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Another anniversary

Exhaustipated to the point of exhaustipation I decided that there was no better time to deal with the last remaining boxes than now. Not the boxes of books that remain, unopened, in the shed. No, not those because I don’t have any bookshelves yet. I mean the three boxes that have stayed in the corner of my bedroom because they are labelled, somewhat ominously, with the mismatched labels “Stationery and Shoes.”

In the end, those boxes were not so hard, consisting as they did of lead pencils, notebooks and the rainbow-coloured sandal for the left foot for which I have searched high and low because somehow I brought the right in my suitcase and have assumed, all this past year, that the left must be here somewhere. But it was in transit.

This week, it has been a year since we moved into the house. This time last year the list of renovations included but was not limited to: knock down back wall replace with bi-fold doors; kitchen; bathroom; remove bar; put up wall; move bathroom; turn door into window; convert shed into studio; take up carpet in bedroom; remove built-ins; replace light-fittings; replace curtains; replace tiles in the entrance;…you get the picture and that’s just inside.

Current list of renovations: clean out cat litter tray.

(I hasten to point out that List A minus List B is not equal to the things that have been done, but I’m sure you already worked that out.)

We probably do need to do a bit of work on it. It’s been chopped and changed in a couple of strange ways so that now it’s layout is odd and that and makes for many oddities and quirks. But there is not a single day that I have not come home and thought, ‘Really? Do I really get to live here?’

In my adult life, I have never felt this way about a house before. That this is my house, where I belong. I have loved each house that I’ve lived in, but until now I’ve always known that I would leave. I know that there will still be many times when I am restless and filled with wanderlust because that is who I am. But I’ve found the home that I will always come back to. And one day, I’ll have all of the boxes unpacked.

A most unusual way to say I love you

For many years after we got married, I was ambivalent about the act of having got married. This was, in part, a reflection of my father’s ambivalence. He had no ambivalence towards Adrian (he loved him deeply) or the relationship and he got into the spirit of the wedding for sure, but I’ve always felt that he would have preferred if it I’d been more radical in my politics (which is personal), and less conforming.

I sometimes do still feel that I should have stayed not married as a political act. Even while I write to Malcolm Turnbull about marriage equality I feel deeply uncomfortable about the many people whose varied and various relationships are increasingly excluded as we further entrench this idea that long-term, monogamous relationship is valued above all others. Spending seven years in a country where I couldn’t have lived with Adrian without being married to him have made this even trickier to resolve in my mind.

For a while, I tried to convince Adrian that we should get divorced. Not that we should abandon our relationship, but simply that we should no longer be married. Obviously, he never thought that was a good idea. And as time went on, I stopped talking about it because it started to seem like a flippant thing to do, disrespectful to the people who had celebrated our marriage with us, and entirely disrespectful to the increasing number of people I knew who had experienced the deep pain of divorce – kind of the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.

Most recently, in a few random conversations this anniversary has come up for one reason or another and people have said, ‘You don’t hear about that so much these days, do you?’ in that kind of nostalgic tone loaded with moralising. It’s made me feel kind of icky. Relationships begin and end for as many reasons as there are relationships. Some are short, some are long, some begin and end many times over, some end abruptly, some are sparked again years after they ended. Some people live alone because they want to, some because it’s forced on them, some because it’s just where things ended up. Life is messy and unpredictable. When I got married I was 23 (or maybe a few days older than 24). I didn’t even know that 25 years was a thing. Getting here has been a bit of luck, a bit of work, a bit of acting bad, a bit of acting good. All sorts of other things could have happened, but didn’t so this is where we are.

So, ambivalent about getting married, ambivalent about celebrating my marriage’s longevity.

Where’s this going? It’s the weirdest wedding anniversary thing you’ve ever read, isn’t it? (And let me say, it’s not at all what I imagined it would be when I started to write.) Let’s go wherever I’m eventually going via my mother.

