I spent yesterday alone in a foreign city. That’s not quite right, of course. It was a city, after all. I had a lovely chat with a man who made me a smoothie and a confusing conversation with an overworked woman in charge of the sale and distribution of baked goods. Not alone, then. Lonely and alone are different things.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes lonely is the feeling that reminds you what lonely isn’t.

A rumour went around our local secondary school that, due to budget concerns, the arts were being dispensed with. ‘Can you believe it’, I was told with high eyebrows, ‘They are cancelling the arts’. Now, as a native speaker of the arts in crisis, I have heard this kind of thing before. We all have. The arts are usually among the first on the chopping block when pennies are being pinched. There’s a quote often misattributed to Churchill; a journalist asked him if he was going to cut the arts in order to fund the war effort, in reply to which he quipped, ‘then what are we fighting for?’ It’s poetic licence but it’s a nice reframing of a naturally rather unflattering comparison. The truth is, when you put the arts next to, say, the saving of lives, it’s pretty difficult to argue that the people whose lives are no longer being saved are nevertheless better off because at least they can watch a postmodern reimagining of Death of a Salesman in their final hours.

Good morning this is your perspective speaking. I write this on a plane flying from Melbourne to Perth. Of course, people take flights like this every month, every week, even every day. For me, though, as an infrequent flyer, the very concept of humans flying is absurd. It’s not a new thought, but for me it gets me every time. All that metal. All those people. All those individual lives undertaking the same four and a half hour journey for these four and half hours only.

I was sitting at a train station on the weekend, alone, waiting for some of the people I love the most in the world to arrive on the next train. It’s strange to think that people — talking, thinking, moving people — are in the tiny dot on the horizon. Not just my people but other people, too, and here? Here with me there is nothing but yellow train station lighting and, eventually, a man in a puffer coat bouncing on his toes, hands in pockets, glancing occasionally at the oversized clock.

I realised recently that it might be a good idea to have a makeover. I’m a big fan of watching things get made over. You know when they do fast forward through the entire reconstruction of a house or something? So satisfying! And the world is full of experts who can help and who look attractive in overalls for heaven’s sake. But I needed my own makeover because I am a writer who lives in a glorified hovel and I was asked to do a photo shoot. I learned a lot in my makeover.

Public Service Announcement: all kinds of makeovers are free. You can change your whole life into a before and after picture! Metaphorically!

Trigger warnings are everywhere these days, and quite right too. We are adrift in a sea of noisy information designed to trigger the reanimation of whatever deep-seated trauma lives within our bones. Shocker: living in this state is not, apparently, terribly good for us. Annoyingly for those of us who (adorably) believe in free will, this is cellular, deep-seated stuff. It’s not a case of ‘cheer up, ya quivering shambles’; it’s to do with neural pathways and brain plasticity and the release of hormones. This is why, if you follow a neuroscientist on TikTok, they will most likely encourage the following repulsive activity: positive self-talk. I know! Ew! Noticing the great things in your life and being grateful for them! How embarrassing! Going outside in nature! Well fiddle-dee-dee.

Perhaps you have noticed a popular custom when organising a meeting, whereby one person will text or email another asking if there is a time that would be convenient for the two of them to partake in a phone call. Now, in the olden days, when phones had spiralling cords you could twiddle while you chatted, one person would simply call another. On the telephone. Out of nowhere. A stealth attack. A mini meeting in the lead-up to the proper meeting. All of this has had me wondering: the meeting is a famously unpopular means of communication, but it shouldn’t be, should it?

You know what’s wild? Other people’s choices. The ridiculous things some people do with their time! Some of them go cold-water swimming at 5 in the morning! Some of them get dressed up as knights and fight each other with pretend swords in suburban parks! There are knitters and bedazzlers and people who make jewellery out of bottle tops or leap from aeroplanes or restore vintage armchairs.

Are you a gossip? Of course you are. You might know how to keep a secret, but all humans are, in some way, inherently attracted to gossip. Maybe it’s not about your friends. Maybe it’s about people you’ve never met on reality TV. Maybe it’s other people’s work gossip. A friend of mine had a string of work stories better than any serialised TV show I’ve ever seen.

I was driving in the dark in the rain the other day. Significant rain. Significant dark. The kind of rainy dark people write poetry about. The kind that comes at you from all directions. There I was, the roar of it all around me, watching great arcs of water curl up like waves from beneath the wheels of anybody ahead of me driving too close to the edge of the lane, whump, through a puddle. It was melodramatic, as was I. Not sad, exactly, but  contemplative. I came to a set of lights then, and I glanced down at my hand on the steering wheel. Under the street lights and through the lens of the thick rain on the windscreen, the shadows dripped long, lugubrious droops of water rhythmically down my fingers. It was beautiful and slightly alarming, as though what I was actually watching was the blood pulse through my veins or my hand being swiftly dissected.

