Passing Time

Since 2019 I have posted every week on Facebook a summary of the good things I’ve found over the previous seven days. This is always prefaced by an acknowledgement that these good things will most likely be small and personal, and that they will be outweighed in the grand scheme of things by all of the huge absolutely bloody awful things that are going on in the world. We can’t and mustn’t shut our eyes to the latter, even when for the most part they are things about which we can do very little. But if we’re going to get up each morning and wash and dress and face the world, or our little bit of it, it’s those small, personal good things that will give us the strength, day after day, to keep on keeping on.

In some ways the Good Things project is an odd one for me. I’m not a strenuously cheery person. If I am a ‘glass half-full’ person it’s an act of will because my brain is almost always in ‘what could possibly go wrong’ mode, and thus even much looked forward to events and experiences always have an element of anxiety attached. M used to say he was ‘glass half-full but really, really cross that it was only half full’. My late brother Greg was ‘glass overflowing’. So I suppose I’m ‘glass half-full but really quite worried I might tip it over and end up with glass empty’… Optimism is, as James Baldwin says, an act of will. It’s also, as Angela Davis put it, an ‘absolute necessity’.  We might look at the world and see little reason for it – that’s what she called ‘pessimism of the intellect’ – but being alive, really living, requires optimism of the will. (My friend Mike Press reminded me of the Angela Davis quote, in a lovely piece he wrote about ‘reflection, renewal and optimism’.)

When I started my Good Things, my brother was dying of cancer. Then there was Covid and lockdown, and then, in October 2021, my husband Martyn died very suddenly of a heart attack. I could hardly have been more aware over these past few years that life wasn’t simply full of good things, even just on a personal level, and that wishing it wouldn’t make it so. But it helped me to have that discipline, that at the end of each week I had committed to finding something to write about, something that had brought me joy or comfort, something that had given me strength, something good. And I have always found something, even at the worst times.

In 2024 the huge absolutely bloody awfulness of what’s going on in the world is utterly daunting. When M was alive, we always watched the 10 o’clock news, but now, on my own, I find I rarely do. To watch together, and then head for bed and sleep with the comfort of each other’s company was one thing, to watch alone and then head for bed and sleep alone, with my mind full of Gaza and Trump and Ukraine and climate change and all of the other horrors is quite another. (I do read the papers every morning, I don’t shut my eyes to it all.)  It’s hard to find good things out there, although I know that in any and every horror there are brave, good people who do whatever they can, at whatever risk to themselves, to mitigate that horror for others. We may not know who they are, but whilst history is very good at telling us of the evil that humans are capable of, it does also, if we look more deeply, tell us of those who stand against that evil. I try to hold on to that.

The word ‘joy’ keeps on cropping up at the moment. I recently watched the film with that title, about the first ‘test-tube baby’, whose second name was Joy, given to her by the surgeon who carried out the procedure. The film didn’t gloss over the wretchedness of infertility, and the people that the IVF process couldn’t help, but it acknowledged very movingly the joy that arrival brought, not only to her parents but to the team that had worked so long for that moment – and all of the people since who have had their chance at parenthood.  And then the Doctor Who Christmas special this year was entitled ‘Joy to the World’, and it dealt with loneliness, loss and regret, but ended with light, and joy and hope. It seems to me that to have joy (as distinct from happiness, or contentment), one must know sadness, loss, pain as well, just as to be optimistic (as opposed to merely delusional) one must recognise it as an act of will, in the face of all the reasons for pessimism.

So where has the joy been, in 2024?

As always, in reading marvellous books, watching brilliant films and TV series, listening to wonderful music. There are lots of things that I enjoy, that pass the time pleasurably, but some that do more than that, that lift and move me more deeply.  Hard to pick out just a few things, but, for example, Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days, Paul Besley’s book The Search, choral music at St Mark’s Church, Chris McCausland dancing to ‘Instant Karma’ on Strictly…

Travelling with my son, for an amazing holiday, a three-city break in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, seeing the beauty of all three cities, and in each of them the tragedy of their wartime history.

Working with Under the Stars, a charity that works with adults with learning disabilities and autism through music and drama, seeing their music groups perform at Tramlines festival, at Yellow Arch Studios, at the Greystones pub and the Octagon Centre, and deejay/veejay at the Leadmill. It’s exhilarating and inspiring – their joy in performance is infectious.

Nottingham Forest. A change of manager – this time last year I wrote that ‘I’m hopeful that the new guy will enable us to stay up again this year’, but it turned out to mean a transformation that finds us at the end of 2024 second from top of the Premier League, and dreaming of possibilities in 2025…

Family – a wedding, an engagement, and lots of ordinary special times spent with the people I love most, watching football, watching Strictly, trips to the cinema, opera or theatre, going around the galleries in town, wine-tasting, meals out, meals at home. Boxing Day shared with the future in-laws for the first time.

Friends – meeting for coffee or lunch, sharing music, talking about families and plans, hopes and anxieties, meeting via Zoom when we can’t be together in person.

So this New Year’s Eve, as for the last approx. 40 years, will be shared with very dear friends. We’ll eat and drink and watch Jools’ Hootenanny and complain about his choice of guests, and on New Year’s Day we’ll eat more and find an undemanding film to watch before going forth into 2025. My first New Year’s Day without M was bleak, almost unbearably so. I faced the first year since I was 16 years old in which he would not be by my side. I expect there will be moments this New Year too, when it hits me, but three years on I am accustomed to being without him. It’s not that the grief and loss is less, rather that one adjusts around it, accommodates it, and it becomes a part of one. I know I will cope because I have coped already with so much, and because the people who’ve enabled me to cope will be with me.

And for 2025 we hope, of course we hope. We hope for cease-fires, for wars to end, for freedoms to be restored, for care for our planet to be prioritised over profit, for vital public services to be protected and rebuilt for those who need them. We hope for good things for ourselves and the people we love. We hope for the strength to cope when bad things happen, the strength that comes from other people’s love and support as well as our own.

I come back to this poem every new year. That word ‘sometimes’ has some heavy lifting to do here, but of course, sometimes, these things will be, and that’s what we have to hang on to.

Sheenagh Pugh – Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,

elect an honest man, decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day (E. B. White)