The Joy of Small Things Read online

  To those who have brought me much joy

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  The perfect dressing gown

  Always look up

  Plays without intervals

  Kissing

  Fonts

  Cover versions

  Ice-cream vans

  Clean bedding

  The all-day breakfast

  Petting cats

  Window seats

  Pockets

  Autumn leaves

  Private jokes

  Petrichor

  Techno music

  Foreign idioms

  Recovering from a cold

  Dogs in parks

  Phone calls

  Reading on the beach

  Pattern

  A fit of the giggles

  Brushing teeth

  Finding lost things

  Being wrong

  Being right

  Red lipstick

  Pettiness

  Secondhand books

  Compliments

  Saturday’s papers

  Being a regular

  Closing browser tabs

  Cheating a hangover

  Acknowledgements

  Cold-water swimming

  Blue plaques

  Little acts of kindness

  Baths

  Arriving early

  Wallpaper

  Flirting

  Pot plants

  Three-minute pop songs

  Compersion

  Video games

  Airplane mode

  A last-minute goal

  A cup of tea

  Polling day

  Antique shopping

  Scratching an itch

  Tipsiness

  Being inside when it’s raining

  Memes

  Free upgrades

  Silence

  Overhearing

  Empty cities

  Staying over

  Massages

  Chocolate

  Day trips

  Gig encores

  Perfect pens

  Regional accents

  Setting the out-of-office

  Good coffee

  Night buses

  Mint

  The final dab of paint

  A Sunday roast

  Fixing things

  Local graffiti

  Bingeing on boxsets

  The sounds of sports

  Pharmacists

  The moment after waking

  Mastering a new skill

  Bonding with strangers

  Travelling light

  Being fed by friends

  The to-done list

  Caring less

  The smell of wood

  European town squares

  Tech reprieves

  Abandoning a book

  Playing board games

  Handwritten letters

  A clean home

  Favourite songs on shuffle

  Bumping into friends

  A shimmering reflection

  A running high

  An open fire

  Cancelled plans

  Going to the cinema alone

  Trainers

  Changing your mind

  Browsing property websites

  Cemeteries

  Tiles

  A trip to the hairdresser’s

  The sea

  Black and white photos

  House parties

  The journey home

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  You probably know J. B. Priestley best for his plays. In particular, An Inspector Calls. But he also wrote novels and scripts and invented a theory of time. (And, as I was piqued to discover, lived in the same house in Highgate, north London, that was once home to Coleridge and, also, Kate Moss.)

  But I like him best for his book, Delight: a collection of short essays on the things, people, places and feelings that delighted Priestley most; a rebuttal to his reputation as a life-long curmudgeon. See, I like all this stuff! This stuff included: fountains; cancelling plans in order to stay in (very relatable); reading about awful weather when tucked up in bed.

  I had this book pressed into my hands by someone during an unsteady period and it helped pick the lint off my jacket, straighten my lapels and push me out into the world again. It helped me appreciate my own pockets of pleasure: the swirling sounds of an eight-minute end-of-album track, the route of a bus newly taken, a reinvigorating cold-water swim.

  Back in 2018, times seemed particularly turbulent (little did I know what was to come) – the high-frequency bickering of social media; each day a Trumpism plumbing new depths; the quagmire of Brexit ‘negotiations’. I found myself reaching for Priestley’s delights once more. He found his in 1949, when the national mood was far from buoyant – a postwar period of rationing and an austerity drive close to the one we were then experiencing. I figured that if this grouchy Yorkshireman could take the time to sit down and document his everyday exultations, then I, someone whose default is a sort of droll cynicism, could do the same, no matter the fraying edges of the world around me. No matter the global, macro snafus, or the quotidian, quiet furies (the headphoneless music listeners, the reply-all emails, the cash-only bars).

  These columns became my attempt to present the reader with the flowers in a tangle of weeds, the lilac of the gloaming, the most comfortable ever tread of a shoe. Inspiration to get us all through the day, without the need to text a friend a gif of a burning dumpster or to empathise with Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  THE PERFECT DRESSING GOWN

  One of my favourite words in the world, aside from the German for armbands (Schwimmflügel, literally swimming wings), is the Russian word halatnost, which means dressing-gownness. This beautiful word was bestowed on the Russian people by Ivan Goncharov in Oblomov, Tolstoy’s favourite book.

  The word has come to mean negligence, but archaically (the novel was published in 1859), halatnost equalled lazing around reading the papers on a weekend, mooching about the house, doing not much at all. Maybe a touch of ennui, a lot of daydreaming. The life of the robed gentry: Oblomov is a nobleman who fails to move from his bedroom in the first fifty pages of Goncharov’s book.

  The halat in halatnost is all important. Halat: dressing gown. One makes big decisions in life: to have kids or not, where to put down roots. But up there, frankly, is finding the perfect dressing gown. Or, if you’re northern and of a certain age, housecoat. If you’re literal minded, a bathrobe – but we all know that’s limiting its potential.

