Kind of lovely

Some things are lovely. No, shoosh, they are. Despite everything. Despite what Twitter says. Despite what “studies show”. Despite “news” and the inevitable crushing disappointment brought about by people who are in what is perhaps mistakenly (a printing error?) described in the handbook as positions of “leadership”. Despite whatever sits heavily within you. Some things are kind of lovely.

Here are some of those things. This is a public service announcement. 

A packet of untouched Derwent pencils.

The moon cut clean in half.

Owls: superb. Terrifying eyes, amusing head swivelling business, some of them bark like a dog. What more could anybody ask.

Watching someone make dumplings. It’s like brain yoga.

Sliding on your socks to cut down on travel time across a room.

A well-made bed.

Blossom. For real! Blossom!

The electrifying, childish, intensely charged feeling of lying in bed and blatantly ignoring the sensible voice in your head by turning the page to the next chapter despite the time.

The smell of crayons.

Other people’s houses. Other people’s bookshelves. The things they have on their fridge.

Those nude eucalyptus trees with the bark hanging off them in big brown skirts down the bottom.

The handwriting of people you have loved.

Banksias.

Sun on your back on a cool day.

The fact that everyone in the whole world, no matter who they are, does that thing where they have to open their mouth when they absent-mindedly touch their eyelid.

Fires. Especially those ones in big tin buckets outside at parties.

The older woman in the post office the other day getting help with her phone from a teenager. He felt useful, she felt that a genius had uncovered a secret to the universe. 

The expression “sleepy head”.

Community markets. There is something so openly hopeful about people sitting behind stalls at a community market. Whether it’s a farmer’s market, a church market, or a local swap meet, it’s kind of the best of society. Walk around, you’ll see keen morning faces behind tables of things people have chosen to present to the world, smiling shyly, or knitting furiously, chatting to the person in the next stall selling honey candles, or pretending not to care as you pass them by. I have a friend who can’t go to marketsbecause she’s too empathetic and she buys all the things from the people who don’t have people buying from them. Comes home from the market with a plastic doll with no pants on, a weird new type of vegetable peeler, and a painting by an old man who runs an almond farm. Point is, markets are lovely. Go to a market. Real communities live there.

Home made cubbies.

Shoes lined up in a row.

Spices cooking.

Weaving your hand through the air out the car door on a hot day.

Amusing text message exchanges. Sometimes the best work you do all week can be some really excellent texting. 

The smell inside an Italian restaurant. 

New pyjamas.

Old-fashioned names in inked cursive in the front of old books.

The rickety-yikes of walking across a suspension bridge and having to trust that other humans have done this right. They’ve never met you, but they’ve got your life in their hands.

Fruit design. Almost all of them are brilliant, with the exception of a couple of the melons and, arguably, the slightly risky avant-garde design of the passionfruit. Imagine you’re a designer and you’re told to come up with a new fruit and you come up with the kiwifruit or the watermelon, though. Imagine how pleased you’d be with yourself. One is a furry brown thing with a symmetrically perfect exploding green sunshine of taste inside it and the other is a big tough ball of turtle-skin green full of mouth-melting pink fuzz that you can cut into pieces so that you hold the skin and don’t get it everywhere. Hopefully they were designed in different years so that they didn’t both have to be up for Fruit Design of the Year in the same year, or it just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Also you know what? The word marmalade is a lovely word and also it means marmalade. Sometimes life is cruel and unfair but then, just when you’d almost forgotten about it, there’s marmalade.

You can do it. Sniff some crayons. Admire your fruit. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

An edited version of this column appears in The Big Issue. Buy The Big Issue next time you see someone selling it. It makes a difference in a real actual human way.