The Joy of Small Things

by Hannah Jane Parkinson

  It is just that I never saw eating as an event. I viewed it as a side course. Breakfast omelette with one eye on a book. Quick sandwich at my desk checking Twitter during lunch break. Balancing a dinner plate on a cushion watching Netflix. Meals weren’t a chore, but I was not someone who planned ahead and got excited about them. I didn’t savour food. I took it for granted.

  Then more and more friends came into my life who adore food. They are loyal to some recipes and experiment with others, yet who are never snobbish or judgmental about the fact I occupy a highchair of ignorance when it comes to all things culinary. One pal has an array of pans hanging over her kitchen island, the names of many I couldn’t tell you; pans that I am seemingly incapable of not headbutting. But this is not a column on how I learned to cook, even though I am slowly – as if on the lowest heat – making progress.

  This is a column on how lovely it is to be cooked for. I used to find being cooked for stressful, for two reasons: I felt panicked by witnessing skills that highlighted my inadequacy; and I felt guilty and rude because I could not return this particular act of generosity. I haven’t sung for my supper at dinner parties, exactly, but I have done a lot of insisting on washing up and bringing large bottles of booze.

  The huge joy, I have discovered, in being cooked and baked for by people for whom food is an obsession – eating it, making it, thinking about it, writing about it, eating some more of it – but who above all prioritise those at their table, is that it is a transferable pleasure. I now enjoy cooking by proxy. It makes me happy to make my friends happy, and I have learned that enjoying the food someone else has cooked for me will do that.

  Feeding someone is an act of love; a way of bestowing life – even if that life comes in the shape of Victoria sponge. Especially, in fact, if it comes in the shape of Victoria sponge. My mouth and heart are full.

  THE TO-DONE LIST

  I have never been great at to-do lists. To me, they are an exercise in torture: writing a list of all the things I will inevitably not get done; a document of imminent failure. In a gameshow host voice: ‘Here’s what you could have done!’

  However, for many people, ticking items off a to-do list is the definition of a quotidian pleasure; mini mood-boosts, micro injections of achievement. It could be argued that getting smaller tasks done supplies the motivation for the more expansive changes one needs to make in life. (Though sometimes this is wishful thinking: remember buying a stationery set before the new school year – despite already owning all the items; as though new pencils would augur a change in attitude from ‘class clown’ to diligent student?)

  I sigh at chores and errands. I hide from returning emails. I am not superb, basically, at life’s admin. But I have developed a trick: to-done lists. Or at least that is what I am calling them, ungrammatical as it is.

  The to-done list is the art of writing down all the things I have done. I get the same boost others do when completing something on their to-do list; it is just that, in adding something to a blank page, I am not reminded of all the things I have yet to do, uncrossed out.

  In a move that perhaps is taking it that little bit too far, I have begun to keep my to-done lists in a giant Google doc. A cumulative record of what, if anything, I managed to accomplish that day. No contribution is too small. To give you a glimpse into the glamorous life I lead, previous entries have included such Gatsby-esque pleasures as ‘Cancelled direct debit’ and, a personal favourite, ‘Gave away coathangers on Freecycle’. But, in general, these lists mean I can keep tabs on when my productivity is spiralling or feel smug when looking back at an efficient week.

  If the list is bulky, I end the day more settled, and I suppose it is an act of that overused and sometimes queasy term ‘self-care’. It is a way of feeling proud of oneself in bitesize. So, if you are in the market for a way to de-stress, to enjoy the little wins – and who isn’t? – I suggest the to-done list. This weekend’s column? Done. I will be adding it to the list.

  CARING LESS

  I don’t want to be dishonest, so I’ll say that in caring what people think about this column, I am perhaps denying myself the peace I’ve found in caring less. Because caring is often important and rewarding: I want to write a good column so that you enjoy reading it. I want to make sure my friends are OK. People who do not care, or lack empathy, are sociopaths.

