Category: The Mundane
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Ambivalent joy of a groaning bookshelf
They’re not sorted yet, but three and a half boxes later, the new bookshelf is reaching a groaning capacity now, and there’s still another four or five long shelves in the big house. To say nothing of the boxes I’ve hidden in the loft! It’s hard to downsize the accumulated reading of a lifetime. On…
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The joy of setting up
Today I get to help out with setting up for a regular weekly function. We’re not really settled in the new village yet, but we’re trying to be quiet helpers. Come winter, when the energy bills will really bite, we’ll probably spend most of our time here in New Galloway, but for now we’re still…
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Is ‘laughing at yourself’ a kind of joy?
So I was doing a decent job on the shower cleaning, and I let the chlorine-based anti-mould application sit for thirty minutes to bleach the black fungus stains off the white grout, as you do. So far so good. I prepared to rinse the product off the tiles. Whoops! Turned the shower tap in the…
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Drudgery is a fact of life . . .
I remember so well, back in the day, thinking about why I loved research. In so many ways it was the physical experience of planning, and then setting the experiment up, so that the waiting could begin. Anticipation and wonder were all very lovely, but it was actually the joy of asking the question that…
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The joy of directed exercise
I’ve always been a kind of get-up-and-go sort of person. Never thinking about stretching exercises, or anything that healthy, but rather just getting on with life, doing activities. Until I couldn’t, after an injury to my left hamstring, which grew progressively worse the more I walked about, the more I tried to ignore it. After…
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Learning how magical realism works
Into each life, some sprinkles of magic faery dust sometimes fall. It’s all part of our story-telling sensibility, I reckon, these magical moments of understanding. I think, as resonant as metaphor, as compelling as an epiphany, these moments are also a big part of what makes us human. I’ve used magical realism with conscious effort…
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Good morning, blue sky
It’s no wonder that the seeresses of old used a crystal ball to peer into the future. The reflection of the blue sky beyond the clouds in our glass conservatory table this morning seems to offer a new perspective to the dawn. New perspectives seem to be an incredible stimulus. I know one writer who…
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The joy of the reveal
When the power flicked off, right in the middle of the bread baking, we thought it was probably a valley-wide outage. But no, the special indicator light showed me that power was still coming in to the house; actually the domestic RCD switch had tripped out. We wondered, as you do, what could have set…
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More things to do . . .
I keep forgetting that work around a big garden is never done. Much as I’d like to pretend that we’re keeping some borders wild and free (folks in New Galloway are very keen on the new ‘ark‘ concept of gardening, in which Acts of Restorative Kindness are brought to bear on domestic gardens that have…
Roads to Joy 