STARS AND PIXELS

I left the house under the stars this morning. Orion blinked at me, cold and bright above the street lamps and rooftops.

I love that the stars are the furthest thing you can see. A quick glimpse before running for the bus, but in that microsecond, photons that had begun their unimpeded journey millions of years ago collided with my eyes, and told me something about my place in the universe. It is amazing that we’re here, however you look at it.

The bus was packed with people on their phones. Much shorter distance for light to travel from screen to eye. We rumbled on in the artificial blue glow, every passenger in their own digital world of stars and pixels.

I’ve been thinking about social media again. Here’s my question: is it appropriate that everyone has an equally weighted voice in every debate?

I think social media did that to us. It balanced the scales, it equalised the volume, it gave us all a printing press. And while it seems fair, I’m not convinced it’s helpful.

WhatsApp pinged at me as the sky turned pink at the horizon.

There’s another equalisation: the equalisation of expectation. But of course, I’m in many WhatsApp groups now that each require a different set of rules. They look the same, they use the same font, the same emojis, the same style. And yet, instinctively there are rules governing all of them differently.

It must be a nightmare for the neurodivergent - no-one spells out what’s appropriate and what’s not. You are you, you have a sense of humour, compassion, kindness in all of these groups, why wouldn’t it be okay to say that in one, but not the other? And yet, so much happens there.

It’s possible that my two points are at odds with each other. One, equal platform is not equal authority, even though it seems like it. Two, equal groups have unequal etiquettes. But they are saying the same thing. It strikes me that the safest thing is to be as quiet as possible, closely followed by the old-fashioned thing we used to do when we all actually talked to each other.

I like the stars. They’re permanent reminders of something intangible, ethereal, solid, in a spinning world. No wonder sailors used them to navigate. We all need some fixed points to steer our ships by.

CHRISTMAS NUTS

It’s been really nice out there today. There was some rain first thing, so that’s added to the freshness. Then the sun came out and brought a crisp blue sky with it. It was all gold and green for a while. I love this time of year.

One of my colleagues was exasperated today that Morrisons are currently selling Christmas nuts.

I must admit the supermarkets do seem to have gone early, but honestly? I don’t mind it so much. I don’t know how long nuts last but I imagine they’ll take you into December. Mince pies with a use by date of November 15th I don’t understand quite so much, but if you’re planning your budget against your pay check, then sure, why not stock up now, on your non-perishable items?

“It’s not like it used to be, eh Matt?” he said. The same man asked me if I remembered Hawaii Five-O yesterday. I told him I was too young (which is true) and it upset him a little bit. I’m not quite sure why; he brought it up! 

Today then he was onto commercial Christmas in mid-October. Someone else then said it should begin on the 23rd of December. Hmm. Oh and how Santa’s going to be at their local garden centre from next week onwards. I’d have thought he’d have better things to do, to be honest. I imagined how funny it would be to dress up as Father Christmas and just go shopping, full-beard, completely in perfect character, never referencing it. I don’t know why that’s funny. Maybe it’s the thought of Santa pushing a trolley round Sainsbury’s and arguing with the self-checkout machine.

One thing I will say about Christmas threatening to consume the rest of Autumn - it doesn’t seem very fair on Autumn. This a great time of year, with its own festivities. We should make the most of it.

Well anyway. Today was nice. Proper Autumn. I really wanted to get my scarf out, wrap up in a long coat, and kick leaves in the park. I settled for a brisk walk, taking in the colours, the low bright sun, and the scent of earth and leaves. Beautiful.

HEATING

At 9:30am, Sammy connected her finger with the ‘boost’ button on the thermostat. She pushed. Electrical circuits fired into motion as a tiny pulse ignited in the wires.

Within a fraction of a second, the pulse zipped through the system, telling relays to fire, signalling valves to open and the boiler to wake up. An LED light flicked on, just next to her finger. It lit up the grey morning, a small square of bright luminescent orange.

Almost immediately, the boiler began to click. Somewhere a blue pilot light woofed into life as the tank remembered its strength. We heard it - the sound of old winter, the roar of cosy nights and chilly mornings.

Sammy looked at the display, glowing next to the LED. ‘Heating’ - so long reduced to ‘OFF’ while we boiled through the summer, now read ‘ON’. And the system was whirring and clicking to prove it.

NICE BLUE

It’s a nice blue day today. I probably write about the nice blue days more than I do the grey ones, but that’s okay.

