, it would be written by Lewis Carroll or Dr Seuss.

Right now, somewhere, maybe not far from you, somebody is teaching somebody something for the first time. Recently, a woman in a local cafe was teaching a bloke how to make a coffee and all the people around them started shifting slightly away to give them space. There is something so intimate, so intrinsically generous and touching about the act of teaching another human a brand new skill - all the more impressive when the teacher is responsive, sensitive, thoughtful, encouraging. Sometimes, although this sentence doesn’t quite sound right, watching a YouTube How To video will make you feel better about humanity.

Witness the glory of toddler dancing. It’s all in the knees.

When the traffic is heavy in the opposite direction and you, my friend, are free as a bird? Lovely. 

Sitting in a car while it rains outside and you and you and your mate are still talking even though you parked the car at least ten minutes ago and the windows are starting to fog up and one of you is running a finger through the fog while making a point about something and you should probably go inside but instead you are watching your mate’s finger drawing in the condensation and listening and thinking, and the moment for going inside hasn’t quite arrived yet? These are the little moments a good life is made of.

Pavlova. With a spoon. 

Brand new, awesome, knock-em dead haircut.

And lastly, an important report from this desk: last Wednesday, a man stood in the butterfly house at the zoo, arms wide, face lifted to the sky, grinning like an idiot while two unspeakably beautiful butterflies balanced on his thick nose and stubbly chin and giggling passers-by took photos of him. Everybody - adults, children, people who didn’t speak each other’s languages - laughed together for about half an hour. The man was wearing one of those bus company name tags with Spiros written on it. Spiros, who probably spends most of his time inside a bus, drove some people to the zoo last Wednesday and found himself centre stage, giggling at some butterflies that were dancing on his face. Excellent.

Everything isn’t always terrible. Plus apparently the octopus has an incredible memory and holds grudges for years. Feel better? You’re welcome. This has been a public service announcement.

A version of this column appeared in The Big Issue. The Big Issue is entirely excellent. Support them here.

Quick! Check Snapchat. Check Instagram. Check Twitter. Hashtag omg. Check Facebook. Check fake news. Check hot take on fake news. Check think piece on hot take on fake news. Check real news. Check heartbeat. Check pulse. Check breath. Is breath going in and then out? Check again.

Slow it down. 

In. 

And then out. 

Now focus on something else. Just for a few minutes. This is a public service announcement.

Focus on ants. Little organised regiments of determination, scurrying about figuring out the logistics of how to tow a giant crumb twice their size back to the nest, with no regard to whether they look like an idiot, and completely oblivious as to whether you’re feeling good or bad or otherwise.

Focus on tunnels. How amazing are tunnels! Some of them go underwater!

Focus on those people who do tai chi in the park. Slow-mo ninjas in daggy tracksuits surrounded by people hurrying to work or limping home from the night before. Borrow some of their stillness. They’re sending it out into the world.

Focus on the fact that we sleep. Maybe not well, maybe not always, but how fascinating that humans can’t survive without this weird thing where their conscious mind shuts down and their subconscious mind plays around in the empty house until they feel better. 

Focus on the word bunkum.

Focus on intergenerational friendships. Like the grandmother in the street near my place just yesterday who was saying “well of course this was about the time my marriage was breaking down so I suppose we have that to thank for something after all” and was blinking up at her grandson, unsure he’d even heard her - this tall, long-haired teenager half-way up a ladder helping her clip the top of the vine. He grabbed a chunk of vine in his gloved hand and handed it down to her. “Well Nan, I didn’t know Grandpa, but I do love your jumpers, so it seems like a fair trade to me. Did you want these right back to the edge here?” and whatever it is he’s said, whatever the context, her small smile at her feet before she continues “yes right back, thanks dear” is enough to conclude he said just the right thing in just the right way.

Focus on baked goods.

Focus on brolgas.

Focus on the perfect mathematics of two people holding hands.

Focus on the astonishing things the human body is capable of: backflips, childbirth, waiting in a queue for a toilet at a music festival, and marathons.

Focus on ancient woodwork, lovely old stained glass, hand-lain bricks and stones. Notice how thick and warped and cool old glass windows are with their little pock marks and imperfections. Notice the texture of the stones. Notice how the buildings around you were made by people - silenced, perhaps, by time - but whose handiwork towers above and around us and whose lives contributed to yours, right now, and wonder: did they ever think of you? Did they ever wonder who would live and work and play around and through and under the structures they were building? In a small, indirect way, is the building a form of communication from them to you?