The last conversation I had with Mum was about the plans she had for her 25th wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks. That part of the conversation took me by surprise. My parents were not at all into ritual and they eschewed any glorification of family (see above). But her words from that conversation have always stayed with me.

‘Some things are worth celebrating.’

She died a few days after that conversation, meaning that after my wedding, the next time my family was all together was 18 months later, at my mother’s funeral.

Because of reasons, I don’t wear a wedding ring. What I do wear every day and every night is the ring Adrian gave me for my 40th birthday. When I was 23 (or possibly 24) I had lived a simple, uncomplicated life, but when I was 40, life was messy and unpredictable. I wasn’t easy to love. I was in a deep, dark place and I could not see a time when life would ever be light again.

‘What if this is it?’ I said to him one day. ‘What if this is how I am?’

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘This is how you are for now. But I’ve known you for a long time. It’s going to be okay.’

It was the first glimmer of light I had seen in a long time.

So this is where we are: He knows the worst of me and loves me still.

It is worth celebrating.

Tuesday morning

I’m not at all athletic, I’m uncoordinated, and I don’t especially like sport. But I do go to the gym three or four times a week. I go because it is good for my equilibrium, for my heart and my arteries, and because as much as this shocks the 20-year-old me, I love it. I even, for a little while and after I’d been training seriously for a couple of years, considered becoming a personal trainer. After all, I reasoned, who could possibly make a better trainer than someone who knows what it feels like to be rubbish at nearly all athletic activity? What could be more inspiring than the sight of a trainer who regularly gives herself a black eye at body combat and sprains her nose with a medicine ball?

That was one of my less brilliant ideas and although I did end with a certificate III in personal training, I think the fact that it took me two goes to pass one of the exams says a lot. I just could not get straight in my head the difference between hyper- and hypo-extension.

Anyway, at the gym I do see a personal trainer two mornings a week, this morning being one of this week’s mornings. I’ve been seeing him for about six months now so we’re starting to get to know each other a bit, and we have a bit of chit-chat (but not much because I am usually struggling to breathe and he’s usually trying to encourage me to do things I don’t much want to do at the time he is suggesting I do them). This morning, knowing that I was taking a few days off work while the mister was here, he said, ‘How was your day yesterday?’

‘Yes, good,’ I said, ‘The mister and I went for a walk along the beach and had breakfast on Jetty Road Brighton.’ We have to say Jetty Road, Brighton to distinguish it from Jetty Road, Glenelg. It’s a beachside suburbs thing.

‘Oh, where did you go?’

I told him where we went and he said, ‘But why wouldn’t you go to Cream?’

Turns out that Cream is the place the mister and I had walked past and thought, ‘Well, that’s intriguing, a teensy, tiny place with loud music,’ and then promptly forgot about.

‘You have to go,’ my trainer said. ‘The coffee is ten out of ten. Also they’re really young and they play gangsta rap.’

I didn’t pay much attention to that last bit because Jetty Road, Brighton, a southern suburb of Adelaide is not a place you would normally associate with gangsta rap. Especially on a Tuesday morning.

Anyhoo, I came home from my hour of jump squats and tricep dips and said to the mister, ‘We should go to that place we saw yesterday,’ and it being a beautiful morning we walked along the beach in the direction of Jetty Road, Brighton.

On arrival at Cream we discovered that the cafe was full.

‘You’re full?’ I said.

‘Every morning.’

‘Can we put our names down for a table?’ I knew to say this because I’ve seen it on the movies never thinking I would need to say it at Jetty Road, Brighton.

‘What name shall I put it under?’

‘Tracy.’

He wrote Gracie and I said, ‘No, it’s Tracy. Gracie is the wrong demographic.’

He laughed as if he might be old enough to understand the joke.

‘You get a free coffee for waiting. What would you like?’

