The Joy of Small Things Read online

  Autumn leaves smell good. The Cambridge Dictionary defines humus as: ‘Dark earth made of organic material such as decayed leaves and plants.’ There doesn’t seem to be a specific word describing this scent, but there should. Humussy?

  Also, leaves sound good. There is the delightful crinkling that finds its way into atmospheric television scenes where characters walk together, breaking up or coming together, with hands deep in wool coat pockets, breath visible.

  They feel good: that twiddling of stems between agitated fingers. They can be useful, too. Slipped between the pages of a book to keep a place or, less poetically, to wipe shit off a shoe.

  The Russians were especially good at autumn. Chekhov, for sure. ‘Mingled with the autumnal smell of leaves, the gravestones and faded flowers breathed forgiveness, melancholy and peace,’ he wrote. Pushkin: ‘Autumn attracts me like a neglected girl among her sisters. And, to be quite honest, she is the only one that warms my heart.’ I wouldn’t disagree.

  PRIVATE JOKES

  I have a friend, Eleanor, with whom I share so many private jokes that if one of us were involved in a crime and the police impounded our phones, it would take Alan Turing-levels of expertise to decode our text conversations. Think Anne Lister’s diaries, but with the cry-laugh emoji after every single sentence.

  One of the strongest bonds people can have is a shared sense of humour. As someone who basically finds everything funny, I have multiple versions of this. Eleanor and I often share very dark jokes, but also run amok with absurdism. I can fire witticisms back and forth with my friend David like it’s a Wimbledon final. With Tshepo, we reference our past shenanigans and shriek with delight. Every time we hang out we add another one to the canon.

  Chris and I love each other so much that we rip each other to shreds most days and, along these lines, there is a long-running trope that he is a cuckold, because I am having an affair with his wife. The WhatsApp group I am in with my school friends is filled with quotes that only we can comprehend. I have a colleague whose office I slip into when she’s not in it and put up posters. One time, it was just a huge blown-up photograph of myself.

  These little-and-often gifts are as revitalising as a vast intake of breath. All I need to be cheered on a bad day is an unexpected screenshot landing in my inbox of something that only a friend, or a small group of friends, understands. This is usually followed by increasingly zoomed-in screenshots of the same thing, or quickly searched-and-sent variations on the theme. Spontaneity and repetition are key to keeping private jokes alive. Riffs are built upon like Led Zeppelin songs.

  But it isn’t imperative to have a long history with someone to share a private joke. Sometimes they are fleetingly possible with strangers. Many a time I have caught the eye of a fellow passenger or queue member when something hilarious has happened, two perfectly unknown-to-each-other individuals mutually stifling smirks. This is best when nobody else has cottoned on or others are too mature to find the situation amusing. (It perhaps shouldn’t be funny when someone trips up … but it just is – sorry. Ditto spoonerisms at live events.)

  I am not entirely sure why esoteric jokes and references make me so happy, given that I can also derive much joy from humour that goes viral worldwide. But I imagine it comes down to a close sense of community and belonging. ‘You had to be there’ goes the phrase, and god, it’s just beautiful if you were.

  PETRICHOR

  There are times when we discover a word that maybe we didn’t even realise we needed, but after we are inducted we’d feel lost without. One of these words for me is petrichor. The Oxford English Dictionary defines petrichor as: ‘A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.’

  I was incredibly pleased to alight on this word because it meant I could stop asking people whether they also thought ‘rain smelled good’. This isn’t among the weirdest things I have been known to ask, but it’s also not particularly hinged as far as queries go.

  The joy of petrichor is separate but connected to the other benefits of a heatwave ending: the regained ability to sleep without all four limbs sticking over the edge of the mattress; being able to read one’s phone screen outside again. I love hot weather – I enjoy heatwaves, even if with side-guilt at what they augur for the planet. But, like a new friend who starts off fun and energetic but ends up relentless, there comes the moment when the charm wilts (and in this case, the garden) and relief cannot come soon enough.

