The first thing that comes to mind when I read about those studies into the health implications of loneliness is a sad-sack, solitary figure, face to the wall, too lonely to figure out how to get unlonely. I don’t tend to picture, for example, myself. Even though I’ve been lonely before, I don’t read about those studies and think that’s me. The lonely person is me.

We humans don’t love thinking about our vulnerabilities, and we tend to only recognise something crushing like loneliness once it meets with interruption. Like how some people don’t realise they’re stressed until they relax or don’t realise they’re in a bad relationship until it’s over.

I thought about all this when I logged into my laptop today. It asked if I wanted to perform an ‘upgrade’. Humans don’t do that. We look back and judge our past selves like they were played by different actors.

Public Service Announcement: maybe it’s time to do a system check. Like an audit but not for money or health or wellness. Just a check-in. Take the temperature. See what’s been neglected or overlooked or outdated.

How’s your connectivity? Have you been checking in with mates? Making new ones? Looking outward rather than inward? Being generous and constructive? Or are you caught in your own loop? That can happen sometimes, with connectivity. Not your fault, you just need to secure a better connection to a network. Do a search and attempt a few reconnections until you find one that works.

Lonely even though you aren’t alone? That’s a security issue, usually. If you’re not feeling secure in your own self, you often need to establish some kind of buffer. Do something different with your time. Try a new thing. When was the last time you tried that? Give it a burl!

Okay now let’s look for any malware. See if you can override any regret you find in your system. They’re not productive and will drain your batteries. Do a search for “grudges” and see if you can jettison any of those too.

How are your presumptions looking? You might want to get a second opinion on those. They sometimes need to be replaced entirely. It can be quite a lot of work but it will up the value of almost everything else. Might be good to start with a search of any times you’ve felt attacked lately. Did it feel like someone accused you of something? Did you become angry rather than introspective? Could be good to install some antivirus software. If you’ve always thought X and you’re being asked to reconsider it, your system should be applying the SELF REFLECTION filter. If it’s skipping that step, you may have an ENTITLEMENT virus. Very common I’m afraid.

Right. Next up: questions of design. When we do a system check, it’s sometimes good to upgrade the design elements. New fonts, new colours, bit of a spruce up. If your system’s overheating, we recommend downloading the BOOK NOOK widget. With a few simple adjustments, turn any space into an appealing haven in which to decompress. A splash of colour. A bar of chocolate. A book that smells like a place you love. Getting sick of your routine? Change it up!

You might need to adjust some more settings.

Are you too busy? Be less busy. Go to the calendar app, select all, then drag and drop it to the trash . Nobody deserves your time more than you do.

Too angry? What are you angry about? Is it other people’s opinions? Is it how other people live their lives? Your filters might need adjusting. Try selfie mode.

Do you need to give yourself more credit?

Are you convinced you’re unlucky or unlikeable or too something or not something enough? Adjust the settings if you can. This sometimes means checking your compatibility with others around you.

Maybe your system check reveals you are the lonely person. Maybe you’re the stressed person. Maybe you’re the person who can’t see a way forward and you know you probably need a hand to figure out the next bit. After a system reset it can be difficult to get used to the changes, but whether it’s a BOOK NOOK widget or an overhaul of long-held presumptions or simply a reminder to be kinder to someone you love, defragging your hard drive every now and then, identifying your weaker points, adjusting your hardware, makes it much less likely you’ll be the subject of a study about how loneliness is killing you. That’s one thing we can all aim for.

This first appeared in The Big Issue. Buy it from your local vendor why don’t you.

I was hanging out with a sick kid recently. This tends to happen in my line of work. By work I mean parenting. This was a lie-on-the-couch-with-a cough type of illness on a cold wintery day. Mum brings you toast. You have more than one bath. You’re allowed to stare at a screen all day. That kind of thing. But the more this child stayed home doing nothing, the more the outside world beckoned. Being an aspiring soccer player half-way through a sustained period of mastering a trick, this child requested my attendance at the park, to kick a ball around. Now, in my line of parenting, this is an easy no on a sick day. It’s cold outside. You have a cough. I have work to do. Have you ever watched Mary Poppins etc.

But as the day wore on, so too did the sick child’s sense of desperation to try the trick in the park. After some negotiation, concessions were made about the wearing of jumpers and the brevity of this part of the day’s schedule, but the answer still wasn’t yes. It was that old childhood favourite: maybe later. Finally, near the end of the day, I was approached again. ‘All I am asking of you’, said this small, wan urchin of a child, voice cracking, eyes giant pools of human emotion, ’All I am asking… is for you to make my day better. Better than terrible. A little bit good.’

In my line of parenting, this kind of plea gets points for passion and expression and before I knew it was pulling on my own jumper and heading out the door.

Public Service Announcement: better than terrible is an excellent result.

Being sick is terrible. If you’re sick right now, that really is terrible. So sorry to hear it. One thing that always happens to me when I get sick is that I promise myself I will never again take wellness for granted. Not instagram wellness with bath salts and yoga and a skin care regime. Just being a healthy person in the world. The expression ‘youth is wasted on the young’ could be extended to ‘wellness is wasted on the well’. Rarely do I find myself strutting about the place just basking in my own wellness. But we should! If you’re well, you’re better than terrible and you’re luckier than most.

If you’re not well, there are certain things that provide relief or distraction or entertainment or comfort. Enjoy them. Ask for them. They could be anything; people or chocolate or audiobooks. Ru Paul’s Drag Race or the smell of fresh cut flowers.

Also? You don’t always have to compare yourself to other people. Yes there are people having a worse time than you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel what you’re feeling. Grumpy about being a bit grumpy? Annoyed at how frustrated you are by something? Meh. Go for a walk. Make a phone call to someone completely outside of the situation. Watch an episode of something that sucks you right out of your life and into an entire other universe. The only thing worse than feeling bad is feeling bad about it.

Same when you’re well of course. Could be a terrible day but the sky looks like someone has brushed the clouds with a hairbrush.

Whenever I go to the beach I think about big things and little things. The sky is big. The sea seems endless - it’s home to the largest mammals on earth for heaven’s sake. The beach stretches out each day, sweeping itself clean with the tides. Meanwhile, tiny crabs corkscrew into the sand. Midges ping like asterisks through the air. Fish dart. A sea anemone braces itself against an incoming wave. And it was all happening before you were thinking about it. It’s happening all the time. There’s something about that that makes my day a tiny bit better than terrible.

Ooh, also, speaking of small things and big things, did you know that scientists recently discovered ripples in space and time? Neiths! No idea what I was doing at the time. Apparently this means the universe is humming. Just all the time. Humming. Every single one of us lives in a universe that hums, which makes me think there are many things we haven’t figured out. Kind of comforting in a way. Better just enjoy the good bits. Find any excuse you can to make your day, or someone else’s, a tiny bit better than terrible. Maybe I recommend the watching of Mary Poppins.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. It always seemed that joining a group was a declaration of exclusion in relation to people who weren’t in the group. It also seemed a bit like signing up for a broad set of values could be a stitch-up. At school, for instance, if you decide to join in being a jock (because you love sport) are you then subscribing to all that being a jock in high school entails? If you’re a slightly nerdy jock and all the other jocks bully the nerds, to borrow a few stereotypes, does that mean you have to give yourself a wedgie?

Sports lovers, though, will tell you that the point is loyalty to the entire team. The point is we support each other and ask questions later.

These two positions are difficult to reconcile sometimes.

Public Service Announcement: humans can team together with constructive outcomes and unhelpful ones. Pick your teams carefully!

Did you know that during the run of a theatre show—whether it’s on for three nights or 18 months— the performers and the production team experience not just different versions of the show but different versions of the audience? Ask anybody who works in theatre, they’ll tell you: every audience is different. Audiences, made up of a group of mostly strangers, have a personality. There’s some predictability to it; the Friday night audiences are usually loud and happy and relaxed and responsive. Saturday night audiences tend to have their arms crossed; the performers need to earn their trust because these people left the house on the weekend and they have other things they could be doing. But it’s not always like this, and it blows my mind every time that some audiences can laugh hysterically and applaud everything, some can be backwards in coming forwards, and some sit together, poised, intent, listening, until the very end of the show when they rise as one in rousing appreciation. This is why comedians thank people for being ‘a lovely audience’. Having a great audience feels like flying. So be a great audience. Lean in. Listen. Applaud. Make a sound!