It was a moment I couldn’t photograph. There was nobody to show it to. I wondered: did that make the moment more meaningful because nobody saw it? Or, as our memory would have us believe, as Instagram would have us believe, is the moment not important at all, because nobody saw it?

Are you always telling your friends you wish you saw more of them? I wish I saw more of my friends. I realised the other day, though, that I was overlooking the opposing viewpoint. I’m not saying it’s better to never see your friends at all. Having just spent the weekend with a bunch of beloved old friends and delightful new ones, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Perhaps it is time, though, to acknowledge the small joys of friends we don’t see enough of.

Public Service Announcement: jettison friend guilt. Celebrate your pals where they are.

There’s a word I’m attempting to discourage at my place. It isn’t a swearword. It isn’t an insult, either. Not exactly. It is slightly ironic, however, that in attempting to explain to the constituents of my domestic jurisdiction exactly why this word is so antithetical to my worldview, I am met with a one word answer. The word against which I campaign, and which is used to dismiss my concerns, is cringe.

The first thing that comes to mind when I read about those studies into the health implications of loneliness is a sad-sack, solitary figure, face to the wall, too lonely to figure out how to get unlonely. I don’t tend to picture, for example, myself. Even though I’ve been lonely before, I don’t read about those studies and think that’s me. The lonely person is me.

I was hanging out with a sick kid recently. This tends to happen in my line of work. By work I mean parenting. This was a lie-on-the-couch-with-a cough type of illness on a cold wintery day. Mum brings you toast. You have more than one bath. You’re allowed to stare at a screen all day. That kind of thing. But the more this child stayed home doing nothing, the more the outside world beckoned. Being an aspiring soccer player half-way through a sustained period of mastering a trick, this child requested my attendance at the park, to kick a ball around. Now, in my line of parenting, this is an easy no on a sick day. It’s cold outside. You have a cough. I have work to do. Have you ever watched Mary Poppins etc.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. It always seemed that joining a group was a declaration of exclusion in relation to people who weren’t in the group. It also seemed a bit like signing up for a broad set of values could be a stitch-up. At school, for instance, if you decide to join in being a jock (because you love sport) are you then subscribing to all that being a jock in high school entails? If you’re a slightly nerdy jock and all the other jocks bully the nerds, to borrow a few stereotypes, does that mean you have to give yourself a wedgie?

I found out recently that a friend’s kid misheard ‘point of view’ as ‘point of you’ and I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s difficult to remember that you’re just a passing character in everybody else’s stories. You’re the protagonist of your own, obviously. That’s the point of you. Sometimes, though, it can be an interesting thought experiment to attempt to switch POVs with people you don’t even know.

Sometimes I get completely lost in a phrase that I have used all my life. Like, ‘I have seen better days’. They reckon Shakespeare invented that one. And wild goose chase. And foregone conclusion. Did you know you can just make up phrases and then people say them for centuries without even knowing it? The one that got me started was: I have changed my mind. Imagine thinking that up. I had a mind that thought this. As a result of some more information or a change of some kind, it is now changed. Like a cool breeze on a hot day. The entire environment is altered.

Isn’t it great how humans report to each other? We say things like “how was your day?” which is both a time-specific report (x1 day only) and requires specific agency (it was “your” day). Americans say things like “how are you holding up?” (no time limit but a qualitative pre-assessment of your context - you’re probably struggling in an unnamed context completely out of your control). The idea that today is yours gives all the power to you. The idea that you may or may not be holding up gives you none.

I read the other day that scientists have no idea how to define time, scientifically speaking, and that, despite our linear narrative instincts, time is probably a great big mysterious illusion that we cling to in order to assert some kind intellectual control over our own utterly bewildering existence. I know, quite a confronting idea to be scrolling past, over your morning cup of coffee. And, let me tell you, it didn’t get any less confounding as I read on (quantum mechanics is quite complex, it turns out). The article did suggest, though, that not only is time an illusion but it’s a subjective one, which is why the time you fell over on stage at school assembly lasted for a thousand years but nobody else seemed to notice time slow down (they didn’t use that example, but I feel like they would have if they’d thought of it). 

I had occasion recently to look through a bunch of old photos. Being as I am (according to my young children) a citizen of ancient vintage, I am of course talking about those old fashioned paper photos you’ve probably seen on display in museums. There was one photo, gosh I look like I was having such a wonderful time, grinning and looking affectionately around at the group of lovely faces surrounding me. Such a good time is being had. The family member looking over my shoulder paused on the way past and commented on how nice it was that I had found a photo of some old friends. Which it would have been… had I recognised a single other person in the photograph.