Day 121

Good things do happen.

When I was doing my radio show on Friday, K, one of the other presenters on Radio Stradbroke (and whom I’m listening to as I write), sent me a message (she was able to listen to me for once, as she was isolating with covid and couldn’t go to work) asking me if I had Jamie Webster’s second album (after having asked me to play a song from it). I said no, and thought nothing more of it. Her next message was that she’d ordered me the vinyl copy of it. Needless to say (and you know this of me by now), I welled up at this unexpected kindness. And when I got home yesterday afternoon after a particularly fraught shopping expedition to find some running shoes that were as close as possible to the old ones I’ve reverted to that are years old and tattered and holey and comfortable (so much noise, so many people, so many over-stimulations), there it was. I couldn’t wait to get it out of its cardboard packaging and take a pic of myself with it to send to K. Of course, again being the man I am, I have yet to take the cellophane off and marvel at the white vinyl. I am obviously still 17 in my head, which goes a long way to explaining a lot of things about me.

After the shopping expedition yesterday and unwrapping the vinyl, I was really low, for some reason. Some might quote Newton’s Third Law that “in a closed system, action and reaction are equal opposites,” because it does seem to apply to emotions as well as physicality – more proof, if proof were needed, that Physics is the science of philosophers (maybe that’s why I wanted to study it for my A levels but wasn’t allowed to because my Maths wasn’t good enough, and because the school I was at thought that doing six A levels would be too much for even me). M put up with the depressed me in her usual deeply sympathetic way. And this morning, I came back into the house to find an espresso on the dining table for me. My first coffee since 2008. M and I had talked about coffee with L&L when we saw them last Sunday, and that I miss so much drinking it (some of my happiest memories of L and me are the two of us sitting in an Italian restaurant in Dunstable drinking espresso and port, and smoking a cigar), so they all said maybe try it again (and R said the same to me years ago when we last met in London), because they all suggested it was instant coffee that was causing the bad reactions I had (and too much of it – 10 cups a day of any coffee is not a good thing, is it?). And after that lovely M-made coffee, I had M-made scrambled eggs and toast. And K said on the radio that I was a part of her extended family. The perfect Sunday morning.

Like I said – there are good things in life. And they’re always worth waiting for.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 78