1. Waking up and feeling well rested. As I’ve gotten older, waking up and feeling refreshed isn’t the norm anymore. Quite the opposite. Most days, I wake up sweaty, more exhausted than when I went to bed and tearful thanks to dreams about my two most recent ex-partners gleefully cheating on me and getting all up in my face about it. (Cheating has been a running theme in my dreams for a very. long. time.) Last night, however, I didn’t dream, or at least, when I woke up, I didn’t remember anything and my goodness gracious me, what a difference.
2. Having the courage to ask for my chai latte to be ‘as hot as humanely possible.‘ The last time I asked for my chai to be extra hot, I was in Iceland and had a barista throw his arms up and bitch at me about burning the milk or something. I was on a date at the time, so I was too mortified to take on board the entirety of his rant, which went on for a good while. Anyway, this morning when I asked for it to be ‘as hot as humanely possible because my train was delayed (shocker) and I had a while to wait so I wanted to enjoy it…’ the barista was only too delighted to make it to that specification. We went on to have a fantastic back-and-forth about the disappointment of being given a lukewarm drink that’s supposed to be hot enough that, when you drink it, it feels like the world has been set to rights. The chai she gave me was the perfect amount of hot and took me straight to my happy place.
3. My daughter Saga (4) insisting on taking her notebook and pen to bed with her and writing one and a half pages before going to sleep. I observed her write out a random assortment of letters with her unicorn pen for about fifteen minutes, after which she complained her hand was sore, YET, my little one kept at it. At one point, I leaned in to kiss her head and whispered, ‘maybe you’ll be a writer like mummy one day,’ to which she replied, ‘I’m going to be a scientist and a chef and go to the library and read books when I’m older. But there will be too many people at the library, so I will go to the café instead.’ Can’t fault her logic.
4. Saga saying ‘biscuits’ whenever she made a mistake. She also said, whilst becoming stuck trying to get out of her school dress, ‘I’ve got myself in a bit of a pickle.’ I also want to get it in that she said my feet smell like love hearts, which I’m delighted about.
Celebrating the strange and the shadowy, the damned and unseen 