Happy Saturday, kittens!
First a poem, which is the same poem I always post at this time of year. Enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world you believe.
I love it so much.
I was, as promised, writing you a very long bumper edition guide to moving house…and I still am…. but you know what? It’s Saturday and I have lots of nice links on other things and I feel like I’ve literally only just, like, yesterday, recovered from the trauma of it: the whole moving thing. Which sounds insane, I know! I moved from one nice house in one nice city to another nice house in another nice city, but man: getting no-fault evicted is one of those things that reminds you with a very ferocious down-to-earth bump that control is an illusion and that living lightly on this earth is all we can ever do.
Which— ironically— felt like a fairly heavy topic for this, the first Saturday since we left London in which I have felt a small spark of happiness. More than a spark, actually: I was walking home from the shops yesterday (more on that shortly) and the florist was having a stock clearance sale? I know. I have never seen anything like it but she says she does it, like, every week. All these beautiful little posies of frilly carnadine tulips and tight little orange buds of ranunculus and red and yellow and pale pale almost a coral colour, and each one was ONE POUND FIFTY, can you believe? I bought three and came home with my bounty like a princess along the seafront and for the first time I thought: I could live here.
Which I guess is lucky as we have taken the house for a year.
When you move somewhere on a whim you kind of have to accept that the first bit of time will feel like you have fallen through a hole in time and space. You do not know…anything. You do not know how to get rid of recycling or where to get a coffee that is not, like, Costa. You do not know who your MP is or what is the deal with library fines or what pubs are nice and what pubs are run by perverts who overcharge and don’t wash the glasses properly. You are a humble baby and you know nothing about the weather and that is why you have moved to a seaside town in the worst part of the year for hail and wind.
Anyway: I bought three bunches of heavily discounted flowers and put them in a vase when I got home, and I was so powered-up by the flowers— I mean, seriously, look at them!— that I unpacked the last boxes.
Anyway: what I am mostly doing now is wanting to buy things for the house, and also my new life. Do you do this? I think when you move house, or change something big, there is this urge to also change yourself into the kind of person who would have this new life: or at least iterate yourself into being just a little closer to the person you want to be. Which, I suppose, is the promise of capitalism. And I cannot lie to you: I love it. I love to buy things! I love to change my life with the purchase of one (1) new item! And of course it’s never just one item, but you know, over time: over time. We move. We change. We become.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to You Get In Love And Then to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.