Focus on expressions old people use. Like “worse things happen at sea” or “you’re looking very smart today” or, in a moment of unbearable fury, “oh, fiddlesticks”. Usually quite formal, often confounding, may they never disappear. 

Focus on small gestures of generosity, like when the woman slipped two dollars into my parking metre at the zoo when I was bent over double trying to find some change under the front seat while an explosion of five-year olds chimed “you forgot the money” over and over for what felt like an hour. Thank you, hero. You will not be forgotten.

Focus on the times you thought you’d be late but you got all the green lights and a man in a four wheel drive miraculously waved you through a gap in the traffic and the apology you practiced faded away as you approached.

Focus on fresh mint.

Focus on a strawberry. The architecture of it. The smell. The colour. The little green hat on the top. 

It’s all around you, this stuff. It’s not in the news. It’s not taking a photo of itself at a party. Nevertheless, it is deserving of your attention. Take a few moments and observe. And remember: worse things happen at sea. This has been a public service announcement.

An edited version of this column appeared in The Big Issue. Please support them. They're tops.

Hello! Nice to meet you. What team are you on? Are you with us? Or them? Are you right or wrong? Did you vote for the idiots or the other idiots? Who tells you what to think? What do you prefer: post-fact or fake? Don’t care? Care too much? Wish it wasn’t like this? Wish it was just you, sitting on a pier, looking at the sea with a slight breeze in your hair and an ice cream, thinking about Things That are Not Unpleasant?

This is a Public Service Announcement. We can’t organise the pier. Or the ice cream. But here are some Things That Are Not Unpleasant. 

A hot meal on a cold night after a big day is not unpleasant.

Standing outside on a dark, quiet, clear night, with a view of the stars is not unpleasant.

It is not unpleasant to stand, or sit, with your eyes closed, while live music, played by real people with fast fingers and focused minds, rises through your chest as though your body is playing along without you knowing how.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, making a new friend is lovely.

Mozart’s clarinet concerto isn’t awful.

Pelicans exist.

A really good stretch is not just pleasant; it can completely transform an afternoon.

It is not unpleasant to witness a thing - a certain type of bird or a YouTube video or a man on a bicycle singing opera or a well-told joke at work - and to know, immediately, the exact person you are going to tell about it, and to realise that your anticipation of their response is making you smile.

There are always, however things might seem, smart people quietly working hard to make things better. 

You know what’s not unpleasant? Real, fun mail.

It’s not unpleasant when you see something out of the corner of your eye and realise it is a tiny aeroplane, high up in the sky, cutting through the blue from somewhere to somewhere else and you realise that right at that second, while you are doing whatever it is you’re doing - putting out the washing, buying a sandwich, stressing about a bill or a letter or a text or an argument - there are hundreds of strangers in that tiny little aeroplane sitting together while they wait to be somewhere else. And you hadn’t been thinking about them but now you are, and tomorrow who knows where they’ll be?

Bubbly water with ice blocks in it is really just water plus some science, but it feels kind of posh and sparkly.

It’s not unpleasant when you’re in a crowded place - an office or public transport or something - and you realise a loved one has privately surprised you with something. They’ve snuck some chocolate in your bag, or written a note or texted you something amazing… and you find yourself instinctively looking up, as though such a momentous occurrence cannot possibly be invisible to everybody else.

Seawater is pleasant. For toes. For sinuses. For looking at while having a cup of tea.

It’s not unpleasant to be in a country town on a day when the volunteer firefighters get a call-out. To witness the cars pulling in one-by-one, someone slipping quickly out of each of them, this one eating a piece of toast, that one in paint-covered clothes, everyone interrupted, swiftly clambering into their uniforms in a truck that is gone now, quickly and efficiently, down the road and in the direction of whatever is the matter. Wait a minute and the next few will arrive, do the same, take the next truck out, hopefully to return with just a false alarm and an update from Dave about the progress on the decking.

An evening walk is rarely unpleasant. A nice little bridge into the night time.