  But oh, good god, I care about so many things that should not matter. I am now thirty-two. For reasons too depressing to go into, I wasn’t always sure I would see thirty. Lots of you will be older than I am, perhaps much older. I’ve always had friends in this bracket, so I cannot be fooled by talk of wisdom. I know that, whatever age, we never escape ourselves.

  What I do know to be true, however, is the pleasure to be found in not bothering about certain things. Because of a clinically malfunctioning brain, I am probably less proficient at this than the average person, and always will be. Still, the older I get, the better I am at caring less.

  You can see the signs of caring too much in the way teenagers often present themselves at swimming pools, how they fold in on themselves to hide their bodies. Or the way a tiny logo embroidered on a shirt takes on great importance. I am a people-pleaser, which I think of as a good thing, but I have discovered that some people will never be pleased. Or don’t deserve to be.

  It used to be that, if I thought someone peripheral disliked me (which is rare, obviously: I’m amazing), I would spend a lot of time ruminating instead of indulging in the appreciation of friends and colleagues and the happiness therein. Often it turned out that X didn’t dislike me, sometimes the opposite; I had just unilaterally decided it.

  It turns out that caring less – the cousin of letting go – brings a joyful release. It’s like taking a bra off at the end of the day or letting a ridiculously large backpack drop to the floor.

  As I say, I don’t want to tell you this is something I have conquered because that would not be true and, I expect, never will be. But progress is a step towards contentment. Run without worrying about overtakers. Brunch wearing your comfortable joggers. Be bored by the film the critics are raving about. Who cares? Not me. And, hopefully, not you.

  THE SMELL OF WOOD

  My grandfather had a shed. That isn’t a boast. That would be like boasting that he had a cardigan. Or that he said that things were better in his day. Or never talked about the war. That would be like boasting about having had a grandad. But, oh man, I loved that shed. It was at the end of the garden, past the football goal I had set up, past the beds of flowers I trampled with a ball, and it smelt of wood. Glorious wood.

  It was a workshop. Beyond the clanking of a triple lock on the door was a treasure trove of saws and nuts and bolts and screws and sanders and vices and chisels and bar clamps. Coils of wood shavings covered the floor. Tiny particles of ash hung in the sunlight shining through the little window. The air filled with a deep, fresh-cut scent. No wonder Jesus was a carpenter: the smell of wood is next to godliness.

  I was reminded of all this when I passed a furniture shop last week and saw a man in overalls sanding down a table in a small courtyard. I never became any good at cutting wood or carving or sanding. I made a lot of ‘door wedges’, a lot of ‘spare Jenga blocks’. But I was humoured enough to have a go, and isn’t that one of the greatest gifts of grandparents?

  I get my hit these days by walking in forests. Roaming around the north and south forests of Hampstead Heath in London, where there are more than 800 trees. Some of the oaks are estimated to be at least 500 years old. When I am back north, I go walking with a group of friends in the 2,400 acres of Delamere Forest, Cheshire, the largest forest in the county. It’s packed with deciduous trees and evergreens. Different types of wood smell differently: the fresh smell of a maple rounders bat is not the same as a willow cricket bat. The smell of an Edwardian secondhand mahogany desk changing the aroma of a room is its own singular kind of pleasure, separate from the sweet, mossy scent of wet wood after a downpour.

 
Many people enjoy a good sniff of wood. Cedar is a popular ingredient in perfumes (I will always remember an episode of The Apprentice in which one team mistook cedarwood oil for the much more expensive sandalwood oil, blowing £700). And I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like the smell of Christmas trees or sitting rooms in National Trust properties. I’m not the only one who pines for pine, who goes weak for walnut.

  EUROPEAN TOWN SQUARES

  I have favourite squares in Britain: Radcliffe Square in Oxford, dominated by its majestic camera; Millennium Square in Leeds; Trafalgar Square in London. Other favourites are much farther away: my breath was stolen by St Petersburg’s Palace Square; I was bowled over by Cairo’s Tahrir Square; charmed by Marrakech’s Jemaa el-Fnaa.