I went for a walk to try to clear my head. The sky was almost Scandinavian - I mean high with altocumulus, white clouds on northern blue, fresh and hopeful. The afternoon sun made long bold shadows. I liked it.

I’m not well today. I feel really run-down, and that’s resulted in a kind of flu bug that’s zapped my energy. Cue the coughing and spluttering and generally feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps, I think to myself, I ought not to mention it and just get on with all the things that need to be done - that seems like the kind of thing that (for example) Sammy would do. Soldiering on.

I don’t think I’d make a good soldier. The army tend to iron-out the daydreaming introspectives, and I can’t imagine it would go down well to stop mid-battle and describe the clouds.

A STROLL UP THE SEINE

I’ve been in France. Paris, to be precise.

I walked up the river last night, just as the sun was falling behind the silhouetted buildings either side of the Seine.

It’s such a curious city. I spent a lot of that walk trying to work it out.

It’s young. There were a lot of young people sitting in huddles near the edge of the sparkling water. Some smoke, some listen to music. Some dance! At one point I found a kind of amphitheatre where couples span each other round very gently, while a portable speaker played folky jazzy music.

There were joggers too. They sprinted past, bobbing up and down, looking cool. Twilight hid them in shadow as they ran under the arches of bridges across the river.

Notre Dame was lit up. I last saw it in the 90s, long before the 2019 fire ripped through the east end of the cathedral. It is still in scaffold, despite the remarkably tall flèche that poked proudly into the golden sky. It is quite the cathedral! To the west, it was draped in banners - the tricolor of course, and the crisp yellow and white of the Vatican. I quickly realised that they were preparing for a papal visit. It was the thousands of white chairs, the remarkably ornate lectern and gigantic bank of TV cameras that gave it away.

Through theatre town and the bright lights of cafes and bistros, the tall tapering shape of the Eiffel Tower rises above the salons and ateliers.

The river sparkled with both the fading light of the sun, and the reflections from party bateaux steadily churning their way up the Seine. Many I saw were crowded with Parisian partygoers, dressed in dinner jackets and evening gowns. The sound of music, laughter, and chinking glass carried easily across the water.

It’s hard for me to work out how none of this felt like the version of Paris I expected. It’s all there isn’t it? The cosmopolitan city of cool romance, the suaveness and sophistication, the energy and love, alongside the pure history and drama of this extraordinary place. And yet. Paris is a city like a lot of cities, somehow parodying the version of itself given to us by every inch of film we’ve all seen. It’s a good reminder that sometimes our version of a thing is not the truth, and that we should always be prepared for the truth to be… well, more disappointing.

Could I live there? Non. Was i inspired to pick up a paintbrush or craft existential poetry? Non. Was it the real Paris? I suppose it was. By the time I was walking back, it was dark and the river seemed an inky ribbon flowing under prettily illuminated bridges.

Paris is like its river then, I thought to myself. Wide, mysterious, and beautiful. But, I would wager, a lot colder and less friendly should you really fall into it.

CUPPA SOUPS

I had a cuppa soup today. It’s a sort of inevitability. Working from home means finding yourself in the kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors - it’s just the way of things. If Sammy wasn’t so good at hiding the snacks, I think I’d be in some degree of trouble.

Anyway, eventually one of those cupboard doors swings open to reveal packets of instant soup. And that day was today. Chicken noodle.

Who knows what French people make of cuppa soups. It’s powder in a sachet you pour into a mug, then stir with boiling water. Fine for your emergency travel kit. Lunchtime on a normal Monday in a fully working kitchen? The cuppa soup is to cuisine, what painting by numbers is to mathematics.

I poured in the hot water from the kettle. Tiny circular noodles danced in the swirling foam - a brownish liquid the colour of milky tea. Teaspoon in, give it a stir… liquid. Would it thicken? No. Is the debate about whether a cuppa soup is a drink or a soup over? I’d say so. This was watery slop with noodle life-rings, presumably desperate to get out of the abyss as they bobbed round the mug.

I drank it. There’s no spooning it up with a soup spoon or tipping it away from you like it’s vichyssoise. No the only thing you can do with this kind of slop is knock it back. It is in a mug after all. So I did. I drained it. I slurped it like a hot chocolate and then tipped the sunken soggy noodles down my throat. That’s protein I suppose. But so salty! Why is there so much salt in these things? It gives the impression of hot bilgewater, expelled into the sea by a ship’s pump. Salty, frothy and brown.

