THE MULBERRY BUSH

Well it’s a cold and frosty morning, and the mulberry bush is in full swing. I’ve put the heating on.

It’s one of those days when the frost could easily be a drizzle of thin snow, and if you squint, it’s hard to tell the difference. I peeked out over the iced rooftops, watching the pink sky grow white and grey. Everything looked stiff and brittle, as though one falling acorn could shatter the grass and crack the sky.

I’m exhausted. Perhaps going into the office on a Monday was a bad idea; it did feel like a long day. Coupled with a few late nights, and some ongoing sorting of the pod, and the insurance, and the kitchen… the whole thing has been quite tiring.

Rico (our insurance man) thinks we’ll get a settlement today. I imagine him spinning a trilby onto a hatstand, sliding behind his typewriter and tapping out some numbers for us in bold, black ink. I don’t know why.

Once that’s in place we can book in the rest and get going with the repairs and replacement of our stuff. Every now and then I get a little cold sweat that we didn’t calculate enough, or that I forgot to add something important to the inventory. A recurring pattern in all this has been me doing a great job of sorting something, then Sammy pointing out later that I forgot the important bit, or did a thing the wrong way round, or accidentally cost us more money than was needed. So, I’m hoping that that’s not the case with this.

“They can take the pod back whenever they like,” said Sammy yesterday, fed up with the freezing portable kitchen on our driveway. I’ve seen it as a necessity so far, the only way we’re going to get anything cooked, boiled or washed up. I’ve got to admit though, on mornings like this, I’m inclined to agree.

FROM THE TOP DECK OF THE 33

I’m really tired after yesterday’s travelling. After work last night, I found myself in town, looking for somewhere to eat. Sammy had taken her sister to the spa. I was hitting a night on the town, on my own.

In the end I got dumped in the corner of a burger bar that was depressingly American. Don’t misunderstand me; I mean that I was alone listening to loud country music about pickup trucks and ‘the man upstairs’, on a cold, wet, November night in England. In a party of plaid-wearing cowboys, laughing under their Stetsons and guzzling a few Buds with their burgers, that would have been a mighty fine atmosphere. But it wasn’t, so it wasn’t. It was the Englishness of it that was depressing, not the Americanness.

Ah well. Never mind. I caught the bus back, still feeling barbecue sauce and cheese on my belly. The 33 rattled and rumbled past bright-coloured shops and glistening puddles. I watched from the top deck.

I used to catch the 33 when I was a kid. It was the best way back from town. The route has not changed, even though the buses have. In fact, I even had a curious desire to get off by the park, run up the road, and burst in through the front door of our old house. Muscle memory, older than old, had kicked in, and I suddenly had to resist the childhood feeling, and stay on the bus.

Most people, I reasoned up there, leave their hometown and put roots down somewhere else. I have not done that. And so sometimes it grabs me. Look, there’s what’s left of my old school - a car park and a sixth-form block, now dwarfed by unfamiliar buildings! Look! That’s where I used to go to cub scouts - the warm hall and the flaking paint. And there! I had piano lessons there for a while. I guess I was seeing things from a different angle. Time has changed everything.

The burger place had been so bleak. A waitress had scraped a chair across the wooden floor and had started stringing Christmas decorations over the beams. I could tell that she, like me, would rather have been somewhere, perhaps anywhere else. 

An automated voice sang along the top deck. I pushed the button and heard it ping. Then I wobbled my way down the stairs as the bus pulled round the corner, before finally throwing my work bag over both shoulders and leaving the bus for the cold, starlit night air.

I probably don’t know what home is, deep down. We’ve only got memories of a reflection, a sort of vague longing for something deep and warm and wonderful. I pushed two cold hands into my pockets and looked up at the twinkling stars over my town. They get it.

RUCKSACK MANAGEMENT

I’ve never been into the office on a Monday. Well, not this office anyway. Bleary-eyed from the two trains and one taxi, I stumbled in, and the automatic lights flicked on.

I sometimes wonder what ancient cultures would make of automatic lights. We take them for granted, but for the pre-electric age, this flow of electrons across a low-intensity plasma, noticing you and then turning on by itself, would be nothing short of magic. What scientific wizardry, I wonder, would I be overawed by, if I were here in 300 years’ time?

One thing’s for certain: I still wouldn’t have figured out how to keep a tidy rucksack…

I know this because so far, it seems to have been my life’s effort. Today I reached in, past charging cables and a book I’d forgotten about, and I slowly pulled up a crumpled notebook, with its blank pages mangled and creased.

How do my rucksacks end up stuffed like this? There are always chunks of biscuit, grubby coins and broken pens at the bottom. Even at school my Tricolore ended up covered in smudgy bits of Kit Kat, pencil and lunchbox detritus. I doubt I can ever go to La Rochelle and not be surprised that it doesn’t whiff of banana and tippex.

What I need to do is empty my rucksack every time I get home. Clear it out - regularly tipping it upside down so all the old batteries and USB sticks fall out with the bounty wrappers, crumbs and tissues before it all builds up round the corner of my laptop. By the way, if this suggestion was obvious to you two paragraphs ago, firstly, well done you - let’s hang out, and secondly, it’s likely that you and I are different kinds of people. Which is fine, by the way, as long as you know that, and I know that, and you know that I know that.

