‘Every tomorrow,’ wrote Henry Ward Beecher, ‘has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety, or the handle of faith.’
Good point, in these most anxious of times. Or, as we have done here at home, we can take hold of it with the handle of doing extraordinarily unimportant things that we have never done before.
Take the kettle. We have owned two kettles in our married life, the old one, and this one. I believe this one steamed its way into our lives in celebration of the new kitchen, circa 2009, and it’s been at it ever since. Never once in those 132 months has it been de-scaled. In fact, at least 50% of the marriage partnership didn’t know what de-scaling was, or meant. Until now, when it was de-scaled to within an inch of its life yesterday morning. The tea tastes the same, but the implied virtue improves the experience and assures purity.
Take the spice cupboard. Like everyone’s spice cupboard, ours has many things that we could never need, and empty jars of things like turmeric, which we do. In fact, it has seven empty jars of turmeric because every time we run out, we buy another jar, rather than a refill. It’s got 250 grams of something we bought in a Marrakesh market in 2018 which, it only occurred to us at the airport on the way home, may in fact be magnificently illegal. Not any more. Today, it all looks like a page in Country Homes and Interiors, with each thing in its place, and only one empty jar of saffron, which confers a bit of realism.
Take the nesting box that has been sitting around for six months in the kitchen. Covered in old vintage wine corks, and produced in memory of a friend’s adored daughter to raise money for the charity in her name, we were feeling increasingly guilty every time we walked past it. Now it is up there by the log pile, Evie, and I can report that a cock blue tit was checking it out this morning.
Take my new beehive. I wanted to paint it boring white, but all we had was the dregs of a little pot of Farrow and Ball ‘Lizard’s breath’ or something, whose colour was heavily in fashion a decade or so ago, when boy bands were the thing. Thus every nook and cranny got the two coat treatment, and the bees won’t know themselves, the spoiled fools.
Take the sock drawer, the office bookshelves, the miles-beyond-sell-by-date stuff in the freezer and the curious alcoholic things we were given for our wedding twenty six years ago. Take the eight years of paper bank statements, the rodents infesting the outside cupboard and – above all- the endless heap of wires that grows and grows in a drawer in the sitting room like a culture of some demented yeast. ‘We might need one of them one day,’ we used to say to ourselves, in our house of permanent possession. Even the dogs have been bathed and the Polo, after a fashion, washed.
And of course, it’s all a metaphor for trying to ignore the upheaval all around, a phoney war with no visible enemy. Suddenly, once we have done the things we have to do, we have more time than we know what to do with. So we fill it and, as we do, we say a little prayer for normality, and for everyone.
Especially Boris.
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