Okay, so how weird is that? You stand outside on the footpath and they bring you a free coffee while you wait twenty minutes for a table to buy the thing they’ve already given you for free. Anyway, we stood outside, looking twenty years older than everybody else who was standing outside. My trainer is right about many things and he was one hundred and ten percent correct about this. Ten out of ten for the coffee.

Some interesting things happened while we were waiting for our table, but I don’t really have time to tell you about them.

The food! Oh my goodness, I could not choose. The mister suggested that we could share and I said WTF WE HAVE BEEN MARRIED TWENTY FIVE YEARS AND WHEN HAVE I EVER WANTED TO SHARE MY BREAKFAST and then I refused to tell him what I was going to order. Actually I didn’t tell him much at all because every time I spoke he said, ‘What? Sorry, I can’t hear you.’ On account of he has the hearing of a middle aged man and the gangsta rap was fairly loud, particularly for a Tuesday morning.

I had the stack of hotcakes with maple bacon. In truth, it wasn’t a stack because I chose the ‘one hotcake’ option, and I’m not sure how anyone would eat the ‘three hotcakes’ option. I’m certain that my trainer would not have recommended that as post-workout fuel, but holy moly ravioli it was delicious. The hotcakes were fluffy, the bacon was crisp, the maple was maple. I did have to leave a little bit on the plate, because I could feel a bit of a chemical reaction inside my body as the sugars from the maple began to ferment and joined forces with the weekend’s gin which I think had not entirely diffused. No lies, by the time I finished, my hands were shaking and thank goodness for the sea breeze on the gentle walk home.

Notebooks aren’t really a mirror to my soul

a selection of my increasingly ridiculous notebook collection

One of the fun parts of doing a degree in psychology is that you get to diagnose yourself with all sorts of conditions you always suspected you had but didn’t know for sure, along with a whole host of things you never knew existed. Of course, a person can’t possibly have all the things she’s diagnosed herself with so I think it must work in much the same way that reading your horoscope does. You pick out all the bits that you think match goodly (my goodness me why yes, I am creative and ahead of my time) and ignore the bits that don’t (what’s that word ‘stubborn’ doing in there?).

I don’t know that a penchant for notebooks and diaries could ever be considered pathological, but cleaning up my desk I feel forced to admit that there is something going on which might not be entirely healthy. That small collection of notebooks all currently reside on my desk and, with the exception of the trusty filofax about halfway down, all have been purchased in the last couple of months.This pile does not include the cascade of A5 clipboards, my diary, the notebook I keep in my handbag and the bajillion moleskine notebooks which are scattered about the room like the frangipani flowers in the driveway after that weird midsummer storm.

Each of the notebooks has a different function. I’m not going to go into those details because I started to write the list of what each notebook was for and nearly bored myself to death and I care too much about you to cause your death after you have innocently clicked through to read what is proving to be a rather tepid, insipid blog post.

A lot of the notebooks I have bought have been from the airport newsagent stands. I know that the airport newsagent stands are robber barons, but just being at an airport fills me with a sense of all that is possible, and there is nothing that says anything is possible like a new notebook. With each one, I am filled with a sense of joy that stems from a belief that here is the perfect way to organise my day, week, month, year. To prioritise my projects. To set out goals and objectives, integrating timelines and budgets. To write like a demon. To remember everything. To be in control.

I read a wonderful essay on the weekend Neat and Tidy: The New Magic in the Sydney Review of Books about books on tidiness. It includes an excellent discussion of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I do have a copy of that book. I tell you what though, reading it sent me to a whole new level of anxiety, because with every page I turned I knew that here was something it would be impossible for me to achieve. For one thing, I’m quite attached to my things. For another, I haven’t fully recovered from the six month period in which I cleaned out my dad’s, my grandfather’s and my own house. This cannot be helpful to me, I remember thinking this quite clearly as I read Marie Kond’s book. I closed it, and I have never bought a self-help book since, never even looked at one.

