The pursuit of sappiness
When people say “live each day like it’s your last”, what do they mean? Burn your boats and then eat them? Can that be a good idea? I’m not sure. What I do know is I’ve started being less reticent about pleasure. I am plotting for it more than ever, hailing it like a taxi, grabbing it by the lapels.
Many ordinary day-to-day situations that, quite frankly, could go either way, can be lifted beyond all recognition by being lavished, furnished or garnished with extra attention and care.
I saw an elderly man dining alone in a restaurant recently (without even a book), and when the waitress brought his plate of food he gazed at it, then gazed at her and murmured, “God, how lovely.” He caught my imagination. I don’t expect he had read too many mindfulness books, but he was carried away by the moment.
“Be a bit more like that fellow, why can’t you?” I told myself.
I nipped into the Ritz on a whim and the five-piece band was playing The Hostess with the Mostest, and I allowed myself to think they were playing it to me, about me. I lingered on a side chair where no one disturbed me and I had a little moment. On the way out I bought a red-and-gold leather-look Ritz “Do Not Disturb” sign, suspended from gold braid, to hang on the back of my door. Or my head.
Work backwards
When people you love are ill, you need to be fierce about punctuating your day with golden nuggets to cheer and revive you. I seem to want to turn everything into a memorable event just now. But can you make each cup of tea or the sewing on of a button a bit sublime? And if so, how?
Starting with the feeling you’d like to have and then working backwards can be helpful. The feeling I want to have at the moment can be summed up by something Seamus Heaney wrote about poets learning their craft.“You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself.”
Take bath time: having had an 18-month gap in my teenage years with no hot water, I still see a hot bath as the easiest way of steeping myself in luxury. But now when I have a bath I try to take it to the next level by getting the sounds right, too.
Yesterday I was scrolling through a selection of old records until I thought: Hello! Dorothy Fields! I haven’t thought about her for a very long time. So I listened to An Evening with Dorothy Fields, and soon she was singing If My Friends Could See Me Now. I’d performed this song in a school talent show with two friends on the stage in the Old Hall and I began to wonder if I could remember the dance routine.
I got out of the bath and dried and dressed and did as much of the number as I could recall. If my friends could see me now, doing If My friends Could See Me Now! So, seizing the day, I sent messages to a certain Ms Alexa Rosewood and a Ms Rosanne Albert to tell them I was doing a one-woman reprisal of the song in my bathroom right here, right now, and perhaps they’d like to do the same thing in their bathrooms so we could all be in sync. We’d had silver top hats and I think we came in fourth. I was very dashing in the scene with the maître d’, if I say so myself. (A job I’ve always fancied.)
Sure, this bath time high jinks took the best part of an hour, because it wasn’t about water and soap anymore, or even memory lane — did we maybe even have tails and canes?
No, somehow I had transported myself to a place a million miles away from hospital life. Something had come of nothing. Where’s the harm?