Being in a sports stadium for a music gig or a huge game can be wonderful in a way that completely undermines all my quibbles about being a joiner. This brings me to another thing that’s excellent about joining a team: so long as you support that team, you’re welcome. You can dress up in the colours in the most obnoxious or ludicrous ways. You can befriend someone you never would have seen coming because you spent the night next to them screaming in delight at Lizzo with matching spangled headbands. Go forth and be part of a crowd that does crowd things like stadium waves or impromptu singing or in-jokes you only get if you’re a die-hard fan.

Clubs do this too. It’s not too much of a stretch, I reckon, to suggest that the more obscure a club is (the less likely other people are to understand the desire to join it) the more its members will get from it, ergo the better the club will be.

Sometimes the phenomenon of great group behaviour happens because of leadership. One brave soul who sets forth and is joined in the pursuit of a shared goal by others. A small example of this is when someone pushing a pram is running to catch a train and the doors start to close. Not wishing to break the fourth wall of public transportation bored-face, a passenger with a blank expression - a brave leader - will stick one leg out and prevent the doors from closing. Another passenger, whose eyes have briefly met the first - will grab the bottom of the pram, joylessly, as though that’s what they were going to do anyway, and assist with bringing the pram onto the train. A seat, suddenly made available by a blank-faced third passenger who is pretending like they were probably going to stand up anyway, is presented to the person with the pram. The person with the pram, before settling into a performance of blank-faced public transport boredom, will thank everybody profusely and then, as though making it worthwhile, engage in a public pantomime with the child in the pram about what a big day they’ve had and how tired they are.

There are lots of clubs it’s not worth joining. Finding the good ones is worth the search.

An edited version of this column appeared in The Big Issue, which you should buy whenever you get the chance.

I found out recently that a friend’s kid misheard ‘point of view’ as ‘point of you’ and I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s difficult to remember that you’re just a passing character in everybody else’s stories. You’re the protagonist of your own, obviously. That’s the point of you. Sometimes, though, it can be an interesting thought experiment to attempt to switch POVs with people you don’t even know.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes all you need to do is consider a different point of view.

This was all brought home to me the other day when the person in front of me in the queue at the shop looked at me and my loud, messy family and made a face that I interpreted as disapproval bordering on aggression. When someone does that, you do tend to turn back to the scene and imagine it through their eyes.

I turned back. Sure enough, there was plenty to notice. One child was picking up every item on the stand near the counter and inspecting it, singing a little song dedicated to the item (chewing gum, a Mars bar), and returning it. The other child, in bare feet and a shirt several sizes too big, was zipping and dipping and flipping and flopping about the place. I turned back to the woman. She was shaking her head. I said, ‘It’s a lot fun, going shopping as a family.’ This was meant to indicate that I was conceding her implied point of it all being a bit much, but was also a way of not blaming the kids for being, well, children. She gave me a slightly disgusted look as a sign-off and then left.

‘Imagine being the kind of person who doesn’t even need to say anything to be unpleasant’, I said to my partner later. But then I thought about it. This person didn’t say anything. I was being the protagonist (the point was me, get it?). I was casting her in the role of the extra at the supermarket who’s a bit snippy.

I put it to you, though, that her POV was probably quite different.

POV: Moira stands at the counter, listening to the teenager scanning her groceries. She’s not looking at the teenager though. Didn’t answer his initial ‘how are you today?’

It’s the children she’s watching. So much energy. Near-constant movement. Imagination, rolling discoveries. The little one in bare feet fits the sole of one foot over the curve of the trolley wheel and tests his weight against it. The other one stops singing to ask a question of her father. Something about the ingredients in the sugar-free confectionary she was singing about.

Moira can’t turn away. Her breath is suspended. Little, lively, people. Imagine. But Moira doesn’t have little lively people. Not now. It makes her sad, of course it does, it always makes her sad, but what it makes her more than sad is angry.

When the woman in the hoodie says something sarcastic about how fun it is to do things together, Moira, just for a moment, thinks she might reach out and slap the woman’s face. Oh to be so relaxed about having all that. Oh, to be so carefree as to introduce a degree of eye-rolling comradery with a perfect stranger. The teenager asks her to swipe her card and she does, leaving it all behind and wondering, not for the first time, why she puts herself through it.

Now whose side are you on?

Of course, maybe Moira never wanted kids. Maybe, though, she was fired late last week. Maybe she had to fire someone else. Maybe Moira is low in iron and has chronic pain right down the side of her body. Maybe she’s feeling stressed and annoyed because of a drug she has to take for something. She could be, in the other scenes of her life, really nice to animals, or she’s the nurse that stays late to hold the old lady’s hand until the drugs kick in, or she’s working on a cure for cancer.

Also? Maybe she’s a judgemental meanie who thinks children should be neither seen nor heard. I feel less confident about this last one though, now that I’ve had a bit of a think about it. Public Service Announcement: sometimes the point of you is less important than the point of view. Not often, but sometimes. And you never know when, so it’s sometimes good to give the benefit of the doubt.

Sometimes I get completely lost in a phrase that I have used all my life. Like, ‘I have seen better days’. They reckon Shakespeare invented that one. And wild goose chase. And foregone conclusion. Did you know you can just make up phrases and then people say them for centuries without even knowing it? The one that got me started was: I have changed my mind. Imagine thinking that up. I had a mind that thought this. As a result of some more information or a change of some kind, it is now changed. Like a cool breeze on a hot day. The entire environment is altered.

Public Service Announcement: changing your mind gets harder as you get you older. Try it some time. A cool breeze can make all the difference.

There’s a café that has opened near where I live and I saw the couple inside it having done all the setting up. There was a bottle of champagne between them and their shiny faces were cheersing each other. Cheersing is a word. I just invented that. You can do that apparently. Anyway, I realised I was witnessing a moment that was a result of a string of decisions. Maybe we could run our own café? Maybe that place on the corner would be good? What if we painted one of the walls a cheeky purple colour? These are adult people who have changed something in lives and stand at the start of something that one day might end in another change of some kind but will pretty soon become their new normal.

Someone corrected me a while back. We were talking about trigger warnings and I made an off-hand comment when she told me trigger warnings were being applied to law courses. ‘From memory’, I said, ‘criminal law would have be trigger warned out the wazoo!’ (Who invented ‘wazoo’? Why did we all run with it? Good on us). Now, when I was told by this person that actually that was ridiculous, I felt the desire to defend myself rise within me but attempted to swallow it down while this person explained it to me. You see, I’ve been the explainer. I’ve explained things like this to older, more conservative people who were raised in a different time. Now here I was being explained to. It was insensitive of me. I was ignorant. These things were being implied about me. Outrageous! But what this person explained was that trigger warnings are just a warning. It’s a sentence written down at the start of something that says, ‘This bleak and confronting material might come right at the part of you that’s feeling vulnerable’. And it’s a sentence. So what do you, who is not feeling vulnerable, care? How is that skin off your nose? (This phrase, I just discovered, originated from boxing). Also: maybe you haven’t felt the need for it and had to suffer through horrible legal cases about the worst excesses of society but why should other people not be warned if we know this is a way of looking after them emotionally? So I was wrong, I decided, about the trigger warning thing, and I felt like a bit of an idiot to be honest. Like the kid in the class who got busted being unkind about someone and the entire class is looking at you and the teacher has made it perfectly clear this is not acceptable.

Changing up your living space is the best. Move the furniture about. Start a new page in a journal.

There’s something about new socks isn’t there. New socks and new spreads. Like vegemite and peanut butter. If you’re the first to open one of those, you just know the universe is smiling at you. Good morning, it’s saying. All the best.

Sometimes recycled and old things are the absolute business, but changing your mind, altering your day, experiencing the newness of something, it’s as significant and insignificant as a cool breeze.

Give it a go. Walk to a different place. Listen to a song you’ve never heard. Buy some vegemite. Change your mind. Listen to someone else’s stories and don’t bop them on the nose because they reveal what you didn’t know or how badly you’ve behaved. Be big enough to change your mind. This advice doesn’t apply universally, obviously. Don’t listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Like me. Don’t listen to me. Unless I’ve changed your mind.

Isn’t it great how humans report to each other? We say things like “how was your day?” which is both a time-specific report (x1 day only) and requires specific agency (it was “your” day). Americans say things like “how are you holding up?” (no time limit but a qualitative pre-assessment of your context - you’re probably struggling in an unnamed context completely out of your control). The idea that today is yours gives all the power to you. The idea that you may or may not be holding up gives you none.