So maybe you’re on the wrong team. Maybe you’re a terrible person. Maybe everybody is shouting at each other and the sound is white noise. You might as well tune it out then. Go for an evening walk. Have a glass of science. Send somebody something lovely in the mail. This has been a public service announcement.

This column originally appeared in The Big Issue. 

It’s happening already isn’t it. The year is underway. Things are due. There’s money to be paid. Chores to be done. There are people expecting things. Self-improvement projects are already teetering off the rails. And as for the world: oof. Bad news, nasty people, nothing you can do about any of it. 

Depressed yet? Don’t be. Celebrate the small things. Specifically, celebrate these specific small things:

Celebrate honey. A thing that is made by actual armies of actual bees, loyal to a bona fide queen, fighting to the death to organise the stuff into neat little hexagonal compartments… and you get to eat it on your toast. 

Celebrate clean sheets and cool drinks.

Celebrate cinnamon.

Celebrate accidental naps.

Celebrate the call of the kookaburra. Really! What a completely ludicrous thing to take for granted.

In fact, you know what? Celebrate the grand, expansive theatre of the natural world. What might we have if we didn’t have storms? It really doesn’t bear thinking about. The history of art, of literature, of religion, of cinema, would all fade to beige in the absence of the creative influence of a real rip snorter of a storm. Not to mention the unbearable dramatic tension of a cool change. And the best performers in the world: the lyrebird and the peacock. They put Meryl Streep to shame. Celebrate the backdrop of the sunset. The scale of the mountain. The special effect of mist.

Celebrate idiosyncratic friendships. The ones you can’t quite explain.

Celebrate parks.

Celebrate how great your feet feel after a few hours on the beach.

Celebrate the privilege of watching another human being just absolutely excellent at something. Playing music, skateboarding, drawing, cutting up celery into tiny thin translucent slices incredibly quickly while also holding a conversation, packing a very full car boot with unfathomable precision, glass blowing, origami, sorting something out on the phone.

Celebrate the instinct, regardless of physical ability or actual desire, to roll down a steep grassy hill or dive until a body of still blue water.

Celebrate a clean workspace. 

Celebrate the celebrity status of the ladybird in children’s books. So many beetles in the world. How did they do it?

Celebrate the word discombobulated.

Celebrate beans.

Celebrate trees growing sideways towards the sun, or tiny plants growing in inhospitable places.

Celebrate your favourite jumper.

Celebrate the gorgeous little accidents of technology that deliver imperfect but realistic memories, like the blur of a nephew sprinting before a glowing bonfire. Not a visible human feature, but what better depiction of an evening? Or the moment when everyone thinks you’re taking a picture but actually, turns out it’s a video, so there will always be a record of your mum and your grandma and your uncle Steve grinning their white teeth at you in a frozen but convivial huddle, one of them asking “did you take it yet?” while someone off camera cracks a joke and uncle Steve says something about dying waiting for you to take the picture and being discovered here centuries later by anthropologists.

Celebrate the smell of the earth after rain. Tarmac. Grass. Dirt. Even cow dung. Doesn’t matter. 100% improvement after rain.

Celebrate serendipitous shadows. A winking face on a passing bus. A person behind you on the walk home making it suddenly seem as though you are wearing an elaborate hat. The elegant version of yourself that appears on the path in front of you when the shadows are long and lanky and you seem like maybe you might be someone else after all.

Celebrate eucalyptus. The most patriotic smell on earth.

Celebrate the weird little performances of manners that humans perform. The handshake. How odd. To briefly hold the hand of someone whose name you are learning. Or, in the olden days, the brief removal of one’s hat.

Celebrate the outlines of leaf skeletons in concrete that was set decades ago.

Celebrate shared glances and moments of stillness and kind offers and toasted sandwiches and watermelon and the way the evening light softens the day around you and makes you feel nostalgic for things that haven’t happened yet.

In this day and age, of course, it is important to constantly update this list. Be vigilant. Celebrate whenever possible, with reckless abandon if circumstances allow (in silent solitude if required). Repeat where necessary. This has been a public service announcement. You’re welcome.

This column was written for The Big Issue. Support The Big Issue. They're the good guys.

A new leaf! A new year! A new diary! Woot! How exciting. We can reinvent ourselves! 

