Source: MJASmith |
It's
all too easy to find things to complain about in your life - endless
automated menu systems on company phone lines, getting cut up at a
roundabout, not
getting enough sleep, you know the drill.
It
occurred to me recently that the people who have the most positive
impact on your life also tend to be the most optimistic, the ones who
seem resolutely upbeat and untrammeled by any small inconvenience. So, in an effort to approach things more
positively, I decided to look back on the last week and, if I could
find five things to feel truly thankful for, I figured I'd be on the
right track. When I put my mind to it, it wasn't that hard.
Migraleve and Nurofen
On
Wednesday morning I woke up with a dull headache. By the time I'd got
to work and fired up my PC it was
evident to me that it had become a migraine, in all its nauseating
glory. I don't suffer with migraines very often but a couple of years
ago I woke up on a Saturday morning with one whilst on a weekend away
with M. and the girls in London and I wound up buying some Migraleve
from Boots in Canary Wharf which cleared it away really quickly.
(Pleased though I was with that, I was shocked at the note on the
packet advising that, because of its codeine content, more than three
days of use could cause addiction).
Since
that day I've always carried that
packet of Migraleve in my work bag (as a preemptive measure against a
potential migraine, not because I'm now addicted to painkillers). It
worked on Wednesday, or well enough to get me through a meeting with
my boss and the various conference calls I sat through that day. The
well-it-would-be-a-shame-to-leave-a-trickle-in-the-bottle glass of
wine that M. poured for me that evening may have been a mistake, or
maybe it just took longer to get over the migraine, but I woke up on
Thursday with another headache, but a couple of Nurofen took care of
that.
I
didn't plan to open this post by being thankful for
over-the-counter drugs, but nevertheless they really helped this
week.
Brownies
My
eldest daughter started Brownies last year, and each Thursday after
dutifully
completing her homework at school she goes off to our local community
centre for a couple of hours. She loves it, and just completed the
work for her first badge - the Booklovers badge, appropriately
enough, given that at seven she has a reading age well beyond that
and goes through novels like they're going out of fashion.
I
pick her up from Brownies every week. It's only a two minute drive
from
the community centre to our house, but it's actually the only two
minutes I get to spend alone with her each week. It's always a
highlight, especially as she comes out of the hall
positively bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm (for context, she's
normally very calm and reserved). It's become one of my most
cherished moments of the week, even if it means that she doesn't
settle down to bed for ages because she's so excited about the fun
stuff she's been up to with the group. This week she emerged carrying
a shoebox which she'd decorated with a rudimentary decoupage from
magazines, wrapping paper, old calendars and so on. I don't think
I've ever seen her get as excited about anything else in her life,
giving me some small ray of hope that she might always enjoy the
simpler things in life.
Beigel Bake, Brick Lane
Every
Friday lunchtime, two colleagues of
mine and I leave the modern environs of the City and head for the
infinitely more interesting Brick Lane, the sole reason for this
excursion being to buy bagels from one of the two shops in the
stretch of Brick Lane just north of where the old Truman Brewery used
to be.
More
often than not, I'm just picking up bagels for the following day's
lunch, though quite when I got into this habit I don't know. It would
be all too easy to pick up a packet of bagels from the supermarket
close to home, but those bagels are poor
synthetic cousins to the small, chewy rolls that you can only really
get from a proper Jewish outlet. Plus at 25p per bagel, I can't think of many other lunches that come cheaper than that.
My
colleagues and I started going to the first
bagel shop you come to as you walk up Brick Lane from the old
brewery. At some point we switched allegiance to Beigel Bake a couple of
doors up, where the service is better and the staff friendlier. On
our recent excursion I bought a slice of baked cheesecake, which, in
all its firm, crumbly glory, was just about the best cheesecake I've
ever had. A snip at just 70p. Most Fridays my friend Dan follows up
his salt beef bagel with a coffee from Brick Lane Coffee next door, a
funky place with a predilection for Lego, Star Wars and risqué
posters and mugs with deceptive slogans that you'd never give to your
parents if they popped in for a cuppa.
(In the picture above you can see my friend Anthony emerging from the shop; I like to think the smile on his face shows how much we enjoy visiting this place.)
Saturday Mornings
Time
was, back when the girls were younger, when I would spend Saturday
mornings in a terrible mood. For a while we attributed this to a pair
of Mr. Grumpy socks that always seemed to be the next pair at the top
of my sock drawer whenever Saturday came around; we now realise that
this was a mere coincidence. None of us believe in
magic, character-changing socks these days.