In a way, though, they’re both kind of true. Isn’t life kind of everywhere, happening to all of us, and also your experience of it is specific to you? Where does your life start and stop? I read a story the other day about a couple who had been together for years looking back through old family photo albums. They figured out they had met on a summer holiday when they were teenagers. There they were, standing on a rock together. She had thought that was another story. Another boy. He remembered it too, but that was a different girl. So how do we know which bits are relevant? 

Public Service Announcement: your life is bigger than you think. 

Life includes the people you watch while you’re waiting for the lights to change. There’s a charming barista who works in a cafe that’s on a corner I regularly pass in the car. I’ve never met her but I see her twice a day on my kids’ school run while waiting for the lights to change. We look for her now: making old ladies laugh, diving out of the street window to present small children with babychinos, leaning in the doorway listening to the locals, nodding,  making them laugh. Never once has she noticed us. She has no idea we squeal there she is! when we spot her, and watch every move with a distant affection.

Life includes memories that surprise you in the middle of nowhere, nudged into your consciousness by a smell or a colour or the way a shadow moves. A half-remembered conversation. The way a ramp sloped on the way up the steps to a school excursion. A painting. A parent’s wristwatch.

We often judge ourselves (”how you holding up?“) in comparison with other people. Did you know that magpies recognise people? Heaps of birds do. They see you coming and think “This one’s okay, but look out for the one with the hat. We don’t like him”. Dogs pick up on all kinds of human traits, and so do cats. We have no way of knowing exactly how we feature in the lives of animals but just because they’re not in charge of our performance reviews we tend not to place their opinions of us at the centre of our life narratives. My grandfather had a way of saying “up” (it was more of a “heYEP!”) that every dog I ever saw him with completely understood. They knew it was coming too. They expected it. They did not try on anything stupid. They bided their time for the heyep. And when that heyep came, o so did they rejoice. My grandfather achieved lots of things in his life but this ability to communicate with animals - to seek them out and make himself known to them - was a very important mark of his character.

Sometimes, even if you are a tiny outlier in someone’s life, you can be a main character without knowing it. Once, when I was waiting to cross a road, deep in thought about the things I hadn’t done and the sleep I hadn’t had, and the lists I hadn’t written, an annoyed man in a suit rode his bike past me just a bit too close and fast, shooting back a look of fury and shouting something into the wind. I had no idea what he said but I hadn’t spoken to another adult all day. I stared after him. An older woman appeared next to me. “In a big hurry I think”, she said, nodding after him. “I expect his many friends can’t wait to see him”. She grinned at me, sideways and I laughed out loud. I think of her sometimes. Something like can really change how you’re holding up.

Public Service Announcement: life is bigger than you think. Look at the very edges of things. You might be surprised what you find. 

I read the other day that scientists have no idea how to define time, scientifically speaking, and that, despite our linear narrative instincts, time is probably a great big mysterious illusion that we cling to in order to assert some kind intellectual control over our own utterly bewildering existence. I know, quite a confronting idea to be scrolling past, over your morning cup of coffee. And, let me tell you, it didn’t get any less confounding as I read on (quantum mechanics is quite complex, it turns out). The article did suggest, though, that not only is time an illusion but it’s a subjective one, which is why the time you fell over on stage at school assembly lasted for a thousand years but nobody else seemed to notice time slow down (they didn’t use that example, but I feel like they would have if they’d thought of it). 

The other thing the article suggested was that if we could, for instance, remember the future, we wouldn’t be so anxious but we also wouldn’t be so ambitious, so determined to figure it all out and shape our future for ourselves. We wouldn’t be nostalgic, we wouldn’t grieve, we wouldn’t hope. Which is to say… life would be stripped of almost all the meaning it currently has. Suddenly, to me, a human adult pretending to understand quantum mechanics before I’d even had my breakfast, our attitude to time seemed kind of adorable. We think time is happening to us, but maybe, also, a little bit, we’re making time up as we go.  

Public Service Announcement: it’s your time. Do whatever you like with it.

 I recently made myself sit in nature without the assistance of any devices, and completely without purpose. Doing that for a bit can really shift the dial on your own subjective sense of time. I watched a whole lot of ants operating in what seemed like total fast forward, belting around lifting and rushing and climbing and I know ants don’t make any sound but it seemed noisy down there. I saw a mud crab too, later that day (or was it later? What even is time?). It was edging sideways, sifting through sand and micro-whatevers, eating stuff maybe? Sensing things? Storing information away for later? I slipped slightly on the rock I was standing on and it corkscrewed its way down into the mud for a few moments, hiding, still, waiting with its legs semi-visible in the afternoon sun, until my shadow shifted and I moved away. Time, in nature, re-calibrates, regardless of who you are or what you think the future or the past might be. 

I remember the future all the time, by the way. Daydreaming, an underrated pursuit in my opinion, sometimes brings to mind a future me (with, by the way, a tidy house and a backyard full of friends I am always having over for dinner) who lives happily in a creatively fulfilling, politically responsive benevolent utopia featuring, frankly, inventions like: donuts but they’re good for you.

Time is there to be spent, too, by the way. Just because time is happening doesn’t mean you must agitate to push through it. Remember, it’s probably an illusion. The whole linear narrative thing is most likely a lie we tell ourselves, and we know this (I like this fact) because scientists (including whatever a quantum mechanic might be) go to work every day in pursuit of an answer to the question of whether time is a meaningless lie we tell ourselves in order to assert meaning into our frankly confounding existence. Imagine how hard it is for those guys to plan ahead!

And while this is confronting and confusing and possibly not true, it is, I believe, at least in some ways, a comfort. If time is a lie then sinking into it, letting it stretch out, enjoying some moments like an ant and some moments like a mud crab, letting your version of time happen around you, is not a moral failing or a waste. It just is. You’re in mud crab time for a bit. You’re sifting through things, sensing things, feeling the sun on your back.

Public Service Announcement: time is there to be experienced. Sometimes it’s important to experience it the same way other people do. Tuesdays are labeled Tuesday so society can function. Sometimes though, time can ebb and flow. On those occasions, resist the linear instinct if you wish, and go with the pull of the tide. 

I had occasion recently to look through a bunch of old photos. Being as I am (according to my young children) a citizen of ancient vintage, I am of course talking about those old fashioned paper photos you’ve probably seen on display in museums. There was one photo, gosh I look like I was having such a wonderful time, grinning and looking affectionately around at the group of lovely faces surrounding me. Such a good time is being had. The family member looking over my shoulder paused on the way past and commented on how nice it was that I had found a photo of some old friends. Which it would have been… had I recognised a single other person in the photograph. 

As a kid, I think I imagined I’d have the same friends my whole life, but actually, a more accurate depiction of the life I was living at that particular time when that particular photo was taken would have been just me and a pile of books. That’s not meant to be sad. I know if it were a movie it would be the lonely opening scene and over the next 90 minutes I would let myself go and finally connect with the people round me, but to me at the time, in my real actual life, it was exactly what I needed and entirely wonderful in every way. In fact, looking back now, now that I don’t have much time for the books that sustained me so well back then, I realise how much I miss them.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes the comfort of old friends is a wonderful thing, and sometimes those friends aren’t people.

The power of old books should not be underestimated. They smell superb, they contain engaging characters, great conversations and beautiful vistas - and if you’ve read them before, you even know the ending isn’t going to enrage you. Sometimes, at someone’s house, or a library, or a bookshop, the act of recognising a familiar book on a bookshelf can make a person smile to nobody. 

 Old music is the same. The right song is like a time travel device. I went on a run recently - belted through the streets like a hero to the pounding music of my youth - a local hero winning against the odds. When I came home I switched to some more relaxed tunes and oh! No! There I was, still puffing slightly from my run, frozen in the middle of the lounge room. How the algorithm knew what song would move me at that precise moment, I don’t want to know, but I stood, quietly, forehead against the glass, and listened to every note, watching the birds out the window, and music, my very good friend, was there for me when I needed it. 