Except, unfortunately, it’s usually only two weeks into the new year before most of us are sneak-watching terrible television, eating leftover Christmas chocolates we found in a suitcase we still haven’t properly unpacked, and failing to put the bins out. 

Look. You’re going to hear a lot of self-improvement mumbo jumbo from people at the start of 2017. But not here. Oh no. This is a public service announcement. The following is going to happen in 2017 whether you like it or not. Get your expectation levels out of those clouds. This, right here, is reality.

At some stage in 2017 you are going to hear, but not be able to see, a mosquito. Probably in your bedroom. At best this means less sleep. At worst it means you will be eaten alive while slapping yourself in your own face.

An inanimate object in 2017 is going to make you shout, mutter or think “oh come ON!” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

An idiot, in 2017, will try and make you feel like an idiot. This is what idiots do. Which idiot will do this to you? When? For how long? There really is no way of telling. Brace yourself.

There is no way 2017 will not contain Eddie McGuire. Sorry. Deal with it.

Someone will, over the next twelve months, use your name excessively despite having just learned it. For example, “if I can just stop you there, Samantha” or “I appreciate your concern Samantha”, or “Can I suggest you pop over to our website Samantha?” while you attempt through gritted teeth to explain for the basmillionth time that your power has gone out/phone isn’t working/car has exploded/face has melted off etc.

Chances are that at some point you will accidentally inhale that bus exhaust that smells kind of like banana.

At some stage this year, a human adult will describe something as ‘impactful’. Deliberately.

Thirteen minutes into registering for tickets to something or, worse, trying to pay for some dumb thing that costs too much money, a website will stop working and you will have to go back to the beginning and re-enter absolutely everything and yet nobody will go to jail for this.

There will be, at some point in 2017, a gap between the You that you plan to be, and the You that you always end up being. It may become apparent, for instance, in one of the following circumstances:

• a)    Grocery shopping. Planning You, who does the grocery shopping, will probably dash the hopes of Real You, who will search through your shopping bags later for any hidden treats that Planning You might have stashed away for Real You to pig out on while watching something terrible on Netflix which Previous You did not put in your wish list and which Future You will probably lie about.
• b)    Buying home goods. Planning You sees furniture in the shop where everything matches and thinks “this will be me! I will become minimalist! I will be like that Japanese woman who sells people books about how they don’t need things or that woman who only owns a passport in a safe in Berlin and travels the world with the money she saves from not buy matching stools with names that sound like Nordic swearwords. This is it! I start minimizing today. This foldaway desk slash table will cure me of my desire to buy fifties salt and pepper shakers at garage sales and I will be free of clutter forever, a calm floating cloud in the blue sky of life.” But Future You will soon be Actual You, trying to put together a foldaway desk slash table with an alan key that you cannot find but was here literally thirty seconds ago. 
• c)    Oh, Getting Ready for The Party You, what a lovely, hopeful, attractive if somewhat nervy sweetheart. After Party You, though, is a regretful, moody, probably hungover shell of a human being whose favourite place in the world is face first against the tiles of the shower wall. 

There, you see? This is how we should start the year. Honest. Realistic. Away with new year’s resolutions, top ten ways to shed post-Christmas pounds and the most exciting films to be released in 2017. No. You are not Future You. You are you. Go and be you for heaven’s sake. You’re actually really good at it.

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There is something you need to know: everything is going to be okay. Christmas might be your worst time of year. It might be your best time of year. It might mean nothing at all to you except more Bing Crosby than you thought you could handle and a vomitous amount of Panatone on sale in the last few weeks of December. Either way, everything feels a bit hectic at the moment.

It’s okay to feel the overwhelmitude. It’s okay to wonder why giant baubles lining the streets are necessary or why we need to hear quite so much about Good King Wenceslas. It’s okay to stand in the supermarket snapping “oh COME ON” at the tinsel. But really: everything is going to be okay. Here are some things it’s good to remember during the Christmas period. 

It’s good to remember that Christmas carols have really lovely bits in them sometimes like the phrase “deep and crisp and even” or just that bit where the kids all yell “Hey!” in Jingle Bells.

It’s good to remember that art galleries are free and quiet.

It’s good to remember that any one of the people you’re rushing past could be your next new friend, talking and laughing in a place you haven’t been yet.

There is nothing so pure as the attention focused on a busker by a child under the age of five. 