  Enter: petrichor. The science bit involves an oil, trapped under dry soil and rock during the hot weather, being released to the surface by moisture. For me, petrichor smells like renewal. It’s the rain equivalent of throwing a big, soapy bucket of water across grubby paving stones. Or a dog emerging from a lake and shaking itself down ready for the next adventure. It signals birth, resetting, resumption.

  The word was coined in 1964 by scientists in Australia. It comes from the Greek for stone, ‘petra’ and, rather brilliantly, the word ‘ichor’, which is used to describe the mythological blood of the gods. The released oil is thus the ‘blood of the stone’.

  The smell had already been identified and even utilised in India. There it was referred to as ‘earth perfume’ or matti ka attar and perfumers bottled the smell and added it to their creations. (Please don’t ask me to explain how this was done; let’s just call it magic).

  It is said some people, but more often animals, can smell forthcoming rain. I don’t have the ability to turn my nose upwards and sniff out the clouds’ impending rupture. But when a summer sky greys and loud cracks of lightning and thunder begin, I know it won’t be long before I’ll be huffing the good stuff.

  TECHNO MUSIC

  I am often asked what sort of things help me with my mental health. I think people expect me to say walking, nature, swimming. All of those things do help, all of those things I do need, but also: techno music. People never expect techno.

  I used to hate techno; would rather die than listen to it, until I was sober for a year. It seems somewhat paradoxical to give up booze and suddenly start hanging out on vodka-sticky dancefloors. But, just like an SSRI, mix a high BPM into my brain and my mood will lift.

  There’s a physical element to techno that is lacking in other genres. There is, of course, joy to be found in sliding across one’s kitchen floor in socks, bellowing out pop lyrics into the handle of a broom; but just as the physicality of exercise takes one out of the mind, so does the bodily response to the thud, thud, thud of techno. The rattling of the ribcage; the beat of the music in your chest – as if you had the world’s most muscular, obnoxious heart. There’s no space for bad thoughts, doubt or worry when the senses are assailed.

  One summer weekend I felt awful. I spent the entirety of Saturday in a duvet-cave. The banality of life, the relentlessness. Boris Johnson. On the Sunday, I dragged myself from bed, threw some stuff in a bag and set off to Wilderness festival.

  A couple of years before I had been revived, Lazarus by way of lasers, dancing at 2 a.m. in the festival’s Valley – a literal valley – green beams scanning the night sky, pushing through trees in the black. Again, this is not something I envisaged a few years ago: I’m a huge Girls Aloud fan. But from that valley full of noise, I progressed to the thump of industrial techno at the infamous Berghain in Berlin. The sweaty basements and repurposed gasholders of east London. Wilderness worked the next year, too. (And of course I did the wild swimming as well.)

  They say routine is good for mental health, and techno is nothing if not routine. A ten-minute techno track is the embodiment of keeping going. And there are barely any lyrics to drag the mind to places it isn’t helpful to go.

  A bonus is that techno often takes place in the kind of Brutalist spaces or decrepit warehouses that sing to my soul, but it can be equally helpful throwing my hood up, putting in my earpods, and walking around at night listening to a playlist that smacks as my heels hit the pavement. Try it.

  FOR
EIGN IDIOMS

  A group of professionals that I have a particular respect for is translators. Those who work to bring us the speeches and press-conference utterances of foreign leaders (ideally avoiding geopolitical disasters by not making mistakes – though there have been some close calls); and literary translators responsible for gifting me the brilliant Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, an International Man Booker prize winner by the Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk (which itself includes a subplot about translating William Blake), or the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.

  Some of the most crucial translations, though, are those of proverbs. Idioms, adages, aphorisms from languages all over the world. These must be handled with care, like family heirlooms passed from generation to generation. Oral stories and national myths, too.