I think this recent spate of note-book and planner over-buying is something akin to those days when I filled my life with self-help books. It is an attempt to bring order, a deep-seated belief that the perfect way of ordering must be out there somewhere. Two things about this: first, I definitely need a place to write everything down and have a couple of lists going, and I do like to keep track of my dreams and my hopes and my ideas; second, I’ve read every productivity book ever written, spent a fortune on a billion productivity apps and I just always go back to the filofax, a whiteboard and post-it notes.

And look when I open my trusty filofax here is the quote I have written from Cory Taylor’s beautiful work Dying: A Memoir:

A bucket list implies a lack, a stor of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry that you haven’t done enough with your life. It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don’t have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven’t done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren’t for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip.

I think it’s time to slow down on the notebooks.

Saturday afternoon

So just in case the dog doesn’t eat its own vomit I am, even as we speak, rehearsing my surprised face for when the mister gets home from cricket. ‘OMG, that’s disgusting, how long has that been there I’ve been so lost in my work I didn’t even hear it.’

It’s not a complete lie. I have been focussed on my work. But not so focussed that I missed the distinctive sound of an animal retching. Really, who would have pets? It’s not just the sick and the poo…

…so, I was interrupted mid-sentence because my phone rang and a lovely man asked ‘are you the owner of (cat’s name)’ because in the ten minutes the big cat was outside this morning he managed to lose his collar. He (the lovely man) insisted on bringing it over so obviously I had to go downstairs and throw a cloth over the vomit as if I had just that minute discovered it because he would be able to see the vomit from the front door.

Turns out it’s a good thing the dog didn’t eat its own vomit, because the vomit was mostly a peach stone. I don’t know why a dog would swallow a peach stone. I would never eat a peach stone. But then I would never eat my own vomit either. (I really mean that, I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect.)

Our neighbour is very lovely, and it was nice to meet him, although I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t our other neighbour over the back fence who sits in her backyard and has loud conversations on the phone about frangipanis. I did not think that there was all that much mileage in a conversation about frangipanis, but my goodness there are conversations galore. I think frangipanis must be one of those plants that used to be in fashion, then everyone except the people who used to live in this house ripped them out of their gardens, and now everyone is planting them again. I hope that happens to loquats too, because I love loquats but it’s pretty rare for someone to give you a bag of loquats of their tree these days.

After I had thrown a cloth over the dog’s vomit, I scanned my immediate surroundings in the way that you do that if you know someone is about to knock on your door when you really hadn’t planned for someone to be knocking on your door. I quickly cleaned up the remnants of the Floppy Adolescent’s afternoon of online gaming. Remnants included but were not limited to:

the foil left from last night’s garlic bread that came as part of the combo deal. Last night the garlic bread was deemed disgusting and no one wants that, but apparently all it needed was another twelve hours to sit on the bench;
an empty Sprite bottle (also came as part of the combo deal);
an empty punnet that used to be a full punnet of tomatoes (did not come as part of the combo deal).

Sometimes I wonder how it is that I am nearly fifty years and I have not yet achieved greatness. Other times I don’t.

Dear Prime Minister

Further to my correspondence dated 1 February 2017, I am writing now to continue our one-sided dialogue.

I begin with offering you my sympathies. You must be spewing over this whole Cory Bernardi thing, eh? Like, you compromise your entire moral being to the extent that I’m sure your skin will never lose that grey pallor you’ve acquired and then he goes and does this anyway.

You have a country to lead and I have cat vomit to clean so I will get straight to the point:

Pull your head in.

Pull your head in on Nauru and Manus Island. Seriously, just pull your head in. It’s pretty clear by now that the idea of resettling people United States is either a. not going to happen; or b. result in an awful outcome for those people. It is time to convince your cabinet to find a humane and compassionate solution. For example, we could probably have them in Australia and that could probably happen pretty quickly all that is missing is political will.