I had a pal at uni who lived off pot noodles. Paul his name was, but he looked so much like 90s Liam Gallagher, he ended up being called ‘Our Kid’. Nice guy, but always hovering round the kettle. I think about Our Kid sometimes, wondering what he’s up to. He was peaky by Christmas. And to be fair, he soon migrated away from the snack pots.

I’m going to have to have a word with Sammy I think; see if she can’t find a way to sanction and ration a few snacks. I say ration because, yes, I am the type of guy who’d chomp through two packets of Oreos in an hour. Absent-mindedly of course, persuading myself that they help me concentrate.

I can’t be glugging down cuppa soups all week.

DREAMING SPIRES AND FIZZY POP

I’m in Oxford today feeling typically beleaguered and inadequate. It doesn’t help that the town is currently teeming with teenagers.

What is Oxford University playing at? Are they letting twelve year-olds in? I just passed a gaggle of them spilling onto the high street as though looking for fizzy pop and monster munch. Students used to wear scarves and pretend to be intellectuals. Or they’d bounce around in tutus rattling a RAG week tin. You don’t see that any more, do you? They were grown-ups weren’t they? Where are the berets and the philosophers? Come to think of it, where’s the tweed and brogues? This is the city of Dreaming Spires after all! No, what Oxford has, it seems, is a massive youth club.

It’s a nice enough day out there. Summer clouds and a warm blue sky. The trees are typically Autumnal now, and the sun hangs just a little too low and gleams white rather than warm yellow. The shadows are long too, falling in stripes across the pavement of bikes and teenagers.

So why ‘beleaguered’? I just feel a bit overwhelmed with everything at the moment. In lots of ways I’m skimming life, just about surviving my way between crises. It is exhausting - like being surrounded on all sides by potential problems but only having enough strength to fight them one at a time. I don’t dare consider how many of them there are.

And why ‘inadequate’? Maybe it’s these students just beginning the journey of their lives. Can you imagine only having lived for less than two decades? What must that be like? And to still have six or seven ahead? In this agonising world! I don’t envy them. And yet, perhaps I do. Or worse, perhaps I envy myself, similarly green, similarly young, floating my way through university, with unknowable energy and potential. And looking like I was twelve, no doubt.

THOUGHTS FROM THE INTERSECTION

Okay so something is up. Tough news at work today: one of my colleagues died.

He wasn’t someone I knew particularly well; I sat with him on a train last year, and I knew him to smile at. But still. Difficult.

It follows on from the shock and grief of Big Church Festival. There are enough people writing about that, and I don’t want to wallow in. The overwhelming emotion around (in church circles anyway) seems to be a kind of dull shock - as though it could have been any of us. Which of course it could. But wiser heads than mine have unpacked all that.

My question for God is a bit more self-centred. I’m wondering why this year has been so filled with grief. I suppose, statistically, people die all the time, so yes, it’s only likely that every now and then the stats bunch up - like buses, if that’s not too flippant to say.

Nevertheless, it does feel like something’s up. Is God softening my heart? Is this a season with a reason? Is it okay to imply (which I may just have done) that he’s somehow behind all this?

You can see why it needs wiser heads. My theology isn’t quite able to wrap itself around grief yet. I don’t feel mature enough, even though I sit at the intersection of faith, life, and death far more than I realise.

My colleague was young. Late 30s perhaps? He had a wife. Somewhere in Paris. Terrible thing really.

It is possible that God uses situations like this to work good. Maybe that’s the softness of heart I’m feeling - a lesson learned from pain and loss that heaven knows, can’t be learned any other way.

I miss Paul. I miss all that he was, and all that he could have been. I miss Heather. I still see her laughing at me sometimes and I wonder how I live in a world that neither she or he is in. It doesn’t really compute.

I’ll hold Sammy a little closer tonight, I think.

DOES OLIVIA TAKE THE ELIZABETH LINE?

There’s a line in an Olivia Dean song (I know because Sammy belts it out every time the song rotates on her playlist) that goes: “The grass is greener where you water it.”

Nice, Olivia. I was thinking about it today as my colleague Andy and I worked on a project in London. It is the easiest thing in the world to wish you were somewhere else, and the hardest to cultivate your current life. And yet the harder of the two routes leads to contentment.

Contentment. Watering your own grass and not yearning for the other side of the river. Wanting for nothing more than you already have.

I need to be more thankful. Listening to podcasts on the train reminds me that there are some wealthy, powerful people out there who still have unfulfilled appetites, and are poorer and hungrier than anyone could guess. And me, on the train, wondering what brings the myriad of people into London - and how each looks like they would rather be anywhere else.