You know what it’s nice to revisit from the past? Latent skills. I have recently rediscovered my old friend colouring-in. Not those deliberately meditative grown-up colouring books, but big kids’ ones that require acres of colouring, meadows of it, drifting in a breeze of my own making, the smell of pencils reminding me of what? Childhood? School? A parent? While colouring in those meadows of green (it was a frog of some sort I think) I looked down at one point at my pencil and there, in the side of it, was my name, written in neat, even capital letters. The paint carefully nicked off the side of the pencil with a stanley knife in the days before I started school for the year.  What year? My first year of school? My last? A little historical relic right there in my hand, several decades later, the careful capitals of my Dad at about the age I am now, delivering him to me, right in my kitchen. Latent colouring skills and little domestic relics. Friends forever.

Other lifelong friends include: favourite meals, dumb movies you’ve watched a thousand times and will watch another thousand even though you definitely don’t need to, certain exercises (throwing a frisbee, for me, will always be my friend) and, of course, the lovely friend that is clean sheets on a cold night when you’re thoroughly exhausted. 

Public Service Announcement: you have more friends than you think you do. Call them. They’d love to see more of you. I’m planning to visit my old friend clean sheets on a cold night tonight. Now that’s a reunion that’s almost romantic. 

This was originally published in The Big Issue.

Like me, you have maybe been reminded recently about history. Someone maybe told you about the Spanish flu for instance, and how people wrote novels during it. Or other times in history - world wars, for example, you may have been reminded, were much more trying than what we’re enduring now. This is, of course, true, and sometimes it’s wonderful to gain a sense of perspective from the worst times in history. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to think of the times in history we don’t know about. The unrecorded. The times when people thought, “well that wasn’t much of anything”. 

Public Service Announcement: everything is not significant, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Confused? Same. Let’s sort this out. 

Did you know you can search through digital photograph libraries in museum and library catalogues online? You can do this with an intention (for example, to find an Important Moment) or you can, to use and old style bookshop word, browse. Browsing old photos is kind of wonderful, because, even without a narrator, a narrative starts to form. You see flashes of personality, little bits of story, none of it studied in school but all of it kind of familiar and yet distant. Like they can almost see you back. A little girl with a dirty face using a stick as a shot gun, decades before you were born. Long gone, and yet there she is, suspended mid mouth-noise: pew! Pew! And you feel like you could know her, if you only made the effort to peel back the years. 

History is full of people watching caterpillars.  

People throughout history have stopped, frozen, in the middle of nature, thinking they heard something, muttering half-words to themselves in quiet reassurance.

There are, in history, literally billions of forgotten or abandoned cups of tea, cooling in the background while humans argue and play in the background. 

The sea, historically, has done a lot of glistening.

Wind has been busy, too. The history of wind is complex and impressive. It has invented, alongside humans, many significant things, generated lots of power, assisted in the migration of several peoples, been an accessory to murder, and flown a bunch of flags.

Many people, from many cultures, across many eras, have held the hands of history’s main players, made them breakfast, sung them to sleep, loved even the worst of them and rolled their eyes quietly as even the best of them leave their dishes in the sink or whistle too loudly or forget to bring in the rubbish bins.

Nature has, wherever it is, managed, throughout human history, to sneak up through the bits we have tried to  evict it from. Grown between the cracks, climbed up the walls, smashed through the boundaries. 

It has watched us, its across generations, attempt to shape the world around our ideas - ideas we only have our tiny lifetimes to develop - and it has grown around us, trees climbing slowly to the sky, water wearing down rocks, mountains exploding, lava cooling, all while societies come and go.

People have been late, missed countless trains, turned up to find nobody waiting at the agreed place, felt their hearts sink low in their chest, pretended not to in case the people they don’t know think they’re as disappointed as they are.

History has had some bad guys, but maybe it could have had more. Some of them were nudged gently in the right direction, loved in just right way, shown a way of applying themselves in just the right way. Or, less lovely, they’ve been managed by unthanked loved ones, absorbing their bad behaviour, allowed the world to believe they are good citizens, bearing their unkindness alone. 

History is full of people writing novels and being heroes and doing great things or triggering moments of enormous import. It is, though, presumably, also full of insignificance. Lovely or slight or quiet little moments of insignificance, without which things would be a lot different. Maybe. 

Abandoned cups of tea, quietly growing trees, loud annoying whistling - all of it is history, happening all around you. Public Service Announcement: just because there’s one story doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of stories. Some of them are terrible and some of them are lovely and some of them aren’t about very much at all. Even during the greatest Naval battles in history, the sea quietly glistened. Here’s to the glistening, and the tea, and the people staring out of windows. And to all of us together, watched by the trees.

This was first printed in The Big Issue.  

It’s a cliché these days that Pixar films make people cry. Don’t know what a Pixar film is? That just means you are not intimately attuned to the viewing habits of small children. For that, you should be quietly relieved. Like, don’t boast about it, but well done. There are these films for kids, though, and they are cartoons for heaven’s sake, but they make grown adults cry. Recently, I watched one of these films, called Coco, and I may one day stop crying, but that is by no means a certainty. The film is about the Mexican celebration, the Day of the Dead, and in it, the souls of the deceased get to visit their loved ones for the day, unseen but celebrated and remembered. A lot of the film was about the grief of the living. For me, though, I kept imagining it from the point of view of the dead. Imagine! Just one day! Reunited with the familiar and the normal and the downright complicated business of life again. Even now, with all the things happening in the world, even with the mundane and the awful and the infuriating and the depressing, even with all that, imagine getting a whole day.

Public Service Announcement: look at today. It’s amazing.

Sometimes, especially at this time of year, just the way light happens is a work of art. I walked into the kitchen the other day and I had to go and fetch someone just so two humans on planet earth had witnessed the exact way the light from the window was coming through the honey jar someone had left on the bench. Kitchen was pigsty, by the way, honey jar should have been put away in the cupboard, but that part of the mess was breathtaking. People who live with me are used to this kind of thing, but even so, I don’t mind telling you, I was thanked. If I were given a day back on earth, I reckon I’d be loving the lighting design. 

The moon does some good work, too. Huge ball of a thing one night, like a thumb print out the window taking you by surprise. Next time you look for it, leeeetle tiny fingernail hiding up a tree. 

People’s walks. The people I have loved and lost: oh to glance up and see them walking about again - to recognise someone at such a distance that nothing could identify them except for the way they hold themselves, such an expression of who they are, and of how they have lived. The fact that doing so sometimes makes you chuckle. 

Being able to sit in your favourite spot, sip your favourite hot drink from your favourite cup, and talk on the phone to someone who really makes you laugh. One of those people who makes you lighter in the world. More confident. Hearing their voice on the phone, doodling. It wouldn’t matter, would it, if you returned to earth for only a day whether you saw the people you feel like you should see. No. You’d go to the people who make you feel like that. So hey: go to the people who make you feel like that. 

You’d love the things you always loved, wouldn’t you. The warm socks on a cold night. The first mouthful of lemon pudding. Your favourite curry. Gently saying the words “sorry mate, my leg’s gone to sleep” to an animal perched on your lap whose feelings you don’t want to hurt. Telling someone how great they are. Watching a ripper TV show. Gasping at the end of a book.

You’d also, probably, be surprised at what you loved, were you given an extra day. I recently realised how much I love the shorts stepped out of, abandoned on the floor in such a way as to bring to mind the gleeful removal of same by a small child in a big hurry. The matchbox cars lined up in a neat row underneath the table. The scribbled note in a hurry reminding me of something I’d forget. In a broader sense, there’s something about the absence of people where people once were that is, especially recently, touching. How lost items are picked up by people and relocated, like flags, to the point most likely to attract attention. A baby’s hat on a post at the end of a beach track. The empty streets painted in noisy chalk. 

Public Service Announcement: you’ve got today. It’s all yours. Luckyduck.

This was published in The Big Issue. You can now support them, and the people they support, online.

Well, well, well. Here we are. That happened fast, didn’t it. Everything, I mean. At once. A lot that felt, suddenly, like we were a toddler at a surf beach being surprised by a wave coming in from behind while we were busy watching a seagull. 

It’s been a big year. It’s been a big year and it’s not even half way through it yet. There have been moments, too, in this year, that have left us shocked at ourselves, shocked at the way things turn out sometimes, when the wave of something big swallows you up from behind. It is easy, when the wave comes, to think that there is nothing but the wave. That the wave is the whole story and there was nothing before or after or during it that happened at all. It is easy to think that all of the terrible things that are swallowing you up are, in fact, a little bit who you are.

