Last looks

Turning the lights off on our living space, its objects so exhaustively sifted through life's fingers as to render even the simplest charged with a purposeful continuity.

Midnight

It was 12.00 AM and Hartley woke up crying. Earlier in the night, I lay awake worrying about him, and wished we were still bed-sharing so that I could put that worry to one side and fall asleep with him next to me. So when he woke up crying, I maybe didn’t try very hard to settle him in his own bed, and brought him back to ours. In the past, he would have used this opportunity to play and sing and keep us awake until we admitted defeat and returned him to his cot. In the wee hours of this morning, I said, "Okay, go to sleep now, baby," and he sighed and smacked his lips gently and stroked the contours of my face with the palm of his hand for a while. Then put his arm around my neck, curled his body into mine and fell asleep.

Thrill

I made it through my first job interview in almost four years, and for a while, the idea of being back in London every day, all day, and in control of my own thoughts and actions made everything feel a bit different. I headed to the duck pond where Bruce and Hartley were waiting for me, and as I passed two mothers strolling with their indeterminately-aged babies, I thought That's not going to be me anymore. It was thrilling.

In pictures

The few out-of-doors hours, leading up to Canadian Thanksgiving dinner (click to enlarge).

Nowhere

How can I explain?

Red on white

Nothing seems real for me anymore. I'm not saying this in a dramatic or awe-struck sense; it's just that living in England feels similar to playing Monopoly at times. The currency appears bogus, the decisions I make no better or worse than any others, so long as I'm still playing. I turned a corner and saw a shock of red against a white stucco house, so I took its photo. A van made a U-turn at that exact moment, doubling back towards me, and I panicked and put away the camera. I half expected someone to ask me what I was doing, or try to confiscate my phone. You just never know these days. But nobody erased my shitty photograph of a stunning autumn ivy, and no other moment stood out particularly, so.

In the sun

Outside the cafe that overlooks the church, where I ate warm tea cakes with butter and apricot jam, and sipped my cappuccino in the sun.

Hands

I reached down and took Hartley's hand in mine, and this time he did not let go. He held my hand and I held his and we walked down cobbled lanes, past shops and straight through the town centre - a mother and her tiny boy, walking together, hand-in-hand.

Lights

Some cross, boss-eyed girl shoved Hartley for touching a toy on a walker that her little brother was occupying. Then she feigned great concern for her brother, even though I could see that her real aim had been to push my son to the ground. That wasn't the best moment of my day. Not by a long shot. My best moment was the lights coming back on after three hours of thinking we'd damaged the wiring behind a wall where we'd hung a painting. That would have been terrible.

Boss

An epiphany: He. Is. Not. The. Boss.

And we wouldn't be doing him any favours if we allowed him to believe this. Such was my revelation at the halfway mark during a full day of shopping with my sister-in-law. She has been an unexpected reserve of strength for me during some pivotal moments in the UK, including the birth of my son. I feel very lucky to be a part of this family, who have all done so much for me over the past few years.

Tea

Well this certainly didn't suck.

Pallet

The sun pressed its face against the cobblestones and I held the crinkly kraft paper bag into which, minutes earlier, the shop keeper had fed a slim historical biography about this very town. I was walking to my final lesson, where Kate would tell us to get our own paints and I would root around inside various sandwich bags for colours I could remember the names of, and put them on pallet paper like I hadn't only heard of pallet paper three weeks ago. "You've cracked that, finally," Kate would say about my landscape, which is a compliment of the highest order, whether or not she means it. Everything about the afternoon was building to this moment, and I could feel it.

Faces

This face, at bedtime, squashed in a face sandwich by the nursery window, as we say goodnight to the bun-bun, and to the squirrel, "Who went (insert the noise a squirrel would make if it scurried over your fence but paused long enough to eat a nut)," and to the stars in the sky, the apples in the tree, the neighbours doing their washing up, &ct. We do this routine at the window every single night, but tonight he squashed our faces together for quite a few long moments, and grinned, and laughed through his nose.

Lies

Not every one is going to be a winner, and some days you’ll be in no frame of mind to spot your best moment. In fact, what the narrator of The Anthologist doesn’t realise is that many of his gems – at least from a reader’s perspective – derive not from his best moments, but from his most painful memories and encounters. I don’t want to share my worst moments with you, because they have no basis in reality. They all take place inside my head, and all of them are lies. (I hope they are lies.)

Spider webs

It's raining and I'm washing dishes. I glance up and see two spider webs clinging to the hawthorn in the back garden. The webs are like delicate necklaces, or faery handbags, their silk textured and weighted by points of rain so exacting it's as though someone has painstakingly strung them with the tiniest of jewels. They swing and glitter there in the dusk as I wash dishes, and give the impression that someone might stop by later to retrieve them.

Beekeeper

At the market, the honey merchant told me to put my hand against the pane of glass separating me from a shallow wall of bees on a comb. “It's warm,” he said. It was warm. “They're generating the heat,” I said. “They're generating heat from all the work they're doing,” he said.

Our town

I was wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown and shivering beneath the duvet. The curtains were open and I watched the clouds scaling the blue skin of a chilled autumn sky. The mock Tudor façade of the terraced houses across the road begged to be part of a sinister historical drama, so I obliged by thinking up bits of narration for one, spooling variations through my internal projector: "Our town...The people of our town...And when we thought back on it...Our town...It was our town..."

An introduction to an idea of best moments

Okay, so here’s the deal. I finished reading Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, and in addition to being one of the best novels I’ve read in a long while, it gave me a great idea about how I can raise a toddler and still keep this blog alive. When asked how he achieves the presence of mind to write poetry, the narrator replies:

"'I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?' The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something that I hadn’t known was important will leap up and hover there in front of me, saying I am – I am the best moment of the day."

He goes on for a while, but in those few sentences, I was already a convert. I know that a blog isn’t poetry, or even prose, but if you look back in your archives, you’ll see that on any given day, your writing often depends on the lifting of these best moments.

My day has only just started, and not very well, but I will write down my best moment from yesterday so that you can see that I’m committed to doing this...

Wait - I haven’t told you what I’m doing yet!

Okay, so I plan to write down the best moment of my day, in whatever shape it takes. That’s it. Simple, right? It will allow me to keep up my end of the bargain (i.e. – I write a post, you read a post) without compromising too much of our precious time on this earth.

I hope you enjoy reading about these moments as much as I enjoy remembering them.

23.09.2010

It was four o’clock and I’d just finished my painting lesson. The pink stucco house across the street had a bit of the weak, autumnal sun smeared across its face and I wished that I could have painted it. I don’t know how to paint, which so far is the only thing I’ve learned in my painting class, but I felt good knowing that I could see this pink house and its light and feel that I wanted to do something like that. I’ve never been capable of seeing colour, light and shadow in this way before, and I’m happy for this new gift.