Second hand bookshops smell nice.

Ice is water that you can tinkle in a way that makes you feel a bit posh.

Cheese exists.

The word ‘lugubrious’ is lovely. A slow, beautiful sound that takes its time to describe the way sorrow expresses itself through the human face. Perfect.

Two people can play chess without speaking the same language and still know intimately how each other’s minds work.

Sometimes the clouds look like the sea.

Some people are truly awful but those people have to deal with being awful and it’s probably easier to just know that sometimes you’re accidentally rude to your family on the phone and one time you laughed at a kid who got dacked at music camp and you always wonder what happened to him.

There is no sound quite so exciting as the squealing, splashing, whistle-blowing hubbub of the Australian public swimming pool over summer.

There’s a couple, a young man and a young woman, who are probably not a couple at all but who work in a cinema near where I live – it’s dark in there of course and they wear black clothes and look completely exhausted. They have a half hour lunch together in which they sit in the sun slumped against a wall on the footpath and talk sideways at each other. They laugh lazily and chat and sometimes they sit in silence with their eyes closed. I went past them the other day and he was reading to her from a science fiction book while she listened, hunched forward drawing circles on the concrete with a twig. They probably didn’t know each other six months ago. Things like that are happening all the time.

Caterpillars turn into butterflies. FOR REAL! THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS!

In nature, paths form. That’s amazing, when you think about it, because it means a bunch of people, or wallabies, or echidnas or whatever have to go the same way without talking about it beforehand. And aren’t paths lovely and welcoming and comforting – do we think that because we’re biologically programmed to? Do wallabies think that too?

Most people are good at something. Lovely handwriting. Being nice to animals. Drying the dishes. Keeping secrets. Everyone’s better than you are at something and you’re better at something than they are. This is why society works and also why arguments start when more than one person is required to set up Ikea furniture.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, we all look up at the same moon each night.

Sometimes, and this can happen at any time, toast is the answer. That’s just a fact.

So be kind to yourself over the next little while. The metaphor of the new year will be along any minute to trick us into thinking we can turn over a new leaf and greet the future as people who won’t overschedule or run late or say the wrong thing or forget to put the bins out. Meanwhile, embrace the imperfect. Enjoy the quiet moments and revel in the fact that the tinsel will be replaced by hot crossed buns in no time.

A version of this article appeared in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue. They're the good guys.

Surprise! It’s the middle of November! That’s… horrifying. Blerg. Why are there signs up in the local shops yelling at you to order your ham in time for Christmas? Why are people talking about their holidays already? It’s not even December, jerks! 

Look, it’s probably best that we all relax. Take five. Sit down and think about the small but lovely things in this world. “But there aren’t any!” I hear you cry. Come on. Sit here. Take a few deep breaths.

It’s pretty great that nobody has yet improved upon the car indicator. A light turns on and off really quickly on one side of a car and we all know what it means. Better still, we hear the clicking inside our own heads when we see the light, even when we’re not in that actual car but streets away. Recently, some luxury cars have tried to posh-up the indicator by making it fade on and off from the inside to the outside. Nope. Tampering with perfection. The car indicator. It’s a simple idea by a thoughtful genius who may or may not still be alive to this day. Hats off to that person. We salute you.

It’s pretty great that riding a bike makes you feel seven again but when you were seven riding a bike made you feel like a grown up.

The word ‘dastardly’ is pretty great.

It’s pretty great that you can be in the biggest venue you’ve ever been to in your life, and still feel completely alone in your own head.

Watching someone you love singing to themselves when they don’t know they’re not alone? So great. 

It’s great when ugly things present beautifully, like when you’re at a petrol station off to the side of a huge highway in the middle of the night and it’s noisy and smelly and ugly and awful and the darkness is scary but the lights are depressing and you’re tired and not where you want to be, and then you stop, because you realise that it’s just been raining. The ground, shining from the rainwater, is covered in petrol rainbows, swirling and connecting like happy little fairy lakes across a dark and peaceful landscape. Kind of great!

It’s great when you read a bit in a book that feels so true that you say “yes!” out loud and then you realise that the writer has been dead for a long time and you are basically having a conversation with a person whose life never had you in it.