  Give me a big, fluffy dressing gown that’s like cuddling in a cloud or bathing in marshmallow. A dressing gown with a belt that wraps around you three times for safety. One with deep pockets in which to hold the world’s minutiae (and, at Christmas, After Eight wrappers). A dressing gown with a hood that makes you feel you could fight the world and win. A salmon- coloured robe in which to read the FT. A floor-length white one that reminds you of glorious sex in expensive hotels. Or a too-small, bobbled dressing gown – Liverpool FC red – that you wore when watching the Match of the Day repeat at the crack of dawn. An embossed smoking jacket, with matching slippers, sitting on a Chesterfield, with a roaring fire and a brandy. A satin kimono for summer, which begs to belong to someone who wears sexier nightwear.

  When most people think of an ‘investment piece’, they think Mulberry handbag, Burberry scarf. I am thinking: dressing gown (but also Burberry scarf). A good dressing gown lasts decades, like a habit. One of the first written mentions of a dressing gown was in the 1660s diaries of Samuel Pepys (‘my new gowne of purp
le shagg, trimmed with gold, very handsome’). Pepys knew.

  When I found the perfect dressing gown, I am sorry to report it was from Soho Home, the homeware offshoot of Soho House. It was £65, but worth every penny. I could have spent £65 on a night out I didn’t remember and then not had a dressing gown to recover in the next morning. I made the correct choice.

  Some of the Worst People (specifically, men) have tried to bring the dressing gown down (Hefner, Trump, Weinstein), but I won’t allow it. In the current state of the world, it’s reassuring to know I have what is basically a comfort blanket with sleeves on the back of my bedroom door.

  ALWAYS LOOK UP

  I want to advise you something: always look up. Oh, the cornices and the eaves you might have missed! The kites in trees! The tall, handsome strangers with long, smooth necks. The pattern in the clouds that looks like a pig – or is it a bear? Or the outline of the UK, while the union lasts. The old brickwork adverts on the sides of Victorian buildings. The unexpectedly witty graffiti on the railway bridge. The ascending, spiralling, iron balustrades.

  If you live in the country: look up for the stars and their constellations, or the book-lined studies of farmhouses, peeked through windows. If you live in the city: look up for the glass and the steel stretching higher and higher. I even like the Shard. If you’re abroad and walking through dusty, narrow streets somewhere, look up to see the patterns of rugs thrown over balcony railings to air.

  Looking down yields fewer rewards. The same feet you have known all your life, even if shod in spectacular shoes. Perhaps a gorgeous, reddening autumn leaf, but look overhead and there will be more. Looking up reveals new treasures and pleasures all the time.

  It took me a few years to clock the Antony Gormley figure on top of Exeter College in Oxford. It took me riding on the top decks of buses (the best way) to notice multiple murals of butterflies in Camberwell, south London, before learning about the species of butterfly they all celebrated, originally native to the area (look up, too, to see actual butterflies). I focused on the café at the top of Mount Snowdon, scrambling up the scree as my bare knees became patterned with tiny stones, to will me on. I stumbled across a tree in the middle of London – in Hyde Park – home to glorious lime-green parakeets. They will swoop down and peck at slices of apples if you offer them. In Liverpool, where I am from, you will find another type of bird: the two copper Liver Birds, eighteen-feet tall with a wingspan of twenty-four feet, called Bertie and Bella, which top the Liver Building and watch over the city and the sea.

  Look up in warehouses in Berlin, and marvel at the Bauhaus light fittings (if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am). In Moscow, the famous ornate ceilings of subway stations are as much a tourist attraction as the Red Square. Lift your head to push on through a difficult run. Give your shoulder muscles a break from bending double over a phone when sitting at a desk or making an obstacle of yourself on pavements. Sometimes all it takes to really ground oneself is to tip one’s head back and take in the vastness of the inescapable sky.

  PLAYS WITHOUT INTERVALS

  I’ll find myself in the office, at about 4 p.m., wondering whether I should go and see something at the theatre, looking online for availability that same evening, especially as the night draws darker and earlier. The good thing about going solo, which I mostly do, is that there is often a seat free, and discounted. I never plan ahead. I am lucky enough to live twenty minutes from the best productions in the world.

  The true joy is a play without an interval. The television writer Steven Moffat once called for an end to intervals, which as an opinion earns a standing ovation from me. Intervals are rubbish: they disrupt the narrative; the toilet queues ribbon around the stairwells (I often just go to the men’s: discuss); and my fellow audience members are excruciatingly slow in leaving and returning to their seats (I thought I saw Vince Cable at the theatre once, and then realised that every single person at the theatre looks like Vince Cable). Intervals are getting longer and longer, too, like Marvel films.

  We need a break from intervals. We probably won’t get one, because the venues need the revenue they bring in: the £5 thimbles of ice-cream, for example. Defenders will tell you that an interval is a good chance to discuss the performance, as though one would go to a book club halfway through reading a novel. They will talk about a chance to stretch the legs, as if we were on a 24-hour flight, at risk of deep-vein thrombosis.

