Everyday Magic

There’s a thing about writing where I want every post to hit that sweet spot of being amazing and every word I write to scintillate with wit or the magic that makes people go ‘ah’ and light up in recognition. If you’re exceptionally gifted, I am sure you can do this, but mostly even if you’re just regularly gifted you can’t. I definitely can’t. I have learned to accept that there will be days of magic and there will be days when there is no magic. What there will always be is writing. What I have learned is that it is enough that there will always be writing.

There is also the temptation with writing to only write about the great moments. The days when I pinch myself that this is happening and it’s happening to me. The days when I can feel the magic that I want to pass on to other people actually manifesting in me. When it happens it feels like green life, shooting through my veins, making my heart pump faster, making my head explode with possibility. It’s a trip. Writing about those moments is so easy. The words are already there, tapping at my finger ends, desperate to make their way into the world. I just have to allow writing like that.

The problem with those times are they make the other times so much harder. The problem with those times is that if that’s all I ever write about, that also skews the pitch for you, the reader. Life is not a series of gleaming moments plucked from the air for my or your delectation and delight. Would that it were.

Life is scrubbing salmon cat vomit out of my cream carpet and sending unhinged emails to my neighbours in twenty foot high font. Life is trying not to look at how much I weigh in the doctor’s surgery because even though I don’t want to know, the toxic part of my brain very much does. Life is going to Specsavers in Canada Water and learning to be fine with spending £130 on glasses and accepting that it’s a measure of how much I love my son. Life is largely this and very little that magic.

There is another kind of magic though and it is this that interests me most. The best thing about writing is learning to write about cat sick and glasses in a way that pleases me and might interest other people. It’s about going on terrible walks in neighbourhoods where gang graffiti and chicken shops are what I find instead of viking churches and delicious bakeries and finding my way into writing about them as if they were all equally interesting, because they are.

Writing helps me look at the world differently. It gives me the patience to think about where I am and find something to say about it, no matter what. Often I find myself walking through unlovely places. There’s a lot of them about. When I find myself somewhere that I want to move through quickly, I try to slow my thinking down and look more carefully at where I actually am rather than where I think I am. I think about the fact that this place that I am so quick to dismiss is someone’s home. They reach here and get that feeling of rightness, of belonging, of comfort. What is it that makes them feel like that? What can I see that might give me a way in to that, even for a moment?

One day this week, I saw a tiny box of a home that generously speaking, looked extremely well lived in. Paint was peeling from the window sills, there were tiles missing from the roof, but the small, front garden, no more than a few feet wide, was a riot of what looked like squash vines. They were strung along intricate netting at about waist height, crafted to carry the weight of huge leaves like lily pads bursting out all over. The border by the side of the front path was planted with runner beans shooting up a lattice of canes, winding round the wrought iron curling at the top of the wall. Whoever lived there loved that garden and lavished all the care on it that the house didn’t get. Whoever lived there understood life and grew it.

Another day I saw a lady in a turquoise hijab standing in the road outside her house, reaching up to try and water the sunflowers nodding over her garden fence. The flame of petals in their great lion’s mane burst against the blue green of her scarf and made a poem right there.

Sometimes I don’t even need to find my own words. Walking along the banks of the river Lea at the weekend, the great tumble of blackberries hanging jewel heavy against the russets and yellows of the bramble leaves reminded me of Seamus Heaney:

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking.

There’s always something wonderful. Every day is so full of moments that I sometimes feel completely overwhelmed that I can’t even begin to capture them all. I keep trying.

The reason I write is because one day, when I’m long gone, I hope my children will find me here, in writing like this. I hope they recognise me as the person they really knew, not the person their memory recalls in incomplete fragments. I want them to be able to fill their picture of me with the moments of the life I lived as wholly as I possibly could, messily and imperfectly and magically ordinary.