I’ve smoothed out my notebook. There’s a water bottle on top of it. Next to it, I’ve noticed someone’s left a “side-splitting” Christmas game entitled “Who Am I & What Am I Doing?”

I don’t know any better questions than those two. Seems today I’m a lazy rucksack owner, and I’m trying to flatten out a notebook.

THE PREVIOUS OWNERS

At the moment, I feel a bit like I’ve been kicked around by an angry horse. I don’t know why I chose horse there; I could have said donkey, bull, sheep, universe, or Tyson Fury. Horse it is. Never mind.

The point is that I’m feeling bruised and battered by all this house stuff. It’s been six weeks now of unbearable disruption, of emotional upside-downiness, and steadily leaking savings account. A year ago, we were desperately trying to live here - a year later, who’d have believed we’d still be trying to live here, and that the house itself would turn out to be the problem.

You should have seen my face when Steve the Plumber told us that our system basically needs replacing. He’s done a patch-up; we’ve got hot water but he can’t change the valve because of where it’s positioned. He doesn’t want to risk splitting the tank. As ever, some cowboys or other were to blame - years ago probably, found by the previous owners. Ah the previous owners…

I’m having difficulty extending grace to the previous owners. They refused to move out of this house when they could have, then just a few months after they did, all these problems suddenly started happening. They were here with an ageing boiler. They were here with a slowly constricting pipe under their extension that had been built over a drain cover. They never had any whiff of any of it. No sewage, no blocked drains, no obvious damp in the walls, nice central heating. We know people who know them, and so humiliatingly, they’ve also found out about all these troubles from their warm, new house.

Now. They’re nice people, and I need to choose the most generous explanation. So, let’s say that they’re relieved (and we all would be, wouldn’t we) but also that they could not have known any of this was about to happen. There was no way to know about the blockage building steadily in their pipes. And the boiler, though old, was working perfectly nicely for them with no reason to suspect it had been bolted up by cowboys. If you don’t know, you don’t know, right? And who knows, perhaps they’ve had huge issues with their new house too? Perhaps a lot of people do.

So I release the previous owners, even though grace is difficult to extend if I think about it for too long. We have to keep walking forwards in disappointment, otherwise we’ll just get stuck.

And anyway, there are no such things as ‘owners’ anyway. We’re all stewards, caretakers, temporary holders, of everything. It’s what we do with what’s entrusted to us, how we invest what we’re given, and what story we can tell at the end of it that counts in this world.

THANKS A LOT, KEPLER

I’ll tell you something I’m not a fan of. Quinoa. Actually, there are lots of things I’m not a fan of, now that I think about it, but specifically this afternoon I am not a fan of having to switch the lights on at 3:30pm.

I mean really? The kids are barely out from school and already it’s basically night time. The lights go on when you’ve finished work, not when you still have two hours of it left, right? And how come it’s suddenly bothering me this year when I must have worked through this many many times, and somehow just got on with it?

That last question’s a bit difficult to answer, actually. What is different about this year? Sitting in a house with no kitchen, no hot water, and damp in the walls? That’ll have a gloomy effect on your working from home experience I suppose. Perhaps the oncoming winter darkness just exacerbates things.

Pesky Kepler. Things would have been a lot easier if Earth could have just gone round the sun in a circle instead of this elliptical orbit of tilted seasons it keeps putting us through. And don’t think you’re off the hook either, Sir Isaac Newton! Not the first time is it, that gravity’s made me down in the dumps.

I’m not really down in the dumps. Not really. And I’m not blaming Kepler or Newton either for that matter. Not really. I’m just annoyed that I have to flood my body with artificial light today when my body seems utterly conditioned to believe that work stops when the big light goes on. Unfortunately, my boss disagrees.

TRADESPERSON’S CONFIDENCE

The damp contractors came round today. Three of them, each in a uniform of plaster-spattered utility trousers, sturdy boots, and a corporate fleecy jacket.

They were breezy but firm. You know, in that way that people have when they don’t need you to finish a sentence.

“So we’ll just whip that plaster board off, add the tanking - it’s basically the stuff they use to keep the water in swimming pools - then we’ll reskim the plaster on top, okay sir? Should take around an hour an’ a half, tops, we’ll get that done for you, fairly straightforward really…”

Later, when they’d gone, I phoned Sammy and we both realised over face-time that the three wise men had only done half the job. I phoned up. Only one came back. He’s applied thick plaster to the brickwork (all of it this time) and we’re letting it dry over the next few days. My guess is that they’ll be back later in the week to finish it off.

It’s funny how confident you get with tradespeople when you’re older. I’m about as practically minded as a racoon in a sculpture class, so for me the language of DIY and plumbing and tiling and fixings is foreign. Yet, somehow these days we’re able to slam the brakes on shoddy workmanship and get ‘em back to do it properly. I say ‘we’ because Sammy, the daughter of a roofer and a lady who had no qualms about anything at all, is much more able with the ol’ tradesperson’s confidence than I am. I’m getting better though. Honest, mate.

THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

I can’t quite believe it, but today marks exactly 10 years of writing this blog.

It doesn’t feel like it. I mean on and off, I’ve written on most days over that time period - an almost continuous stream of nonsense - and also across continents. Canada! Israel! Milton Keynes! I’ve been everywhere, me.

And yet, the nature of time somehow makes November 2013 feel like just a few short steps back down the path. Sigh. That’s how it goes, I suppose: blink and you’ll miss it. Oh and also, it’s been ages.

I thought, given that it’s a whole decade, I’d pick some of my favourite posts - one from each year. I don’t know; call it sentimental, call it nostalgia if you like. I just think there’s a whole lot of ocean, a history of tides that have swept in and out, and it’s great to look back and be thankful.

2013 - my six year old nephew learns how to play drafts. He’s not six any more, but I’m still just as proud of him.

2014 - I realise I don’t much like the experience of eating an ice cream.

2015 - a quite perfect afternoon on Streatley Hill with my Mum where I reflected that memories were made of moments like that.

2016 - I was a butler for a cat.

2017 - In this classic episode, I’m in London when disaster strikes outside Buckingham Palace…

2018 - I contend that you can do anything if you focus on it.

2019 - My friend Paul and I spend a day in Jerusalem in this one, and I get cross because of religion.

2020 - This is the last thing I wrote before the global pandemic and it’s a bit of a ramble on how big questions can help solve smaller ones.

2021 - In this one I go further north than I’ve ever been, having a great travelling day in the outer Hebrides.

2022 - A trip to Windsor in Her Majesty’s jubilee year turns splendid when we see her being entertained by a steel band.

I am thankful. A lot of things I’ve written have been ‘middle of the night’ posts, thoughts and fears swirling in the valley and the doubts. But like the poem says…

‘The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all its might

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright

And this was odd because it was

The middle of the night’

• The Walrus and The Carpenter, Lewis Carroll

SUPERMARKET CHAT

What are you supposed to do when you meet someone you know in the supermarket?

I don’t know what the statistics are but it seems to me to be highly likely, given the number of people you know and the inevitability of you all living in the same town. I reckon barely a shopping trip goes by for me and Sammy without a friendly mid-aisle chinwag with someone or other.

I’m glad I’ve got her. She excels at that awkward boundary between small and medium-talk. Within seconds she’s remembered the important thing to ask about that person’s family, the last conversation they had, and the eye-rolling camaraderie of ‘doing the weekly shop’. She laughs in all the right places. I often stand there just drifting next to the marmalades, wondering whether or not I should say anything. 

I do big-talk. Or at least deep-talk. That feels like where I come alive - not in the shallows. Funnily enough, people in Sainsbury’s aren’t usually in the mood for philosophy and existential debate. They need quick, light, frothy and considerate. Without Sammy, I’m in trouble.

“Hello, doing your shopping?” I might garble artificially. It’s a better opening gambit than, “Hey, do you think mathematics was invented or discovered?” but unfortunately the inanity of the doing-your-shopping question also makes my eyes flick rudely around their trolley, as though judging their choices, and then of course, sheepishly around my own.

“How’s the family? Everyone alright?” I might say. They might be in a rush to get out of here, says my whirring brain. Last thing they want or need is you, jabbering on.

I wonder if I can take any cues from their body language. Do they keep the trolley gently moving? Are they distracted by the tins of custard just over my left shoulder and is that why they’re in this aisle in the first place? Or are they giving me good eye contact and thoughtful gestures?

“Excuse me,” says another shopper, a stranger, trying to get past. She’s irritated, I suspect. We part our trolleys like the Red Sea so she can rattle through towards the eggs. I raise my eyebrows.

And how do you end a mid-supermarket chat?

“Well, I’d better get on I suppose…”

“Nice to see you, anyway.”

Gesturing: “This dinner won’t cook itself, after all.”

“Hey have a think about why the luxury items might be near the entrance, and what that says about human behaviour, won’t you?”

“Lol,” I might add as they vanish round the corner.

Then, even when you’ve used up all your small-to-medium talk and you’ve done your goodbying like a pro, you’ve still got the added (and mildly terrifying) problem of running into that person again while you trawl the shop. With no small-talk left. Awkward. At least in the street, you’re usually headed in different directions! In the supermarket, you’re weaving around a network of paths in different configurations, and before you know it - there they are again, stocking up on toilet rolls!

Nervous wave and half smile. Move on.

And again! This time surveying the cereals.

I might go in with a “We really must stop meeting like this,” line, but that doesn’t deflate even half the awkwardness, funny as it might have been in the 1970s and 80s.

I’ll say it again: Sammy is about a thousand per cent better at this. It’s almost as though she’s been going to Sainsbury’s daily for years…

I find myself walking about in a sort of daydream, wondering whether the store is forcing me to circle anti-clockwise for a reason, and whether the words ‘food glorious food’ (which are emblazoned across the wall behind the checkouts) need a comma, oh and how ‘10 items or less’ should definitely be ‘10 items or fewer’…

It’s so weird how nobody in the store ever seems to have time to talk about those things.