Sunday? A Sunday email?
Ah go on then. Why not?
In many ways this feels like a Sunday sort of email: a lovely long chunky post full of bits and bobs I have been saving for the weekend. This could count as a Things I Loved Lately, even, but you know what: what if instead we cracked every frozen berry out of the frozen-over freezer, blueberries and blackberries and raspberries and something that might have been my grandmother’s redcurrants, and bubbled them gently with peeled and ageing Granny Smiths, and covered them with a sort of mixture of oat crumble, granola, and bashed up HobNobs? What if instead the house smelled like vanilla and berries and baking all Sunday instead of the inside of packing tape? Yes, it’s 9.30 in the morning, but what if…crumble for breakfast, because what if today was allowed to be a nice day? Not quite a day of rest, we’re not there yet, but maybe a nice day.
I am trying hard to explain to my parasympathetic nervous system that this is all nice.
I mean: it’s not all nice. It would have been nice, for instance, not to be evicted the day before Christmas. It would have been nice, for instance, to be able to stay in our beautiful art collective with room for all the waifs and strays. It would have been nice not to have to move away from the community I have built so carefully over the last eleven years. And yet, here we are, and I think it will be nice. I think we will make it nice! Every choice we have made— the moving out of London, specifically, to the place and street and flat we have (please God) found– is to try and make this nice.
And it will be nice! It will be really nice, I think, and even if it’s not I have found two things to be incredibly helpful in my endeavour to believe in the essential niceness of this project.
The first is this: I am not being chased by a bear.
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