You are not the terrible things. Well actually you might be. I don’t know you. Some of you are. If you have a Cabinet position, perhaps email me and we’ll sort it out. But look, the point is: we live in a society. Sometimes that’s confusing or confronting because it involves living alongside people who do or say despicable things but most of the time it’s the reason life is lovely. Public Service Announcement: people are not always the worst.

 There is a nice man who lives near me who goes out every morning and gets his newspaper. The person who delivers it at 5am piffs it unceremoniously out the window of a moving car and it often thwacks itself in between two branches of a tree in front of the nice man’s house. The nice man comes out and gets his paper out of the tree as though he is picking an apple every morning and he shuffles back inside. The other morning, I saw him wander out, notice a large crow in the branches of the tree near the newspaper, see that he may disturb the crow, bow to it ever so slightly, wait to see how it felt about things, and then gently remove the paper under the watchful eye of the crow. That man, whatever else he might have done in life, bowed reverently at a crow.

Those people who put shallow bowls out for animals in the summertime are not terrible.

The person who talks the shy kid out from under the table is a wonder to behold.

The person who writes the best notes, the best text messages, the best letters: cling on to that person.

The person who has a skill you can watch and the watching of the skill is itself a meditative experience? What a joy that is. I’ve said this before but my grandfather could peel fruit in one long, thin, even snake that he could sit on the table next to the nude fruit so that it looked like the fruit had just stepped out of the shower and was about to get dressed into its skin again. Every time I see someone peel an apple I think: pssht. Miss you gramps.

Ever seen two old people dance? Like, a proper dance with steps? There’s something about the elegance of the steps and the slightly jaunty fragility of the movement that makes it feel like you’re watching history and poetry at once.

Another thing that’s lovely about society - about all of us being together in the world - is that you can be walking through a park, for instance (I know, I know) and you can be chatting to the person you’re there with, and another person can be chatting to who they’re there with, and both of you can keep chatting but you can both go: nod. Four different lives, two different conversations, passing each other, engaging however briefly, and moving on. 

People calling out to each other from balconies, strangers singing songs together, doing a funny accent to lighten a moment in a video in a way that makes everybody suddenly empathise. People writing perfectly told stories or intelligent explanations of things you never realised you had even misunderstood. The person who listens like nobody you know. Your favourite person, too. That person.

Public Service Announcement: we aren’t what’s happening to us. We’re the man talking to the crow in the newspaper tree, bowing slightly, regardless of whatever news is about to greet him on the front page.

This was originally published in The Big Issue, which is really bending over backwards for its vendors at the moment. Go and check them out. They’re wonderful.

This one’s for when it’s all too much. Genuinely terrible. When, as it has been lately, your world feels like it’s on fire. When life feels unfair and out of control and terrible and awful and relentless because it is. 

Public Service Announcement: things are going to be okay. They are. Even if they are as bad as you think. They’re going to be okay. Probably not immediately. Maybe not always and forever. But you are going to be okay.

You can’t see past the next bit. There is a future version of you, though. You can’t see them right now but there are many possible very okay things that future you might be doing. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things Future You may be doing:

Looking up to notice in surprise a beautiful sunset.

Reading a news story about something wonderful. Hard to imagine maybe but wonderful things will still happen in the world. People will discover things and fix things and learn things and invent things and achieve remarkable things. In fact, people do this kind of thing on a small scale every day, it’s just that the news cycle thrives on real live footage of a bus going over a cliff into the sea rather than a little story about that nice Mrs Bennett from two doors down bringing your Mum a curry when she’s had a bad back. 

Playing. You’ll do it again. Doodling on a page. Lining up the buildings with the rainbow by squinting. You’ll play. Animals play. Did you know that? People have studied them to see why they play, but that’s the point of play: there is no goal. Animals frolic and play just like children and, yes, even adults. Whether it’s joking or doing a sodoku or measuring how far forward and backwards we balance in our new shoes, or walking down the footpath avoiding the cracks, we all play. When we play, it unlocks things in our brains. New pathways form. Chemicals are released that make us feel good. Play a game. 

One day, you will accidentally lose yourself in a laugh. You will. You won’t see it coming but you’ll laugh like a drain and the echo of the laugh in your muscles will make you laugh again to yourself and you’ll suddenly realise: I’m laughing again!

Just by the way the fact that you exist at all is completely ridiculous. The likelihood of you being born is estimated, by people whose job it is to estimate such ludicrous things, to be one in 400 trillion. This certainly doesn’t mean you’re obliged in any way to enjoy it. You don’t have to feel any way about it all except that it is a phenomenally slim margin of probability and it consists of all sorts of things that probably wouldn’t otherwise exist too, like lemon meringue pie and the ocean and those huge socks people put over cars to stop the birds doing poos on them. Life is strange and confusing and a tiny bit surreal - not in the way people often use the word surreal (“Oh wow, I haven’t seen you since high school and here you are in the supermarket - how surreal!”) but in the way surrealist art is surreal, like a person with a crab for a face or a flight of stairs that goes in two directions. Life has not - as of the time this is going to print - been figured out by anybody. Being a part of it is like an experiment. Finding the bits you enjoy and the bits that interest you is as good a use of it as any.

Movies. Books. Music. Theatre. Radio. Podcasts. Computer games. Art. These are the things we humans have designed as ways of escaping and enjoying whatever this life business is. They might not solve anything. But they’re there for you, always, and sometimes you can lose yourself for a little bit, inside of something made for you by somebody else you’ve never met. What a thing.

You might not want to hear that you’ll be okay. You mightn’t believe it. You might know for sure it isn’t true. Thing is though, it is. Even if it’s just in a small way. Even if it’s a slightly different version of okay. Things are going to be okay. A cup o tea. A nice bath. A hilarious video about a monkey. A nice conversation that makes you feel a bit sad and a bit better. Some lemon meringue pie. You’re going to be okay.

This was written for The Big Issue. It was written during the Australian bushfires.

I’ve been laid up sick recently - the kind of sick that makes you feel like a character in a Dickens novel, groaning and dabbing your forehead and passing out for days waking only to wonder why better healthcare hasn’t been invented yet. There really is nothing nice about it, and to all of you dealing with ailments and illnesses, long-standing or short-lived, all power to you at all. 

There is, therefore, nothing so miraculous as the feeling of awakening from an illness. It is not difficult to understand how in previous centuries people believed in evil spirits being exorcised from the body. It feels like magic. Merely walking through the world feels like something worth being evangelical about. Putting one step after the other! Being vertical! Eating a piece of toast! 

Waking from the heavy slumber of my recent virus, I was like a Disney princess prancing through a forest lightly touching things with my fingertips and exclaiming gleefully in bursts of song.

Back into my usual daily routine I wanted to embrace all the people who who play small parts in it. The local crossing supervisor, the hilarious barista, the grumpy corner shop lady. 

I loved the tiny ways in which I was able to dispense with the metaphor of illness, too. The fresh sheets! The tidied room! The hot shower!   

Once outside (outside!) I looked up at the clouds cantering across the ludicrous blue sky and thought: look! Clouds!

This is a Public Service Announcement: actually, stuff is amazing.

Yes, we elevate buffoons as kings. True, we are often fools and nincompoops. Some of us are dreadful. Some of us aren’t, but we still do stupid things like feel ourselves fighting the urge to smile while someone is telling us their shocking news, or calling someone’s partner their previous partner’s name several times to their face. There’s also war and halitosis and “this video will continue after this commercial” and the smell of burned rubber and people who give unsolicited advice. But also, stuff is amazing.  

Come with me, join the newly well, and experience with gobsmacked amazement the following things:

Clouds!

Hot drinks!

The feeling of having freezing feet and your trousers rolled up to your calves from standing in a river or the sea.

Trampolines!

That bit in live music where a pause is about to finish and the musicians all look at each other and do a “now!” face and then play the next note. Love that face!

Love those places - often restaurants or delis - where you walk in and all your decisions get taken from you. It’s the opposite of capitalism. They don’t care about the individual. It’s a community experience, whether you want your kid to be sat up on a counter and fed a chocolate ice cream or not. There’s an Italian deli near me like this. I head in with a quick trip in mind but suddenly I am tasting a chilli sauce, chatting to some locals and it’s all: ”Taste this salami. Is good salami. You like lemons?” It doesn’t matter if I like lemons.

Doing nothing! Amazing! Feet up on someone else’s chair. Doodling on a note pad while someone talks in an adjacent room. Little bit of bird action outside.

