Is it here, pretty much minding my own business. I try to stay out of trouble. I spent two hours playing The Game of Life this morning and had three sets of twins while holding down a career as a brain surgeon — quite inspiring if I say so myself — but real life is more taxing. Real life keeps playing fortunately/unfortunately with me. The speed with which good news is followed by bad news and then back again, repeat and rewind, is almost more than I can take.
Into my inbox popped an email from a self-help guru I rather like in San Francisco, offering a few words of advice. “When you go to sleep at night, instead of counting all the things that went wrong, why not count all the things that went right?”
This isn’t quite the same as counting your blessings, which can feel nauseating on the lips; no, this course of action takes in what hotels might term the “incidentals” — doing someone a good turn; not burning down the house despite two episodes of candle-use.
I tried it out at the end of a very busy weekend. You might start gently with how soft the sheets feel, the faint scent of starch on the pillow, the fact that the curtains are drawn — three ticks, three small measures of rightness. I added to my list a rhetorical flourish I’d heard the Broadway star Audra McDonald use to introduce a statement: “In my humble and accurate opinion...” I mentally whipped that winning phrase up my sleeve.
You could continue your “right list” with the fact that you managed to secure tickets for the matinee of Show Boat in Sheffield for your birthday treat... bit far to travel just for the afternoon but some people go to Paris to have lunch, don’t they? And that hardly ever results in someone performing the song “Bill”. I have been singing it today in preparation: “With a giant brain and a noble head/ Like the heroes bold in the books I read...”
Next I remembered a neat thought I had enjoyed mid-afternoon about how my love for and appreciation of Jane Austen is coloured by the details of our English teacher’s marriage counselling, which provided a kind of commentary/alternative text, undercutting and occasionally reinforcing what was on the page.
I had also cheered up a friend who needed four chairs as props to represent a car in a play he is directing, by finding him four suitable chairs.I cooked some lamb to the perfect shade of pink — that might not be everything but it is something. Another good thing: I went into an antiques shop on the Gray’s Inn Road that specialised in silver and glass.
The almost Jamesian scene prompted me to send a thank-you email to the woman in Massachusetts who sold and shipped the plates painted with flowers that were my best Christmas present. “When I look at the beautiful flowers I do not see the world as it is but as it should be,” I wrote, in courtly style.
Quick as a flash this came back: “I am so happy you love them — I do, too! So much that I had a hard time letting them go but now I know they have gone to a happy home where they are appreciated and, I am happy to know, used! We all seem to have so much to navigate in this complex world. May these bring you much joy in the coming year.”
That felt very right.
Finally, I got talking to a stranger at a party who worked in finance. “High risk,” he said.
“How high?”
“If you gave me your money, I might well triple it in a few months, or it might just disappear.”
I had 27 pound coins in my handbag. I would have been happy for them to disappear because of the wear and tear on the much-loved bag. When my friend Marc took this bag to be mended in New York last year, the repairs guy shook his head at its sorry state: “Why’d your friend send a gold carriage out to do a truck’s work?”
The finance man said his kind of investment worked for people who would be twice as happy to have their money doubled as they would be sad to have it halved. Then he said to me that his ex was an unfit mother. I was shocked. He outlined the areas on which they clashed.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Are you asking for my advice?”
He nodded.
“If she finds motherhood so hard, I think you should do everything within your power to make it easier for her,” I told him.
“Everything?” he said.
“Yep.”
“OK,” he said. “That’s about the only thing I haven’t tried.”
It was the best thing I did all day, looking back, in my humble and accurate opinion.
— Financial Times