  But who does town squares best? Continental Europeans, of course. That’s why we often describe squares by their Italian name: piazzas. I have special memories of Pariser Platz in Berlin and Livu Square in Riga. When those of us not from the continent think of our finest holiday moments, I would wager that tucking into lunch, sipping a coffee, nibbling ice-cream, people-watching or chatting with a companion, all while sitting al fresco at a piazza table, are up there with other delights such as lounging on a beach, going on long walks and haggling in markets.

  As with so many of the great things in life, we have the Greeks to thank for coming up with the idea of a central meeting place: the agora. (Hence agoraphobia, the fear of public places.) Back then, poets and philosophers would meet to entertain and share ideas – because public squares consist of people enjoying each other’s company. They serve as locations for municipal celebrations, the screening of sporting events and firework displays. (Of course, they can also serve as places of protest.)

  So we must look after them. Whenever Venice’s Piazza San Marco is flooded, the pictures of it underwater are devastating. I’ve visited San Marco three times, and each memory has a different flavour: family holiday; school trip; friends’ getaway. But there’s a balance between caregiving and overprotectiveness. I’m thinking of Rome, banning people from sitting on the Spanish Steps; this is a shame, especially for tourists, because watching the bustle of a community – and an unfamiliar one that speaks a different tongue – brings a special contentment and should never be banned.

  I cannot wait, then, to be back sipping cool lemonade. Or watching a street performer, resoundingly applauded by a crowd. Admiring locals in high heels expertly traversing ancient cobbles. Chatting into the evening, shifting a chair to follow the last dapples of sun. Stopping for a nightcap on the leisurely walk back to the hotel, lights shining, like the EU stars, overhead.

  TECH REPRIEVES

  Something guaranteed to make my stomach lurch (aside from running out of teabags) is tech failure. Oh, it comes in many forms: the spinning beachball of doom on a Mac; the strangled, high-pitched beeps of a keyboard; the deep groan of a laptop shutting down for no apparent reason; and one time, a loud pop, flames, and an obliteration of the motherboard of my desktop. All of my data – years’ worth – disappearing in a strong-smelling, smoky haze. Like magic: but dark, dark magic.

  And that’s just computers. In an absurd act of self-sabotage, I have also owned multiple iterations of iPhones for the past decade, despite the fact a third of them have given up on me – one day just switching off, never to switch back on. No amount of button-pressing combinations (the phone equivalent of CPR) brought them back. It is infuriating and devastating. There have been hot, hiccupping tears.

  I’ve lost tens of thousands of photos, tens of thousands of words. In hindsight, I am sure, no, I know, some of them deserved to go. But, still. At the time, I mourned. I used to own so many USB sticks on lanyards that I resembled a prison officer with a multitude of keys. Somehow flash-drive errors followed me around. I bought external hard drives for backup, and they perished.

  This was all before the advent of cloud storage, but a combination of scattiness and making masses of content means that I frequently run out – and then forget to buy more data. (At this point I should sheepishly mention that I worked as a tech journalist for two years.)

  The heart-lifting opposite of tech failure is a tech miracle. That ecstatic transition from an open-mouthed, Munch-like suspended scream to a wide grateful grin at the reappearance of a lost doc, a sputtering reboot. I have punched the air.

  Sometimes it’s a joy undeserved. You don’t know what happened, but it did, and that is all that matters. Other times, it is the reward of subjecting oneself to helpline hold music for forty-five minutes, or downloading patches or disk recovery software, or begging, on numerous forums, strangers for advice: someone, please, help. I am not sure which is the greater satisfaction; the spontaneous tech-redemption or the hard investigative graft paying off. Sometimes, as with simultaneous medical treatments, it isn’t clear what truly made the difference. But who cares? All is not lost.