Knitting. Loops of actual lambs’ wool dyed and then connected using sticks and it keeps us warm? What a ridiculous series of steps to create a beautiful thing!

The way kangaroos scratch themselves. It’s hilarious and amazing and they all look like big blokes watching the cricket in the sun with a beer and I don’t care what anybody thinks.

Ever seen that thing that happens to birds when they’re flying like billy-o into a wind and then they just go “oooh, here’s a good bit” and they coast on a flat bit for a while? I love those bits. They seem like the sky equivalent of when you’re walking on a beach and you’re in slightly stinky sand and then you find a good, hard, solid bit of sand and you try and follow the fault lines of the solid sand all the way home and you feel like an explorer at one with nature.

Things that were made a long time ago that required enormous ambition and vision are astonishing. Giant structures that took decades. Beautiful maps where the edges just dribble away for a bit because those bits hadn’t been figured out yet.

Other people’s accents.

A glass of water after a big walk.

Cake! For heaven’s sake. Cake.

Public Service Announcement: you exist! Stuff is complex and difficult! Also though: stuff is amazing! Cake!

This was originally published in The Big Issue. Bless their cotton socks. Purchase from your local vendor.

You’ve probably heard that mind-blowing fact about how when you condense the entirety of human history into a year, humans don’t arrive until that weird little period after Christmas and before New Year. 

We are tiny, even all of us together. Even all the people you’ve never met in countries you’ve never visited and the ones who, centuries ago, invented the things you now take for granted, like pepper shakers and medicine and hats. All of us. You and me and Marie Curie and Hitler and Ghandi and the first cavewoman to light a fire and all the people you’ve never heard of who could have shaped human history but who lived at the wrong time to be allowed that privilege and whose name does not therefore echo down the ages into the present. All of the people ever. Even with all of them, we’re tiny.

Public Service Announcement: Happy New Year! Don’t worry! Everything is tiny!

You being embarrassing all the times you’ve been embarrassing: not going to be remembered in the big History of the World year book. It won’t say: this person invaded Poland, this person discovered Radium, and this person acted like a total idiot at her work Christmas party. Remember: humans don’t even ARRIVE until mid-December. Unless you live for hundreds of thousands of years, you are not that important. No offence. None of us is - which really takes the pressure off when you think about it.

How much money you earn won’t make the year book either. There will be no pie graph like in a company’s Annual Report that compares us all. There will be no prize for best looking or most likes on instagram or best parent or most successful at romantic relationships and there won’t, sadly, be any prizes for most cups of tea consumed in a lifetime (am quietly confident, should this become a category).

Lil secret for you here too… some of the people who think they’re going to be in the year book, yeah, bad news for them, won’t be in the year book. This goes for your awful manager, your devious ex, your lying politicians, and that obnoxious person who talks over you because he knows so much better. The lying politician might sneak into the index but at this rate it will be under “environment, destroyer of” or “democracy, a danger to” so probably not a scene you want to be part of.

So if everything - bar a few dramatic eventualities - is too small to rate a mention in the big year book, what should we do? How do we spend out time? Well this is where the small things really matter, you see, because they’re not getting in the year book. It’s our job, then, to notice them. To relish them and enjoy them and document them and share them. 

Happy New Year: everything is tiny. 

The way birds carry on in a birdbath: tiny. Won’t get a mention in the year book. 

The taste of a really great combination of things in a sandwich: never should this tiny thing be underestimated. 

A sensational curry.

Watching a thunderstorm. 

Arriving somewhere you’ve never been before in the dark. The shapes and smells foreign to you but the stars, high up, deep and friendly. Somewhere, a bed.

A conversation you didn’t expect, with a person you presumed you knew enough about. That turning out to be wrong. You, talking to the person, that wrong presumption dissolving in your mind as you speak.

Raspberries. Tiny.

Holding a shell. A tiny architectural nature house thrown about by the monstrous sea but gleaming and perfect in the palm of your hand.

The feeling of having made somebody feel better.

Giggling with strangers.

Laughing with friends.

That thing where you’ve stood in line practicing buying the same sandwich you always buy and then you open your mouth and you order a completely new sandwich and you can’t even believe yourself and you’re already cataloguing the wrong turns you have made that led you to this Terrible Sandwich Decision - and then you take a bite and lo! Your brain’s reckless act of daring totally pays off and you look around to high five someone about your sightly different sandwich but it’s too small to celebrate.  

Watering a garden at night.

An animal sleeping on you.

This year might feel like a fresh start or a scary new chapter or a droning continuation of yesterday. But don’t worry. It’s tiny. Public Service Announcement: none of it matters as much as we think it does. This year, bear witness to the important things: thunderstorms and birds and raspberries.

This appeared at the start of the year in The Big Issue.

The other day I saw a headline promising an in-depth article about why winning lots of money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I laughed, of course. Stared into the middle distance for a bit thinking of all the terrible times I’d have if I won lots of money. I imagine you too cannot think of a single thing about suddenly owning millions of extra dollars that would make you happy. 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised the article was designed to appeal to exactly this instinct in us. It was designed to meet us on the side of fence where we, the people, stand, arms folded, understanding one important thing: we would do better. We wouldn’t be miserable. We would know paradise when we saw it. We wouldn’t make mistakes or trust the wrong people or feel our friends behaving differently or be discombobulated by the quiet shifting of the universe that no doubt occurs when you zoom up the tax brackets. We would keep it quiet, have better friends, give to those less fortunate than we are, and treasure the privilege of never having to have a single other problem so long as we live. 

Money, as we all know, doesn’t buy happiness. Or sense! That’s why, as we all know, rich people are sad idiots. 

But here’s the thing: there’s probably not a scientifically accurate means of comparison here, is there? We’re probably never going to find out who wins. Looking over your fence at the green grass on the other side can be diverting, it’s true, but who wants to be looking over a fence when there’s backyard cricket and a drink with your name on it and your mate just brought over a pav? 

Public Service Announcement: other people’s lives aren’t the point. Focus on the pav.

Focus on the cup of tea you have with the pav. The chair you sit in.

Focus on reading. The way words you’ve never seen in that order can completely change your mind.

Focus on the greatest story you’ve ever heard someone tell.

Focus on the song you can’t not sing to.

 Focus on the sounds that happen only in the evening. The dinners enjoyed on surrounding verandas. The insects. The sound of kids in the street. The evening news theme. The night time kettle. The dog snoring.

 Focus on clear desks and green hills and flossed teeth and butterflies and crumpets.

Focus on gradual change. How some things are different now. Like the way men these days hug each other. The generation currently in their teens and their twenties. I saw two men approach each other with such huge grins the other day that I thought “this will be some handshake” but as they got closer I revised my prediction to the form of intimacy known in generations past as “a back-slapping man-hug”. But no. These two, heading towards each other, embraced front on and kissed on the lips, happy to be reunited. One of them, rather than let go of the hug, picked his mate up, swirled him, and put him back down again. “How are you?” he said. “How’s Katie? Finally getting hitched eh?” and there they were, unabashedly expressing affection for each other in the street with the same silly, daggy affection women have been allowed to express for generations. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Focus on spiderwebs. The design. The function. That amazing thing that happens when the light is right and the morning dew glistens and humans think, huh, spiders are pretty amazing, before heading inside where it’s less dewy.

Focus on the person who was kind to you at the start.

Focus on those little moments that are just yours, like when you’re knee-deep in the sea and the people you’re there with are just out of earshot and then you see fish darting about. Quick and silver and sharp and glittery and silent, and you go to shout out but the fish are gone and anyway nobody else will get your fish like you do.

Focus on friends who make you laugh and friends who make you proud and friends who you realise later you didn’t even ask a single question of the whole time but you feel somehow lighter and smarter and funnier and like maybe everything is going to be just great. 

So long as you don’t win any money. That would be a disaster.

Public Service Announcement: your life is on the side of the fence that you’re on.

This was first printed in the 600th edition of The Big Issue. Well done to them.

Do you remember the feeling of being on a team? At school, maybe? All of you together, trying to strategise your way around some problem or other? Or maybe at work - figuring out how to get things finished on time, shoulder to shoulder? Maybe you’re on a team with members of your family or your partner or your dog - going on a walk that’s a little longer than you expected and getting slightly lost before stumbling back into familiar territory and giving your team member a bit of a scratch behind the ears while you breathe a quiet sigh of relief. 