  I collect these phrases as some collect stamps. Italy, as you might expect, has many food-based idioms. To have one’s ‘eyes lined with ham’ is to be blind to something obvious. In France, ‘to pedal in the sauerkraut’ means to go nowhere fast, or have difficulty finishing something. I loved this originally because I assumed it referred to the texture of sauerkraut. But I later learned that it apparently comes from early Tour de France races, when wagons picking up stragglers often featured ads for sauerkraut.

  I enjoy seeing how human brains, across place, time and culture, will make the same observations. And comparing the different ways in which we come to express those same thoughts. For example, in English: ‘A bad workman always blames his tools.’ In Russian? The much more brutal: ‘Don’t blame a mirror for your ugly face.’ Thanks, mate. In response to a sneeze, the English might say: ‘God bless you.’ Mongolians go the extra mile, with: ‘God bless you and may your moustache grow like brushwood.’

  Other idioms are so bizarre that they appeal for their sheer imaginative energy. Prevaricating in Latvian is ‘to blow ducklings’. Which makes no sense and somehow seems unfair on ducks. In Croatian, ‘what goes around comes around’ becomes: ‘The cat comes to the tiny door.’ Again, what? Then again, my cat would be angry if his cat flap shrunk. So, maybe.

  Given our global political landscape, the Swedish description of someone privileged, who hasn’t had to work to get to a prominent position, that they have ‘slid in on a shrimp sandwich’, seems widely apt. But let’s end on a positive note. ‘It is better,’ the Chinese proverb goes, ‘to light a candle than curse the darkness.’

  RECOVERING FROM A COLD

  This may seem a tiny thing, but it has huge ramifications for one’s happiness – a bit like winning the cup final with a goal adjudicated by video referee to be a millimetre over the line.

  I am talking about recovery after a cold. Recovery from any period of ill-health, but in particular, the tentative escape from the banality of a cold, or a virus, or even just being ‘under the weather’ – as though when we are well, we soar above the clouds.

  Being sick is the pits. Here, I think men get a bad deal with accusations of man-flu, i.e. the idea that men treat a simple cold as though they are slowly dying of a flesh-eating disease at sea. The truth is, at the sniff of a sneeze, most of us turn into pathetic avatars of our usual selves. Otherwise we would not move seats the moment someone coughed. (I know there are mothers who could power through tuberculosis if it meant getting the kids to school on time, but these are superheroes, anomalous case studies.)

  Sickness means a mountain range of tissues in the bed. It’s the gripping fear that tributaries of snot, flowing like the Dart, will never stop, and that the pressure in one’s head will never shrink back to normal. That the eyelids will stay puffed up, like the worst examples of surgery gone wrong found in ‘real-life’ magazines, for ever. That it is worth it to pay £7.99 for branded paracetamol from the corner shop rather than stagger the extra half-mile to the supermarket and pay just 99p for the generic sort – because every second not in bed feels like the frontline of a war.

  And then, just when you resign yourself to a permanently chafed nose, something magical happens: you wake in the morning, and the nostrils are crusted and a slither of air has entered, light at the end of the tunnel. As the day goes on, it’s as though you have broken to the surface, drunk with the sensation of not being weighed down by four extra pounds of mucus. You even consider going for a bite and a drink after work, because you might be able to taste again. Your deskmates, meanwhile, have stopped shooting you filthy looks; at any rate, the looks are now non-contagion related.

  You instantly forget how to spell echinacea and catarrh. You will never, ever, take for granted again the cilia that protect against bacterial invaders; you will always give thanks for the lungs that work so diligently on your behalf; you will never lose your reinvigorated passion for a throat that does not tickle. Of course, like a New Year’s resolution, this resolve lasts mere days. Quick enough, being well is just the baseline one doesn’t think about. But god, that first day feels like a lottery win. To your health, then.

