Swings and Roundabouts

Got really impatient and anxious for my boyfriend to leave to go out for dinner. For an hour was snappy and kept encouraging him to leave in case he was late.

Now he has left, I’m eating a wheel of goat’s cheese and watching Masterchef Australia. Sometimes you just need to be alone.

“Only don’t get soppy about him. That’s fatal. The thing with men is to get everything you can out of them and not care a damn. You ask any girl in London— or any girl in the whole world if it comes to that.”

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

“Look, man, I think we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the defintion of good art would seems to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

David Foster Wallace, Larry McCaffery Interview

sad maths

making pancakes, realising you’ve no maple syrup > making tea, realising you’ve no sugar

breaking through to glory

My basic rationale might be that I like to write. I feel good when I am doing it — better than when I am not. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythms of words and sentences, and when these happily combine in a “thing” that has texture and tone and emotion and design and architecture, there comes a fine feeling — a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love. If there have been difficulties and failures overcome, these may even add to the satisfaction.

As for my “reasoned exposition of principles,” I suspect that they are no different from those of any man living out his life. Like everyone, I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved. I think that writing may be simply a method or technique for communication with other individuals; and its stimulus, the loneliness we are born to. In writing, perhaps we hope to achieve companionship. What some people find religion, a writer may find in his craft or whatever it is — absorption of the small and frightened and lonely into the whole and complete, a kind of breaking through to glory.

-John Steinbeck, Why, How to Write

I think I was maybe eight or so when I started grappling with the idea of death. That I would die, that the people around me would die. Would go, forever. I’m not sure if we can ever understand the idea of forever, just come to terms with it, but at nine I was still absolutely shocked and terrified by it. Is nine late to realise this? Maybe. I don’t know. But it’s when I knew.

I was staying at my Granny’s lying in bed and all I could think about was that one day my family would die. One day they would be gone. I can still remember that fear I had then - the first time in my life I had felt so scared. I went into my Granny’s bedroom and crawled into bed beside her but instead of feeling comforted I felt more awake then ever - staring at her shoulders in the dark, the shape of her body in the blanket, her embroidered nightdress. She was going to die, too, I thought. I felt panicked; I didn’t know what to do.

It must have been late, but before dawn because it was black outside the windows. I took her phone and went to the bathroom (why do we have this idea that bathrooms are safe places?  little cubicles of refuge). Toilet lid down, I sat and dialed my house number. In my head I thought - let mummy answer, let mummy answer, let mummy answer.

But the voice at the other end was my step dad’s. I felt let down, immediately deflated. I loved my step dad, but he wasn’t someone I felt like I could talk to. He is a big, burly Italian man, built like a bear, who communicates through exclamations of happiness or anger not emotional heart to hearts. But I had no choice. I cried down the phone. “Everyone is going to die” I said “and I’m going to miss you, and mummy, and Granny and you’ll never come back and I’ll be all alone”….(I don’t think I listed my younger brother or sister, probably because I still had the idea that everyone would die in order of age).

Dad was asleep, and it was late, and I’m sure the last thing he expected was to be woken up by his daughter sobbing down the phone about mortality. But he said “Cara, cara. It’s alright. It’s true that people die, but all anyone does - all any of us do - is try to keep the people we love happy while we are alive. To protect our families and the ones we love, to hold them close and love them as much and as well as we can for as long as we can. While I am here, I will do everything to keep you and your mummy and everyone safe. You don’t have to worry about anything. You will always be loved.”

I slept properly for the first time in weeks that night.

Years later, I found out that by the time he was twenty one, both my dad’s parents had died from long, difficult illnesses. At twenty one now, and still so dependent on my parents for love and support I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him. But he is brave, and strong and however he dealt with it, he has never been anything but unfailingly positive and full of joy.

I have always felt loved.

If you like looking at attractive, creative men in suits, you could do worse then check out the photos for Hickey Freeman x Opening Ceremony.

This one is mine though, so pick your own thanks.