  Shakespeare’s plays were written without intermissions. It is directors who insert them, running the risk of ruining them. I understand that sometimes a set change requires a delay in the action, and actors might enjoy a rest. But I would much rather stay in the dark, belief still suspended, than hang around in a sticky-floored lobby clutching a flat Coke (read: actually Pepsi) in a plastic cup.

  Instead, give me, uninterrupted, a new world for the evening. Don’t allow me the temptation to check my phone, forty-five minutes in, to have politics and work rush back into my head. Unwind me from scrolling. When I leave the building, I want the weather to have changed beyond all recognition. I want actors at the top of their craft, while I absorb every change in expression and movement. Give me a performance that changes my mood and my mind. Give me Pinter without the pause, and lines that inspire. Give me the lights down, and do not let them come up again until we rise to our feet as one.

  KISSING

  Do you remember the best kiss of your life? I imagine that you do. It’s an evocative question – which is why a certain esteemed Saturday newspaper supplement (the Guardian) includes it in its regular Q&A feature.

  An alternative query is: do you remember your first kiss? But that’s not such a big deal. It is often fooling around with a friend, or at a pre-teen sleepover, or in a park somewhere, against railings, in the rain. Magical, too, of course. Special. Formative. But, for most people, probably not the greatest of their entire lives.

  There aren’t many things better than a great kiss. I am talking about romantic kissing – what we call (and here, a shudder) snogging. Such an ugly word for such a wonderful act. I once looked up the etymology of ‘snogging’ and the OED wasn’t sure. Probably because nobody wanted to own up to it.

  I don’t think there is anything sexier than when you meet someone, before you have ever kissed, and your eyes keep mutually flickering to one another’s lips with longing. I am not sure who came up with the idea of smooshing our faces together, but it’s a good one. I couldn’t date a person who was bad at kissing. Or, I suppose, more generously, bad at kissing with me. And I don’t understand people who don’t kiss during sex. It is such a fundamental part.

  But a kiss can be pleasurable without sex, or the prospect of it. Some people are so good at kissing, or so compatible, that the kiss can be great even though you probably would not actually want to have sex with them. It works as its own shared, siloed intimacy.

  There is no kissing off-the-rack. It’s always specific to the situation, and the person. It can be fierce, full-throttle. Or gentler, slower. Kissing at its best becomes a fluency, a poetry; the highest form of communication, a physical language.

  The best kiss of my life? I don’t even want to share it. It was a conversation, almost. And, in this instance, untranslatable.

  FONTS

  Right now you are reading the font Aldus LT Std chosen by my Faber editor and me. It’s possible you don’t care about this; but I very much do. (The difference between a font and a typeface is that a font is a specific iteration of a typeface. Bold, italic, size, etc, though I’m not a stickler for this, so I’ll just use ‘font’ here.)

  Fonts are a huge part of our lives, because words and numbers are. Even if you think you don’t have a favourite font, I can assure you that you absolutely do. Even if you think there is no font that would cause you to cross a road or avoid eye contact on the bus, there is. We are wedded to fonts; they work their way into our hearts and minds by both stealth and design.

  A few years ago Helvetica became so omnipresent that
it was the subject of longform essays, an exhibition at MoMA and a hit documentary. American Airlines, Toyota and Nestlé all use versions of it. Somewhat traumatically, it has also been used by the UK government. That may well have been the final nail in the coffin, as Helvetica became victim to tall poppy syndrome. Does anybody associate Chris Grayling and Matt Hancock with cool? No.

  On the corporate side of things, fonts inspire brand loyalty. You’ll notice that sometimes when companies change fonts, consumers revolt. Often the companies just give up and change back. Gap once attempted to switch from its established serif font to Helvetica on a drop-shadowed square, and it just ended up looking like the header for a school-project Word document. It reverted. Tropicana also backtracked.

  Bibliophiles, and I am one, take a keen interest in cover designs, but also fonts used. Have you ever read a book and found the lettering infuriatingly dense, making it hard to follow? Or one whose showiness is distracting? Have you ever been browsing spines on a bookshop shelf and had one jump out at you amid a crowded section?

  Fonts have different personalities, which is why you never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice. Or a railway arch graffitied in Times New Roman. Authoritarian regimes tend not to stylise in a font called High Jinkies. I will never not find it amusing that I can write something in Arial, hate it to my very core; then switch the font to EB Garamond and think: this is a masterpiece. A perfect example, I’m sure you’ll agree, of the transformative power of fonts.

  COVER VERSIONS

  Cover versions are like white wines: they’re either very good or horrid. Horrid ones include mediocre guys playing acoustic guitars, wearing waistcoats over T-shirts, butchering every song released in the last three decades. Or how about the instrumental ‘samba’ covers of chart toppers that play in coffee shops, on repeat.

  Good covers, however, are truly transformative. They turn a song inside out in the manner of a reversible jacket: same structure, but something entirely fresh. You can wear it pop or jazz or dance or rock’n’roll. Listening to a favourite song in a different guise taps into alternative emotions.