  DOGS IN PARKS

  They say dogs are man’s best friend. This phrase amuses me because I enjoy the idea that we might carry our best friends under our arms; walk them on leads; throw frisbees at them which we expect them to catch in their mouths. Just once I want to walk in on my friend in the act of gnawing on a slipper.

  I do not own a dog, but I do not need to, because every time I step out into the world, dogs are ever present. The glorious and uplifting thing about dogs is that, unless they are sick, or maltreated, or lonely, they are essentially always happy. Or at the very least, content; and these two things are often catching.

  Many attempts at going for brooding walks have been wonderfully ruined by the sight of a smiling labrador, totally in love with the world – this blade of grass! That other dog! Oh my god, that bin! My own tail!

  There is the something-for-everyone variation, even within breeds. I simply adore a miniature dachshund – the hot, low, satisfied bellies; the curious snouts; the ears like a freshly cut bob; the Malteser eyes; the seeming mid-air suspension during full-pelt running – but I could not choose between short-haired, long-haired, or the ones dappled with silver. Last summer I saw a white dachshund and I have never doubled back so quickly in my life (and one time I swear I saw a clown driving down the Archway Road).

  Too frequently I forget to ask an owner their own name, but not their dog’s, while utterly absorbed in their canine companion. I ask people with adorable, unusual dogs, whether they get stopped a thousand times a day, like A-list celebrities. (Invariably, yes.) So many times I pass dogs much better dressed than I am. Whippets in cravats.

  I am an equal-opportunity admirer when it comes to size. There isn’t much more majestic than the golden waterfall of an Afghan hound’s (natural) coat. When I was growing up, our neighbour had six. When I asked my mother about the veracity of my memory, she replied: ‘Oh, there were eleven at one point.’ Meanwhile, I met a pomsky not long ago, which is a cross between a pomeranian and a husky. It had ears taller than its body and paws that looked to account for 70 per cent of surface area.

  I do worry about selective breeding, but then I worry about selective schools and plenty more besides. I will not deny myself the pleasure of a trotting pup, a bubble-gum pink tongue, a tight spiral tail. But I should stop now; for the cat is getting jealous.

  PHONE CALLS

  Everybody has a mobile phone. Or at least more than five billion of us do. And yet nobody makes phone calls any more. In fact, the under-thirties have been called Generation Mute, for their habit of refusing to accept incoming calls. A recent UK survey found that just 15 per cent of sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds would choose phone calls as their favoured method of communication. I once read an article with the headline: ‘If I get a phone call, I assume someone has died.’

  I used to feel similarly, but recently my opinion has shifted, and I have come to appreciate phone calls the way I did during my school days: when I’d almost pull the landline phone out of its socket in a desperate attempt at privacy, wrapping the cord arou
nd my fingers and spending a solid two hours talking to friends I’d just spent the majority of the day with; staying on the line for so long that the screeching dial-up sounds of my sister attempting to get on the internet would repeatedly interrupt, while dinners cooled and congealed on the dining-room table.

  In the days of bog-standard landline phones without displays, the phone ringing was a game of risk. Pick up and it could be a cold call pitching you new windows; or a dull peripheral family member; or a loquacious acquaintance. This trepidation remains somewhat, in that I won’t answer a call from a number I don’t recognise, and there are still calls that, quite frankly, should be a text or an email.

  But I have slowly broken away from the grip of the fired-off emoji, or at least lessened its dominance, and started to appreciate an old-fashioned natter. There is a special pleasure to the volley of text banter; but talking to friends or lovers while I lounge on the sofa, or, more often, walk somewhere, has opened up subjects that we’ve often stopped allocating enough time to (family issues, health concerns, career woes), because they don’t fit easily into the communication mediums we have come to rely upon. Meeting up face-to-face isn’t always possible, given our increasingly frenetic lifestyles. Or rather, they were frenetic, pre-pandemic; now what’s stopping us meeting up face-to-face is lockdown after lockdown. Voicenotes are more likely to be quick thoughts shot off or rambling, solipsistic chains of thought.