Pull your head in on electricity: I know you know that climate change is a real and present threat, and that we’re better off with renewable energy than we are with coal. Do you know how I know this is what you think? Because you said it. Quit with demonising the South Australian government. Do something smart and do it smartly.

Pull your head in on your parliamentary performance: That ridiculous tirade in parliament the other day. Do you know who liked that? Political journalists who don’t get much entertainment otherwise; your back bench and Barnaby Joyce. Do you know who didn’t like it? EVERYONE ELSE IN AUSTRALIA. Do you know how I know this? I read the comments. (And apart from anything else, the logic is what? It’s okay for you to be a millionaire, but not okay for Bill Shorten to have dinner with them.)

Pull your head in on this Centrelink debacle. Seriously, mate. Not cool. Can I suggest that you find someone who currently relies on Centrelink payments and that you spend a day or two (and you will need a day or two) trying to work your way through things with them? I can guarantee you that you – like all of us who have done this – will be shocked at how difficult this is.

We are at a crucial point in the history of democracy and of political leadership. There has never been a more exciting time to be Prime Minister. (Sorry, you must be sick of that.) Perhaps instead of framing this letter in the negative tone, ‘Pull your head in,’ I should frame it more positively.

Be strong. Do good things.

Yours sincerely

Tracy Crisp

PS If, as I suggested in my previous correspondence, you did want to meet, perhaps you would like to come to a reading I’m doing at the West Terrace Cemetery on Thursday evening and we could go for a glass of chardonnay or something after that? I could also do Tuesday, but Wednesday is out because it’s my 25th wedding anniversary and I expect to be otherwise engaged. (Which reminds me – with Cory Bernardi gone you could probably do something about marriage equality now, eh?)

Claudia Karvan, white handbags and pillows of memory foam

I had something to tell you, but I can’t remember what it was. It was lighthearted and amusing and didn’t involve me sitting in front of the television watching episode one of Newton’s Law and comparing myself to Claudia Karvan. But comparing, obviously I mean saying such things as, ‘She’s really made a go of things, hasn’t she, she’s so smart and talented and my goodness she is gorgeous.’

One of the good things I’m finding about my late forties is that I’m able to be genuinely admiring of people’s successes because I understand that there’s something much more than luck in sustained success. I understand that there’s been a lot of hard work and resilience and probably a bit of picking themselves up and dusting themselves down going on behind the scenes.

At the same time of course the envy cuts deeper because middle age is as much about coming to terms with one’s middling successes as much as it is coming to terms with one’s mortality. Or perhaps they are both elements of the same thing.

(Newton’s Law has finished now and in my judgment, the jury is still out. Apart from anything else, the music could be way better.)

I still haven’t remembered what it was I was going to tell you about. It wasn’t these bites on my ankle which I got at this time last night when I was also sitting here on the couch and watching television. I don’t know how long its been since I spent two nights in a row sitting on the couch watching television. I’m watching Netflix now. Suits. It’s okay, but it’s no Boston Legal, is it? Though I tell you what it has got that Boston Legal didn’t have: Jessica’s handbags. I’m in season three and she’s just been on with the amazing white handbag ever seen in the history of amazing white handbags. I mean obviously I’d look ridiculous carrying it around Romeo’s Glenelg South Foodland, but it would totally suit me in the alternative life I sometimes construct for myself in my mind.

I’d be better off going to bed than sitting up watching shows that aren’t as good as shows I used to watch. I’m very tired partly because the bites on my ankle kept me awake all night and partly because my neighbours seem to have installed a new security light and its not their fault if they don’t know that every time a possum triggers the light my room lights up like its just been lit up by a security light that’s been triggered by a possum. Imagine how tired I’d be if I hadn’t finally treated myself to the wonder that is a tempur memory foam pillow? Oh my goodness, people get on that STAT.

