Day 73

A very busy day ahead. A very busy week, in fact. It will be Friday evening before I’ve even thought about it. We pack our days with so many things.

After my radio show on Saturday morning I went to the letterbox and found a lovely hand-written card from my friend V who was one of the first people from Authonomy (a long-gone Harper Collins writers’ web site) I met in person. She has been amazingly supportive of me and my writing for years (and her OH is one of those few people I call holy). The closing line of the card was “We who wield words are the quiet warriors.” That made a big impression on me, and the card is going to be stuck to the wall over my desk as soon as I find something to stick it on with.

M and I spent a lot of yesterday clearing out the garage so the builders ca come and do their thing today and in the coming weeks. My office, oddly enough, looks tidier now that I’ve dumped a load of shelves and other things in it. Very odd how the world works.

This morning I haven’t even checked the news yet. Yesterday’s was bad enough. But there were some good things. O went on an anti-war demo in London that was organised by the Drum and Bass community, and wrote in the family WhatsApp later how amazing it was, how many different generations were there, and how friendly and giving people were. The vast majority of humankind are kind – and I am now well over 200 pages into Bregman’s Humankind and still finding new things and learning, and discovering that we are all manipulated into being cynics and into the belief that evil is a prerequisite of existence; it’s not. I hope to be given an argument before the end of the book to give one possible explanation for the existence of psychopaths.

The sun is out. The wind has dropped. I do wake up each morning feeling a certain sense of futility, but then remind myself that there doesn’t have to be a reason for life, doesn’t have to be a reason for writing. Just do it.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 30