I wonder whether Olivia Dean takes the Elizabeth Line from time-to-time. I like to think so. I like to think she smiles at Slough and Burnham and West Drayton. Perhaps as the green hedgerows flicker by and the factories turn to houses, bridges, rivers, and trees, she sighs with contentment and gratitude.

LIT BY THE RAYS OF THE SETTING SUN

August is slipping towards its end. It seems to be taking the summer with it - though apparently, there is one more heatwave to come.

We went to a riverside pub last night. It was so nice to see the golden trees reflecting in the still, flat water. With the exception of a few ripples where lazy ducks had dipped, the river was like glass. The gentlest wind picked out a few russet coloured leaves and flicked the tallest branches against the rich blue of the evening sky. It was a delightful way to end the weekend.

Sammy’s gone into work today. If ever anyone says anything about teachers having a long summer holiday, I feel ready to explain.

They spend the first two weeks detoxing from the previous academic year, the middle two weeks trying not to think about it, and then the last two weeks frantically preparing for the next one. It is intense. Also… they love a WhatsApp group, even in the middle of all of that! Oh the teachers! Some of them just can’t resist it. Or, more accurately, are terrified of falling behind and have to get ahead to keep up. Ping ping ping. Sammy had to archive a lot of chats this summer.

Anyway, she’s in today, getting ready for the new year. For me it’s just another marker post to the inevitable end of one season and the start of another. Cool breezes are lovely, and the world is very pleasant out there. But autumn is most definitely in the air.

And no bad thing! We love autumn in this house! Especially Keats’s Fall, when September really shows off. And after the endless weeks of heat, it all seems more welcome than usual.

I had a ginger beer. The lady had a raspberry and rhubarb cooler. Neither of us felt like swapping. We both had chips, and a prime view of the glorious river, lit by the rays of the setting sun. I can’t think of anything better.

RAIN DANCE

Apparently it is going to rain tonight.

Clear your diaries. Half of us are going to go outside and stand in it for three minutes, and the other half are going to roll their eyes and mutter ‘typical’.

Them’s the rules, Britannia, them’s the rules.

In this nation whose conversation, culture and social bonding rituals are entirely shaped by the weather, you just have to go along with it. And it’s likely that a little cold rain after endless weeks of baking sunshine, will be as communal an event, a thing to be commented on, just as much as the partial solar eclipse we all had last week.

I went out for a walk in the park today. Cool air, grey skies, and almost white grass thinning over dry, cracked mud. It’s a picture of our summer.

I feel more hopeful today. I mean, not quite full of hope, but maybe closer.

Sigh. There’s been a tiredness this summer that has come from more than just the boiling sun - a tiredness that has made me ache for something more, something fresh and new. As so often, the change in season seems like a reflection, a painting that matches my own.

Come on then rain, I’ve got at least three minutes to get my wellies on. Down you come. 

FROM THE CRÈCHE FOR HUSBANDS

I’ve been left in the in-store Starbucks at Sainsbury’s. I think I’ve probably been doing too much moaning about the new layout, so I’ve been given this ‘treat’ while Sammy does the shopping.

The new Sainsbury’s is too bright. That’s all I’ll say about it. Oh and there are just too many words everywhere. And the aisles are too tall and too narrow. Honestly, some of them feel like the Shambles in York, looming overhangs of cereal and tea creating alleys that are just about wide enough for one and a half trolleys.

They would argue I suppose, that everything is now clearly labelled. Brilliant white screens (paper in front of a light box) blare at you from all directions, and luminous signs like ‘MEAT & DAIRY’ and ‘FOOD FOR NOW’ hang above the aisles, shouting at you, as though they ought to be in Tokyo - an effect that’s not diminished by the presence of an instant-sushi hut by the way. ‘Wok in Progress’. There’s never anyone in it whenever we go by.

Anyway, I said I wouldn’t talk about it. I’m in the Starbucks, feeling grizzly in the heat. It’s been relentless today - I am a sweaty mess, grumpy and snappy and conserving energy in the same way a colander might preserve some water.

Starbucks is grotty these days isn’t it? Sticky tables, tuneless music, plastic seats and wooden chairs. I don’t want to go on about that either. It is serving as a sort of crèche for overheating husbands, so at least it’s serving some sort of positive function.

I hope she’s alright out there with the trolley and the swirling public. I get to pay in a minute, so who knows what treats and offers the Queen of Snacks will have scooped up. Hopefully too, she hasn’t spent too long staring at the signs without her eclipse glasses on. Actually that’s quite a good shout for next time. Sunglasses at least.