Housekeeper's Diary

I slept like a lamb and woke at 6.20am, as always, because my body has decided that 6.20am is simply what happens now, non-negotiable, regardless of what time I went to bed or what I ate or drank or how sincerely I pleaded with it the night before. Poking me awake and shattering a dream in which I was wandering through a house that was mine, making a slow inventory of everything in it, touching things, and naming them. The same old dream. Always the same house, always the same time, always the same faint sense that I am checking something is still there before the day gets its hands on it.

Mornings have been odd lately. Full of weather, full of portent, full of the kind of atmospheric drama that makes me feel like the slightly overwrought protagonist of a golden-age domestic novel. A windowsill of rooks last week, all apparently seconds away from genuine violence. Then snow I initially mistook for ash falling from the sky, as if the world wasn’t just metaphorically ablaze, but had set fire to clouds so fat, low and aggressively present that Ben and I lay in bed naming them like geography students, competing over which one most resembled a Schnauzer and whether that one there, was technically a cumulonimbus or simply a very ambitious stratus. Because this is apparently, what passes for romance after a certain age, don’t you know?

But I will miss these windows. Ten foot tall and undressed, because nothing outside them has ever needed keeping out. I will miss Ruth in the turreted house opposite, her frail body a small steady lamp at her bedroom window each evening, her kitchen glowing orange at 6.20am like a gentle reminder that other people are also, improbably, getting on with it. Life insisting on itself. Ruth insisting on it. Both of them making the point quietly, without fuss, every single morning. 

I will miss this house. It is falling down and drafty and I will miss it awfully regardless. I will miss it in the way you miss things that were never quite right but were entirely yours for a while. Because now more than ever I understand that home is more than the sum of its parts. It is more than wallpaper and pictures, cushions and mattresses. More than the particular angle of afternoon light across a particular wall. It is the accumulation of ordinary mornings. The snow that looked like ash. The faces formed in the plastered ceiling from the simple swish of the plasterer’s tools. The rooks. The clouds that looked like puppies. Ruth, glowing steadily on in the dark. The life that happened here, whether we were paying attention or not. Whether, I suppose, we deserved it or not.

But today. A bright yellow bruise on my arm I have no explanation for beyond where there is no sense, there is no feeling. Two contented cats seeking out spots in the Spring sun to bask in. Me wandering the bare boards of these rooms in the glorious red kimono Ben gave me for Valentine’s Day. A green pottery jug with daffodils so strongly scented I breathe them in before I open my eyes each morning. The smell arriving before the light. Before the day's demands. Winnie Dog, who has been a little poorly, suddenly besotted with me so she takes every opportunity to spring onto my lap and lick my face with love. Spring! The joy of window flung open, and the brief conviction that things are going to be alright.

It has been an odd few weeks. A mixed bag, as life reliably is the moment you stop trying to arrange it into something that would look nice on a vision board.

The family portion was wonderful. Poppy's 18th at Junkyard Golf, cocktails with a sachet of space dust balanced on strawberry daiquiri ice, the whole evening so gloriously, structurally precarious it was basically a metaphor for being eighteen, the kind of night that ends with glitter in your hair and no real account of how it got there? Then Mother's Day with Finn, who gave me his full undivided attention and a card I managed to leave behind, though when I rang to apologise, he said, with the serene je ne sais quoi of a man who considers himself permanently reasonable: well you've read it now Mum, does it really matter? And I don’t suppose it does, because memories aren’t made of paper and we had sat opposite each other for hours and dissected his questionable taste in women and eaten loaded fries and talked about our tomorrows, his and mine running alongside each other now like two rivers that used to be the same water, and I know exactly what the card said and I'm carrying it with me always anyway.

The strangers portion however was considerably less excellent. One woman, deeply offended by something that was entirely my right, responded by ceasing to acknowledge my existence. And another, a complete stranger on the internet, who has appointed herself a kind of one-woman tribunal, and arrives in my inbox whenever she decides I am overdue a humbling, her disappointment in me delivered in instalments, thorough and unsolicited and utterly baffling. All of it exhausting, all of it, when held up to the light, simply someone else's quiet unravelling I found myself accidentally standing next to.

We are living through a wobbly moment aren’t we? A particularly wobbly moment in the story of us. People seem unmoored. Other’s contentment reading as personal provocation to those who have lost the thread of their own, and I understand this, I really do, but I don't have to host it. Grace is not the same as being a doormat. It is simply the decision not to throw good energy after bad. Because I have bigger fish to fry. Considerably larger fish. An entire substantial catch! And none of them are swimming in my inbox. So I have learned, slowly and not without effort, that dignity is not a thing you defend by getting into the mud and there is nothing to be achieved in retaliation, or at least nothing worth having at the end of that particular road. So I don’t go down it.

Instead, I acknowledge, quietly and without drama, that life feels a little ominous right now for most of us. That we are all, in our various ways, just trying to get through it. That none of us has any real understanding of what it is to walk in each other’s ballet shoes, blistered and beautiful and broken in to a shape that only fits one particular foot. Grace costs nothing, but it's still mine to spend, and I'd rather spend it well than waste it on a fight that was never really about me.

Today. Spring flinging itself bodily through the open windows, insisting on being noticed. Two women gossiping in the lane in a language I don’t speak, their lilting happy voices doing the work of translation anyway. The little girl next door conducting a very serious masterclass in how to be a Mummy, offering her doll to her little brother with the grave authority of someone who has thought long and hard about whether it is wise, then tsking with magnificent exasperation when he swings it by its hair and looks quite prepared to drop it into a puddle without a second thought. Birds going absolutely berserk. And then Ben, coming back through the garden, announcing himself in the way he does, clearing his throat and humming loudly through the cacophony of four dogs thundering back into the house like a herd of overjoyed wildebeest.

Now. My silly laptop point blank refusing to charge, so time on the internet ticks ominously toward sudden shutdown, the doomsday clock of creative Armageddon always perilously, appallingly close. So I type faster than I think. The unreliable keyboard skips its n’s willy-nilly and my nervous system does somersaults and I want to scream with entirely ludicrous rage until I remember to breathe, and get some perspective, and take a sip of water, and frankly behave myself. Because life forcing me to take breaks is probably exactly what is required when I am prone to glueing my bum to the sofa and forgetting to go to the loo because I have entered the joyful twilight zone that is my life online. And it truly is only Armageddon or love that will tear us apart.

Yes, now. The question that arrives at the end of every afternoon that got away from itself. Perhaps a cup of tea and a chapter of Floating Home. Another bin bag filled with the excesses of a life I have decided not to carry into the next one? The laborious, oddly satisfying ritual of hand-washing our smalls in the bath? Or the radical, underrated act of simply closing my eyes for a quiet nap in the deep of a Spring afternoon, the birds still going berserk outside, the dogs a warm and breathing heap somewhere nearby?

This is what a life looks like, I think, when you stop stop performing it and simply live it instead.

A bruised arm and a red kimono. Daffodils doing their work before the day begins. Winnie Dog, besotted and insistent, licking love into my face whether I asked for it or not. The fat clouds we turned into faces. Ruth’s orange kitchen, steadfast in the dark. Finn saying well you’ve read it now Mum, does it matter? and being, irritatingly, completely right. The strangers who came undone in my direction, and the grace I chose instead of the fight.

And Spring. Always Spring. Coming through the windows whether we are ready or not. Which is, it turns out, the only way anything worth having ever arrives.

Roll on 6.20 am tomorrow morning. You are entirely welcome.