It’s pretty great when someone you know quite well in one context turns out to be exceptional at a life skill you never would have anticipated, like cooking, or being hilarious with children, or quietly and unpatronisingly talking to dogs. 

Foot dangling is nice. Over a jetty is best. A drink of something or a good conversation for extra points here. 

Talking while walking, especially at night, is great. Something about the anonymity of darkness, and the sound of your voice at night, and that everybody involved in the conversation is, literally and metaphorically, heading in the same direction, conspires to provide some of the best circumstances for great conversation.

It’s pretty great when you run out of things to say because you’re all looking at an open fire.

It’s pretty great when you thought you would miss your train but you made it and another person in the carriage looked at you as if to say “well done. You’re here now. Relax. You’ve earned this.”

It’s pretty great when two musicians exchange a smile and the smile is borne of the music. That basically means that music just told a little joke.

The word “earthworm” is great. A little thing like a worm, and a big thing like the earth, and they’re part of each other in a word. 

Ice cream: just great. Don’t care what kind. Whatever kind you like. Vegan, choc top, cone or cup. The little science project of trying to eat an icecream before it melts all over you is a study of significant importance for people of all ages. Do not lose focus. You’ve got this.

There you go, you see? That isn’t even all of them! Have a look around! Admittedly, sometimes you have to look pretty hard. But you’ll find one. Something tiny. Something nobody else has noticed. A lot of things are rubbish, but some things are quietly great. Keep an eye out. Especially for the ice cream.

A version of this article appeared in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue. They're the good guys.

Here, for your consideration, is a list of things that people don’t like. You may not have known this. You now do. You’re welcome.

Nobody likes people who are rude to waiters.

Nobody likes bus exhaust.

Nobody likes it when someone opens a car window at the lights and twiddles loose hair from their fingers.

Nobody likes laborious opening credits.

Nobody likes that little moment in the lift where your stomach drops and you have to pretend to all the other adults that you’re not feeling like going “Woah!”

Nobody likes being watched while parking. A watched car-parker is a frazzled, sweaty idiot who cannot remember which way the wheel goes. An unseen car-parker is basically James Bond, reversing effortlessly into the perfectly appointed, slightly-too-small spot right outside the venue, in one smooth move, one arm resting casually out the open window. Witnessed by nobody.

Nobody likes a phone call where a text or an email will do. We live in an era where it is safe to assume that if your phone is ringing, it is either an automated message from your phone company, or somebody you know well has died.

Nobody likes the following sentence being said about them: “Oh my goodness I love her to death, but…”

Nobody likes a missing spider that was there 20 seconds ago.

Nobody likes unexpected objects in the bagging area. What’s more, nobody likes your self-checkout attitude, supermarkets. You lose a bunch of staff for an apparently flawless self-checkout, and then say you’ve called the cops to crack down on people who walk out of the self-checkout with an extra truss tomato? Boo to the bagging area, boo to the taxpayer paying for what staff used to do, and boo to truss tomatoes.

Nobody likes the words “it’s not good news”. This applies particularly in relation to: health, car troubles and whether or not a smart phone is under warranty.

Nobody likes your cheery chitchat, dentists. We are literally only here because otherwise our face would fall off.

Nobody likes other people who know better. This pertains particularly people who know better about:

•  The having of babies (“It will kill you! I had a baby and I exploded!”)
•  How to do your job (including emails titled: “a few quick suggestions” or similar)
•  How to drive a car (“I would have turned there” is a phrase that should remain forever unuttered)
•  Love (“You’ll find someone when you least expect it. It’s funny, Darren and I…” Just, no).

Nobody likes the sound of their own voice recorded. We’re used to hearing it through the acoustics of our own heads. It’s like singing in your bedroom and then suddenly: boom! The lights go on and you’re on stage in front of everybody, through an amplifier. Nude. 

Nobody likes one sock that holds up better than the other.

Nobody likes walking out of a movie before all the credits have run, just in case there’s an extra bit that’s completely hilarious. Or, at the very least, a crewmember called Dave “The Big Man” Morris or something.

Nobody likes trying to look casual while erecting a pop-up tent on the beach for the first time. 

Nobody likes radio-traffic reporters giving the roads nicknames.