  ABANDONING A BOOK

  I love reading books I hate. I used to hate it because I was one of those people who would force myself to finish a book, even if every turn of the page filled me with unmitigated dread. Even if each sentence made my brain wince. For some reason, I placed moral value on not giving up until I had reached the back cover.

  I no longer do that. I learned that life is too short to indulge in things that do not give a great return on my energy, emotion or time. So really, you might say I enjoy tossing a book I am disliking across a room (though I’m not cavalier enough to do that: I just snap it shut in a decisive way). The relief of calling time on something one is not enjoying, and which is not enriching, brings a warmth and lightness.

  But it’s true that even before that moment of abandonment – during the actual reading of awfulness – some pleasure sneaks in. Perhaps it is a type of schadenfreude. I might think: ‘Well, if writing as poor as this can be published and sell, I can’t do much worse.’ Maybe it’s written by someone I know to be awful as a person and therefore I relish their subpar prose. What is great about bitching about a book is that it doesn’t leave one with a sense of guilt. It is not an ad hominem attack. If I ask a friend whether they have read X and they reply that they hated it – and I did, too – that is the perfect base for a wonderful conversation.

  Obviously, I love reading books where I am savouring every sentence. But the problem with being a writer and reading immensely pleasurable work is creeping feelings of inadequacy and envy, i.e., the opposite of the encouragement and fillip and unattractive competitive streak that the badly written books elicit.

  There’s an added bonus, too, one that I think of as altruistic but that you will now know is nothing of the sort. After I have dismissed a book, banished it from my hands, I will give it to charity. One time, when I was young and didn’t really understand etiquette (or anything), I put a used toothbrush in a care package that churches collect and then send abroad. I know. Donating a crap book to a charity shop is the literary equivalent. If you have ever picked up a painful novel or some nonfiction drier than the Sahara, then I’m so sorry; I cannot promise I am not responsible. My advice? Toss it across the room.

  PLAYING BOARD GAMES

  Monopoly, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Operation, Mousetrap; when a man is bored of board games, he is bored of life. Playing with friends is so relaxing an activity, I can imagine even paid-up gangsters cracking open a few beers and getting the Connect 4 out. As wild teens who took a lot of drugs and frequently woke up with hangovers in bathtubs, my friends and I would still enjoy nights gathered around a coffee table playing Bananagrams. I recall, too, a tender moment during a school detention – one of those lax, end-of-term ones – when I taught a tough lad chess and he taught me draughts.

  There are people who profess not to like board games, but I feel they have just not met the right game for them. Risk, for instance, has a legion of fans, but if I were an alien dropped into mid-play with no other board game experience, I, too, would think they were not for me. (No shade towards Risk-lovers: I just find political conflict and war depressing e
nough IRL. I’m much happier strapping a plastic bee on to my head and playing the nineties classic Bizzy Buzzy Bumbles.)

  As a child, my family would make an annual visit to a beach house in Cumbria (six converted and connected railway carriages). In the evenings, games of Monopoly would be conducted with a view of high tide – as though the sea, too, wanted to play. With an early bedtime, half-finished games would be put away overnight to be returned to the next evening. I cheated every time, stashing pink notes before recommencing. Nothing was said, but I am sure everyone knew.

  Luckily, my family is small, and therefore games of charades were never played at Christmas, a routine I am told can turn stressful and sour. I was, however, often a sore loser. I have mellowed in this regard (although perhaps that is a result of playing with friends rather than relatives). Now, I think playing chess or Scrabble with one other person, in concentrated but comfortable silence, is an understated sign of love.

  If I may, I would like to touch on card games. Poker I am bad at because I cannot hold my emotions in, ever. But Ring of Fire and the quite iconic Shithead – both of which involve alcohol as a key participant – make for raucous bonding. That said, when I attempted to introduce the former to pals in Russia, they looked perplexed and said: ‘I do not understand. Why would you need an excuse to drink?’