Being on a team is, of course, a total cliché. People do corporate retreats to learn how to do it. They make movies about it. Everyone says they’re good at it in job interviews. It’s the whole basis of organised sport. Here’s the thing though: being on a team usually implies one very not-teamlike thing. There’s another team. And you hate them.

I went to a sports match recently. You can tell already from the words “sports match” that it doesn’t matter what sport it was because I neither know nor care, which put me somewhat in the dark in terms of what was going on in the game. Now, most people would have seen this as a disadvantage. Not me. Watching the players (on both teams) run around together down there I realised something the crowd didn’t know. I watched them duck and weave and sidestep like dancers in a complicated ballet and I realised: they’re on the same team. Working together for the crowd, dancing in formation, performing identical little rituals.

This is a Public Service Announcement: we’re on the same team. 

 Ever played a musical instrument in a group? Banged a drum at a music festival? Clapped like an idiot along to your favourite song? We’re on the same team!

You might be on a different team from someone but when you both watch someone do something like folding tiny origami pandas or glass blowing, you’re on the same team. 

Waited for a ludicrously long time while both lanes of traffic waited for a family of ducks to cross a road? Applauded the woman who eventually got out of her car to clap them in the right direction? You’re #teamducklady. We all are.

Watched some knife’s edge personal drama play itself out on the Olympics, hoping with every sinew of your body that a diver from Norway can summon up whatever neurons she needs to win this thing for her single mum and her hilarious Nan who you saw interviewed because you’ve accidentally not moved off the couch and have instead become an expert in diving?  Yep. Welcome to the team.

Dancing is a team sport. The suspension of disbelief - the taking of synchronised leaping at all seriously - is truly an imaginative group act.

If you have ever run down a hill, dived into cool water, experienced the joyous fear of doing something you are terrified of but know is safe, or eaten a truly magnificent meal, you are part of the team. 

 Ever witnessed an emergency? Amazing how quickly the team assembles. People assign themselves roles. Relationships form in an instant. Right there, dynamics are established. Team captain isn’t up for debate. Strategy is immediately determined. We’re instinctively good at being in a team together.

Humans judge each other in a nanosecond, but we’re good at talking to each other. We’re good at changing each other’s minds. In fact, without each other, we wouldn’t change our minds at all. You’re on a team even with the people you disagree with and don’t like. I know! Even those jerks are playing!

I had to do a group project once with a person whose views on life were the absolute opposite of mine. We couldn’t stand each other’s political views. Didn’t like much about each other at all - we probably still wouldn’t - but we had to present this project, so we studied. I realised I admired the way he organised his information. He liked my handwriting. When he drew a picture of a chicken rollings its eyes at one of my arguments about vegetarianism, I laughed out loud. I still reckon I’d want him nowhere near me on election day, but that was a funny chicken drawing.

Not everybody is redeemable. We’re not going to all hold hands and get along. In every team though, there are strengths and weaknesses. Look for the strengths. Public Service Announcement: we’re on the same team. If some of that team is comprised of #teamducklady, I’m fine with that.

This was commissioned and published by The Big Issue. Thanks to them as usual.

I recently saw a baby notice a statue. 

We were both waiting in line in the sun to get into an event in the inner city, this baby and I. I didn’t know the baby personally. She was looking over a parental shoulder, scanning the crowd, when her eyes fell on the statue above us. It was still and stern and pointing while riding horseback, its copper eyes staring down at the baby, whose brain was occupied, as all baby brains are, with trying to decode the universe. That was the moment I saw for the first time how bonkers statues are.

 Public Service Announcement: almost everything is bonkers. This is important to remember when reality seems just a little bit too real and the bits you have to deal with seem terribly urgent and not as fun as they should be. Remember: some people - even some nerdy scientists - think we’re in a simulation; that there’s an alternate reality humming along somewhere alongside this one. A reality in which things like dice don’t exist. Or light. Or shopping trolleys. Or bananas. Or Donald Trump, or your boss, or global warming or the library book you can’t find or chemical reactions or helium balloons or uncles or tiny hats that babies wear or cake or bottoms or traffic jams. Who knows what doesn’t exist in these worlds that are thus far only theoretical and about which know only that we do not know anything? The possibilities are endless!

Not comforted yet? Stay with me. If someone from an alternative reality landed in a beam of light right in front of you and asked you for a tour, imagine how bonkers thing would seem. Imagine statues.

Imagine seeing a platypus for the first time. It has a beaky thing and webbed feet and fur and poison and it lays eggs. 

Imagine seeing lightning.

Or explaining the feeling of being about to sneeze.

Think of how we fold things, and organise things, and why we do that. Why do we do that?

Think of the thing you do to feel productive - is it work? Is it raking up leaves? Is it cross-stitch or building a house or playing a computer game? Do you fill in forms or sew up wounds or pretend to be other people or blow air through a horn? Humans tend to ascribe status to acts of human endeavour but really, in the scheme of things, when you zoom right out, they all seem equally ridiculous and fruitless and brave and noble and frankly kind of adorable.

Think of regret. How ridiculous is regret! And guilt! Ridiculous! Wasted time on the fictional timeline that might not be real anyway. Process the guilt, deal with the regret, go and engage with a different part of the simulation. Take up cross-stitch maybe. Knit a hat.

Sleep is magic. Like, video-game-style magic. Imagine the questions you’d need to field on that one from your alien stranger. What do you mean there’s a level where you physically recharge and heal and become stronger? What do you mean you also get to mentally sort through your problems without even having to be awake for them because your brain plays itself a little cinematic story in the form of a thing called a dream? And also its cozy and comfortable and when you change the sheets you feel like a new human entirely? Utterly bonkers.

Things that are also bonkers include money: it’s a fiction. Rich people are always talking about this. ”Money is a fiction! It’s just an idea! Value is just a construct! Susan, what time do you have me booked in for my spa?” They’re right, though. This fact doesn’t help you pay the bills but it sometimes helps to know that while money makes the (obviously simulated) world go round, it doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t define you for instance. Even if you’re rich. Not when the people from the other simulation come to visit and say, “So this one’s got more shiny coins than that one. But does he cross-stitch?”

Sometimes it’s nice to pretend to be a baby. Or an alien from another reality. Just so you can look around and realise how silly everything is. 

This has been a Public Service Announcement: it’s kind of up to you to decide what you value. We have to pay our bills and rake our leaves, sure, but don’t forget to factor in the platypus and clean sheets and cross-stitch and bananas and lightning.

This was originally published in The Big Issue, which you can buy from your local vendor and they’ll be thrilled if you do. So do.

This is a true story. I was sitting in a park once, shoes and socks off, grass beneath my bare feet, sky scrolling above me like it was rewinding to the good bit. I was enjoying a lovely moment of watching people doing the various things people tend to do in parks… and I felt something beneath my thumb in the grass. 

Now, if the next moment had been in a movie, it would have been a crash-zoom. An extreme and sudden closeup in the middle of a drifty, gauzy, peaceful scene: right in close on the moment of truth in an urban park. What did I just put my hand in? It felt like - and forgive me for bringing these words to our happy little world of parks and grass and clouds -  moist paper. 

It was, upon further inspection, moist paper. Ew! But then I realised something. I realised there was handwriting on the moist paper which was probably wet from lying in the dewy grass. See? Edging back into romantic again isn’t it? The paper was very small. There were some letters spidering out and so I unfolded it, curious. It was about as big as a postage stamp. There was very small handwriting on it, very careful if a little bit spidery, and it said this: 

M 

It is your hands, most of all.

C

No kidding. Not a lie. That’s it. The comma and everything. Now, this being the digital age, and me being under the age of, well anyway so my first thought was to photograph this (now transformed) mysterious dew-covered love letter I found in the park and invite the internet to help me decide what it meant. Maybe we could even find M? Or C? Maybe this love story - for how could it be anything else? - could now become a project of community imagination - an ongoing collaboration of reflections, perhaps, on hands and parks and love and dew.  

But instead: this is a Public Service Announcement. It is your hands, most of all.

It isn’t your face in the mirror.

It isn’t your bank balance. 

It isn’t that embarrassing thing that happened or your excruciating Centrelink phone call or your parking fine. 

It isn’t the worst version of you or the best version of you or how clean your house is or whether you’re wearing tracksuit pants when everybody else is in a  ballgown or a ballgown when everybody else in tracksuit pants. 