Me and my banjo, a lamentable song

You might know that a little over a year ago I bought a banjo. It was a decision made on a whim at the moment that, instead of heading straight from Zayed Sports City after the rugby carnival, I turned left and headed out towards Raha Mall. I had no idea whether the music shop out there would even have a banjo and, as it turned out, nor did they. The person at the counter had to go and check with the person out the back who had to go and check with the owner who eventually came out and said, ‘Did you want a 4 string or 5?’ (His accent was Australian, east coast.)

‘Oh, five,’ I said.

It didn’t have a price on it, and he pulled a number from the air and said, ‘What do you think?’

Numbers fall out of my head the minute I hear them, so I can’t remember what I paid exactly. The owner disappeared back out the back and along with the banjo I bought the only banjo book they had and also some picks.

Picks aren’t picks.

When I got home and opened the book I discovered that guitar picks and banjo picks aren’t the same thing and of course there being only one banjo in the shop it was hardly surprising that there were no banjo picks and they had sold me the ones for guitar (not deliberately, they didn’t know). Then I was cross because they hadn’t even put them in for free.

It’s reasonably easy to get a good sound out of a banjo because, unlike guitar, the open strings make a lovely chord. I had this idea that one day – probably the next day and if not then definitely next week – I’d be able to play Rainbow Connection. I used to play that on the piano in 1983 and 84, my god I loved it. To play it on the banjo would be such retro fun. A new party trick (not that I had an old party trick, but you know what I mean).

Time has taught me that my natural talents do not lie with the banjo. I’m shit at it.

I taught myself a few things, and then I went to lessons last year, taught by a wonderful young man of excellent music talent. I’m sure he dreaded my lessons. I’m sure that every time I turned up he went home thinking Do I really the money this much? And that every time I cancelled he was like, oh, there really is a god.

I haven’t got very far. I can play a couple of chords, but my rolls are still very slow. My biggest disadvantage though is that I can’t really sing. I can hit a range of about five notes (two down from middle C and two up) with vague precision, but that does limit a person’s repertoire. So even though I learn a new song each week all I really do is play the same chords in different combinations.

The only way I’m really going to get any better is to play a whole lot more than I do. But the thing about middle age is that you have this ever-increasing awareness of the value of time and there are so many things I want to get better at in the space where banjo might be – sewing, baking, reading poetry. I want to read more books and watch more movies than I do.

I’ve always lived my life by doing more things, but I wonder if that’s changing. Maybe I want to commit to other things by deciding that I’m not committed to my banjo.

What would Kermit do?

Household ratios and relativities

In the house where I live the current adult to teenager ratio is 1:2.

The human to animal ratio is 1:1.

You will not be surprised to learn that there is some friction where these ratios intersect with the human to cat litter tray ratio which is 3:2.

Everyone is taking their turn and everything (cleaning the cat litter tray, not using it, before whichever smartarse gets in first with that one), but all the same and nonetheless adult humans and teenage humans have different standards when it comes to such matters. Particularly when – as as the case in this house – the adult human spends more time in the house than the teenage humans.

On an unrelated note, I went to the hairdresser today. When she asked me what we were going to do today I said that I was thinking maybe, I wasn’t sure, but if she thought it was okay maybe we could try a bit of red. She was thrilled. She’s a wonderful hairdresser and she doesn’t let you do dramatic stuff if she thinks it will make you burst into tears at the the end. So when she said yes I felt that I was in safe hands.

I did miscommunicate though, and where I thought we would be adding some red foils in the way we have been adding some blonde foils we instead made my whole hair red.

I have had red hair in the past a great number of times, but it has been some years since the last time. Seeing your red hair revealed is far more dramatic than seeing a few blonde foils. It is extremely red. Not a coppery red, a warmer more brunette red than that. But red. Do you see that green in the photograph at the top up there? If that green were red then that would be the colour of my hair.

That grass is not real grass which I think is what gives that green and my red their equivalence.