Nobody likes the lack of a clear regulatory system regarding chai. Is chai actually tea? Is it brewed like a pot of tea? Is it tealeaves in a little metal cage? Is it done like a coffee? Is it made with a bag? Powder? Or, criminally, a horrifying liquid that tastes like someone squeezed a day-old cake through a moldy cushion? Why are our leaders not moving on this? The people are as one – we will not be denied.

In the meantime, don’t sweat the small stuff. Give it a minute. Maybe look out the window for a bit. Have a daydream. Make yourself a cup of tea. 

This has been a public service announcement. 

A version of this column appears fortnightly in The Big Issue, which you can support by buying a copy on the street or going to their website and supporting all the great things they do.

Quick! Keep up! Everyone knows more than you do! Panic, immediately! Read the news! YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING! But no. Not here. This is a place of peace. Welcome. Shoosh. Calm down. Breathe. Be still. Let us join hands. Time to celebrate the small things.

Here’s to the people outside your car who don’t realise they’re walking to the beat of your music.

Here’s to the hot cup of tea.

Here’s to plain old porridge. Not reimagined. Not deconstructed. Not recast as a three act play interrogating the sociological underpinnings of capitalist society. Just plain, hot, nourishing porridge, served with a hot cup of tea (see above).

Here’s to the organised elderly couple at the local library who meet for a lunch break of pre-packed sandwiches and do the nine letter word in the paper together with a degree of seriousness often seen on the faces of world leaders engaged in peace talks.

Here’s to the bloke holding the Stop and Slow sign on the side of the road last week when I was driving through construction work for pausing just a bit too long before swivelling the sign, so breathless was he with laughter at the woman next to him who was telling a hilarious story. 

Here’s to the exhausted, sweaty guy in the high viz vest and the blunstones waiting for the bus on the corner of a major intersection in the CBD yesterday evening who pressed a greeting card against the bus stop Perspex for upwards of fifteen minutes, carefully composing a message to go with an enormous elongated present wrapped in silver paper which he carried so carefully it was almost heartbreaking. May the gratitude of the gift recipient sustain him for days to come.

Here’s to satisfying tasks like moving bracken and rubbish out of a blocked drain with your foot after a downpour to allow the water to flow freely.

Here’s to the button on the vacuum cleaner that you kick with your foot to retract the cord. Anyone who doesn’t admit they feel a bit like a superhero when they do that is a liar or a sad sack.

Here’s to small, mutually agreed upon habits of human thoughtfulness. The dropped baby bootie posted onto a nearby fence post – a flag to returning parents. The far off dip of the high beams as a fellow driver senses your approach. The single finger car-to-car wave that happens on a quiet country road. 

Here’s to the irrefutably spectacular concept of a rainbow, surprising you when everything else is The Worst.

Here’s to the deranged idiot who first thought of milking a cow.

Here’s to the sound of keys in a door just when you were starting to worry. 

Here’s to that thing where you talk to someone you don’t know through the window of a shop or a car and you can’t hear each other and so, for some reason, you whisper while miming.

Here’s to being greeted by a dog.

Here’s to the sound of a football crowd from a distance, robbed of its “ah come ON ya filthy maggot” or “are ya bloind, umpire?”. Instead just a low hush.

Here’s to the office email entitled “cake in the fridge”.

Here’s to the astonishing symmetry of nature.

Here’s to live music.

Here’s to the kind of tired your feet get in a foreign city.

Here’s to mud.

Here’s to the elderly woman on the bicycle with her thick socks pulled up to her knees and her purple Crocs, leaning on the pedals as she half rises to stand, dragging with her the weight of a child (a grandson? We suspect a grandson but of course we do not know) skiing behind her on rollerblades. A glorious, dorky assembly line on wheels. He with his luminous kneepads, gripping the back of her bike for dear life as they cross a main road that she could, one suspects, cross in her sleep, backwards, in heels. She with her front basket full of shopping, packed as only old ladies can pack shopping. Precision packing. One extra microcosm and the whole thing would come tumbling down, probably right off the earth and into another version of time.

And, lastly, here’s to the feeling of having read a really, really good book, in one sitting. 

Don’t read the news. Give it a minute. Maybe look out the window for a bit. Have a daydream. Make yourself a cup of tea.

This has been a community service announcement.

An edited version of this column appears fortnightly in The Big Issue, which you can buy and support in more ways than you might be aware.