The
truth was that I just didn't know what I was doing, or had no
confidence in my abilities as a father, or both. M. would head off to
the gym early Saturday morning, something which I never begrudged her
doing
after a week of looking after the kids while I went to work, but the
mood that prevailed before she left the house may well have been
construed as such.
Nowadays
things are better. M. still goes to the gym all morning but I'm much
more relaxed. This
is probably because the girls have grown up a bit and my duties
extend to simply putting out bowls for the cereal that they pour
themselves or cleaning their teeth before we leave the house. I'm
probably no more confident than I was when they were younger (I still
can't tie their hair up in ponytails, for example), but things have
definitely become easier. I'm still prone to bouts of grumpiness but
I'm much more self-aware these days: it's true that you get out what
you put in, and you can guarantee that if I'm in a mood then all I'm
going to get back is two very grumpy little girls, and grumpy girls
are indeed a force to be reckoned with.
My
eldest daughter goes to a drama class for most of Saturday morning,
leaving me to spend three hours with my youngest
daughter. Those three hours have become among the most cherished of
the week, something I couldn't have imagined earlier in her life. Our
eldest is a daddy's girl through and through but it's fair to say
that my relationship with our youngest was always a bit more
strained, and I've never had as close a relationship as M. enjoys with
her. Perhaps through me being more relaxed, or her growing up a bit
more, Saturday mornings have given us a chance to enjoy each other's
company and bond a lot more. It's only taken almost six years.
Most
Saturday mornings we'll find ourselves running errands, either to a
supermarket in Milton Keynes or taking a walk to our local high
street shops in Woburn Sands to visit the
tiny library we are fortunate enough to have in this small town of
ours. We talk about whatever takes our fancy, play I spy, look out
for cats, interesting buildings or just make small talk about school,
work or sundry other things according to our moods. Just lately I've
made a commitment to her that once we've done our chores we'll spend
some time doing some sort of craft activity. A couple of weekends ago
it was decorating a paper lantern she got for Christmas, while this
weekend it was decorating a shoebox just like her sister had done
enthusiastically at Brownies earlier in the week.
I've
never been a big fan of getting messy, and for a long time we've been
happy to outsource that sort of activity to their school teachers but
I guess I've reached a point where I think it's fun, and certainly
worth it for the happiness it brings my youngest little girl.
For
the record, I still have the Mr. Grumpy socks, but they appear to have
lost whatever potency they
may once have had.
Breaking Bad
I
am passionately averse to anything
that's hyped. I don't know when this started, but over the years it's
just developed into a sort of mantra; I don't mind 'cult' films or
books, but such things often attain that cult status because they
were roundly ignored when they were first made and achieve plaudits
by slowly working their way into people's hearts. Hyped things don't
do that; they have an impudent swagger, get five star ratings as soon
as some reviewer has watched the opening credits, and get critics
sufficiently hot under the collar to deploy billboard-worthy words
with a fervent enthusiasm that all seems a bit daft. (I realise that
in saying this I'm being somewhat ironic, given that my music reviews
are published each month by Clash and I will confess to having
deliberately worked up at least one sentence in a review with the
sole purpose of seeing it quoted in an advert).
So
it was with Breaking Bad: everyone I knew was gushing about it, and
so I wanted to avoid it with similar enthusiasm. And
then a colleague let me borrow the boxset of the first three series
and, despite some initial reticence M. and I were both hooked (aided,
in M.'s case by Aaron Paul, the latest in a lengthening line of men
she confesses to having a crush on). Sufficiently hooked, I would
say, to have found ourselves approaching the end of the third series
with an addict's sense of desperation: we'd watched two or three
episodes per night for going on three weeks and with series four not
in our possession, we had a need for another fix but no real way of
knowing where the next hit was going to come from.
I
found myself at a kids party with my youngest daughter this past
weekend where I spent a comfortable hour extolling the virtues of the
show
to another dad, who, in wearing a very cool Heisenberg t-shirt, had
marked himself out rather prominently as something of a fan.
'Series
four is the best,' he mused, perhaps sensing
my desperation to get my hands on those episodes. I briefly wondered
if he would exchange those episodes for one of my kidneys.
Perhaps
I've been wrong about hype all along. I was wrong about The Wire and
Girls and many other things. But then I think back to the hours
wasted watching Kill Bill, some Oscar-winning
ensemble cast film that might have gathered all sorts of risible
adjectives or Comedy Central garbage like The Millers or Mike And
Molly and reckon I'm not quite ready to slavishly follow the herd
just yet.