The problem with red is that just when you get used to it and think, I’m just going to find myself a mirror so that I can admire my fabulous red hair, it has faded and you are left wondering why you spent all that time and money at the hairdresser’s. But then you remember the massage they gave you when they were rinsing your hair and you think that it’s worth it.

Do you know how I know that my hair is dramatically red? Both of the teenage humans noticed that I had done something to my hair.

I would like to have got more done today, but in between being the adult in that series of ratios described above and watching my hair change colour I didn’t have much time left. I did do some fossicking on the ikea website because nearly a year after moving into this house the ratio of things that need to be put in cupboards to cupboards where things could be put remains more out of whack than the ratio of adult humans to cat litter trays.

I’m not at all sure what I learnt from today.

An inauspicious beginning

I try not to give in too much to feeling sorry for myself, but it was 6.15 am on my birthday, and I was on my way to the bathroom to throw up (because my perimenopausal body had decided that today was the day the menstrual nausea would visit) when I came across first a dog poo then second a cat vomit.

The beginning of my 49th year (it being my 48th birthday) was off to something of an ordinary start I think we can all agree. After throwing up, then cleaning up (dog poo first then cat vomit), then throwing up again I made myself a cup of tea. The name of the tea is womankind, but I think it is just a coincidence that it is pink on account of the fact that its ingredients include cranberry.

All of this was conducted in alternate states of swearing at the absent mister (using both adjectives and nouns) and crying. The kind of crying I was doing was the one where you’d prefer to be angry than sad, but you’re enormously sad and so a river of tears runs down your cheeks and you know your face is going to look puffy for the rest of the day. Also, I wear increasingly magnifying glasses which means that my eyes look slightly larger than they really are. Or slightly puffier. Depending on how the day is going.

This situation made me grumpy because the tarot reader I saw last year told me that we live our lives in cycles of seven years and so this coming year would be the first year of the new cycle so it would be exciting and all of the hard work of the last couple of years would begin to come to fruition. Of course, I don’t actually believe in tarot cards or runes, but I visit tarot readers regularly (but not frequently) and I often cast my runes just to see what they say. Which is a fair amount of commitment for something you don’t believe in.

Anyhoo, I got back into bed with my cup of tea and I was going to continue watching Wives and Daughters on Netflix. There was a whatsapp message from the mister who had stayed up late to make sure that he could send me a birthday message when I woke up. I ignored it which was rude, but not as rude as swearing at him (using above-mentioned adjectives and nouns).

I’m almost certain that Wives and Daughters was one of the novels on one of my Major English Texts reading lists in around 1988 which almost certainly means that I’ve never got around to reading it. I have not been enjoying the Netflix series at all (she has a most annoying stare) and sometime after I finished my cup of tea I fell back asleep.

It was a lovely refreshing sleep as such sleeps often are and when I was woken at 8.30 I was sufficiently recovered from my earlier misadventures to eat some of the breakfast that was delivered to me in bed after a gentle knock on the door. It was smoked salmon and avocado on toast which is one of my favourite foods, but I could only eat one slice. Perimenopausal nausea is awful, but usually lasts only a couple of hours at a time. There was also some fruit salad which was a beautifully-scented combination of blueberries and nectarines. I ate all of that. (Please note the second piece of toast was not wasted as it was consumed by the morning’s chef.)

Later in the day I was passing by Haigh’s and I bought myself a dozen peppermint creams. I have always loved peppermint creams because they remind me of a scene in a novel I used to re-read when I was young where the heroine stands against a lamppost eating a bag of peppermint creams. I have some vague sense that the peppermint creams were obtaining illicitly, but I remember nothing else about the novel – not why she was standing there, nor what happened next, not even what the novel was called. But I still adore peppermint creams.

I am a few days into my 49th year now, and while nothing particularly outstanding has happened so far, I have not had to clean up any dog poo or cat vomit and so I think we can say things have improved. I wish I had some moral to share with you, some lesson, some stunning conclusion. But really it was just a day that got off to an inauspicious start and never progressed past ordinary.