It’s not whether you please your boss or your parents or your children or your accountant or even yourself.

It’s your hands, most of all. 

It’s the way you move and someone who loves you can spot you in a crowd from a mile off.

It’s the thumping tail of the animal you’re nice to.

It’s your hands.

It’s what you do when you listen to music and you don’t even know you’re doing it.

It’s the way your eyes move to someone else’s and theirs move to you without a word being spoken and you’re both saying the same thing - ”cup of tea?” or, “is this meeting ever going to end?”

It’s the doodles you do when you’re on the phone or listening to something or waiting.

It’s your hands.

It’s the way your brain feels when you’re tired from your favourite thing.

It’s that thing you do when you’re standing somewhere, talking to someone, and the talk is going on for a while and you’re thinking and so you absent-mindedly do something repetitive and soothing like rake the ground with one foot or pick at tree bark with your fingers and both you and the person you’re talking to watch you do it while you speak and it focuses your talk and it becomes at once less intimate and more intimate and it’s your hands.

The reason I didn’t tweet the lovely note I found in the morning dew is that I lost it. I actually think I washed it in a pocket. I have no proof it exists. I cannot use it to reunite M and C or celebrate their love or lament the lingering note of nostalgic regret. Public Service Announcement: in a world that on very rare occasions gives you dewy love notes when you thought you were getting moist paper, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. Just be you, with your hands, and the little ways you connect to the world, and if you like, write somebody a note and fold it up nice and small.   

This was originally published in The Big Issue. Buy it from your local vendor.

‘Hey! Thanks for coming! Just follow me. Nice to see you. Trouble getting here? No? Excellent. Well: welcome to my life! Come in! Through here, that’s right. Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Ignore all this. Probably best to… yeah, step over it, that’s the way. Bit of a shambles, this bit. And that bit over there. And, oh, yeah, that other bit. Apologies for the noise, by the way. Getting some repairs done. Who’s what sorry? Oh that? That’s Dave. Yeah. Don’t worry about Dave. We’ve all got a Dave haven’t we. Dave mate? Give it a rest will you please. Now… when I open this next door, you’re going to notice a large fire. Do not be alarmed. We get past this bit, there’s a nice little room where we can have a cup of tea before we have to deal with the snakes. Here. Put this on. And try not to breathe in.’  

Erhem. So I was thinking about my life the other day. Specifically, I was thinking about how exposed I would feel if I had to show someone the bits of it at which I am thunderously unsuccessful. Like the scene where I had to retrace my steps all the way back home from the post office because I literally dropped the letter I was going to post there somewhere on the walk and then I got to the post office with the now-rescued letter and had to go home and get my wallet. Or the scene that same week where I had to recite a section of the alphabet song in my head like a child in order to figure out which area of the library shelf I needed to be looking in for a book. But of course, everybody’s life has deleted scenes and they’re usually much more incriminating than a dropped letter aren’t they. And yes, it’s true, we shouldn’t compare or lives to someone else’s highlight reel. But another true thing is this: the bits of your life that you keep to yourself can sometimes be quite nice.

Public Service Announcement: enjoy the bits you keep to yourself. 

Like those moments - and surely there are hundreds by now - where it’s just been you and an animal, looking at each other. Sometimes, but not always, you will find yourself saying hello possum to a possum, for instance. Nobody else for miles.

Or the moments where it’s just been you - you in your shambles of a life sprinting to your  expired carpark, cursing your own idiocy - only to find the parking ticket inspector issuing a ticket to the car two cars in front of yours. 

Or the tiny things you know you’re impressively competent at. But they have to be tiny things. Far too little to even mention to someone. But when you do them, you feel kind of cool and  confident at. I reckon when you hit that vacuum cleaner button that retracts the cord, it feels like an important thing to have done in a suave way. You mess that up, it feels all wrong. I have a friend who makes reverse parking look like an art. A woman I worked with once realised she was in love with someone the first time she saw them deal cards. 

Noticing things that are happening outside, far away, when you’re alone is like a whodunnit. Squinting at someone in a building over the road through the window and saying quietly to yourself ”what is he doing?” and then figuring out this little mystery that turns out to be a guy shampooing carpets in an office block, but you’re kind of pleased anyway because you figured it out yourself and the guy doesn’t know, and nobody knows, but you know. 

Or the moment when everything is quiet and it’s just you, and you take your shoes off.

When you’re listening to music in your headphones or your car or whatever, watch what the music does to the other people you’re watching. I swear they walk more rhythmically. Some of them even move in time to the music. Music is magic. 

Other people’s lives are full of things you can’t see, we all know that. We all know we shouldn’t compare. Also though, sometimes it’s nice to take the pressure off your own little life. It’s full of light and shade. Find the light, sometimes, in those bits nobody else sees. Celebrate not getting a parking ticket. Watch someone walking in time to your song. Enjoy your very own self, all by yourself. And if that doesn’t work, kick that cord-retraction button. I swear it makes you feel like a cowboy.

This originally appeared in The Big Issue, which just launched its 600th edition. Happy 600th, Big Issue.

Be still our beating hearts

Whose side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you like the right things or the wrong things? Have you checked? Did you look it up? Are you sure?

Quick! Pick a team! Didn’t you know we’re at war? We can’t even agree on the facts anymore. All day every day is a struggle: who’s wrong? Who’s right? Whose fault is it? Who gets to be the judge?

Except it’s not like that really.

This is a Public Service Announcement: we’re all on the same team. Some of us are very badly behaved. Some of us are unforgivably awful. Thing is, though, we were all babies once, our tiny minds being blown by light and movement. A blank slate, all of it ahead of us.

Did you hear about the study of heartbeats recently? It was done by researchers at University College London who studied the heartbeats of audience members throughout a theatre performance. Get this: their heartbeats synchronised. They were entirely at the mercy of the theatrics unfolding before them (the theatre production, I looked it up, was the West End production of Dreamgirls). This heartbeat synchronising business happens, apparently, on two other occasions: when two people are in a romantic relationship, and when they’re effective team-members. How’s that! We don’t even have a choice! Humans are social animals, even when we’re not.

Bare feet in grass is the same: we’re biologically programmed to benefit from it. It’s science, but also, you have to admit, it’s kind of poetry too.

If you stand on a beach and bend down and slap your hands against your thighs, a dog will run towards you. Doesn’t matter who you are.

Music is a gift to your feelings from the universe. You share that gift, but also it’s yours.

The feeling of getting into fresh, cold bedsheets, on a fresh, cold night in a house that isn’t yours and snuggling into a bed that is both a familiar experience and an entirely new one probably happens to Kings and presidents and astronauts and circus clowns and mathematicians and you.

If you’re a human person in the world and there is an open fire near you, and you don’t stare at it absently and find it strangely wiping your mind clear of clutter, then perhaps you aren’t human at all.

Things look nice all in a row don’t they?

We all do that thing where, when the music stops in the middle of the song, your brain keeps it going for you whether you want it to or not.

Crossing the road, even if the pedestrian lights are green, most pedestrians have, at some stage in our lives, performed an apologetic little trot across the road to make the driver waiting for us think they’re waiting longer, which they aren’t. Or we’ve mimed “did you want a drink?” across a crowded room. Little theatrical performances for the benefit of others in everyday life.

A hot thing with a cold thing is pretty special. Ice cream with rhubarb pie. An iced drink with a spicy soup. Now I’m just hungry.

Try and dive into cold water and not come up doing some combination of gasping, squealing and grinning. Impossible.

Holding hands is nice. People in all cultures hold hands. It’s totally counterintuitive, though, isn’t it, biologically. Holding hands is a medical disaster. We laugh in the face of medical disaster and we hold the hands of the people we love because we love them, and because it makes them feel nice, to have a hand slip into theirs across the gap that separates them from everybody else.  

Everybody looks twelve when they’re drinking out of a straw or eating an icy pole. It’s just true. You can’t look mature or sophisticated when you do that, and nor should you.

If there’s music coming from inside a building and the lights glow orange and you’re outside and you have no idea what this event is, most of us kind of want to be invited. Standing at the door of a place with loud music though, where you can see the faces of the people inside, and there’s a chance you might know someone and a chance you won’t know anybody, most of us want to turn around and go home.

See?

 We aren’t that different. We’re all on the same team. Reach out over the gap and hold somebody’s hand. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

This was originally published in The Big Issue.