No bad days?
Car trouble, round things, and Martin Scorsese
The thought
I’ve never really known what to do about bad days. Especially about announcing that you’re having one. Some people say you should surrender to them, but I always felt that writing off an entire day because of some unluckiness or some first-world stumbling block was so petulant. Like a microcosm of an entire life, most days are made up of some good and some bad.
Of course, there will be terrible days. But these kind of days are so self-evidently shit, so all-encompassingly awful, that mentioning the badness is moot. At your father’s funeral, you will not go around at the wake with a pouty face saying “Ugh, I’m having a BAD day.”
But now let me tell you about Monday, October 13. A day that shook my conviction about the good/bad microcosm.
At 2am I picked up a crying Archie, who projectile vomited on me. And his bed. And the carpet. We both went back to bed around 4.30am.
At 7am, it became clear that Ian had the bug too. He stayed in bed, groaning. While he was in bed, groaning, he got a call with very bad work news. There was more groaning, now intermingled with some swearing.
At 8am, I drove Rory to school. I KNOW he shouldn’t have gone – our house was an incubus of viral plague – but while keeping a well child home because he is pre-contagious is the right thing to do in theory, it personally inconvenienced me at the time so I didn’t.
At 8.15am, I had a conversation with Rory’s teacher that went like this:
Her: “I want to talk to you about Rory’s thumb sucking. Whenever he’s sucking his thumb, I feel he isn’t listening or receiving instructions.”
Me: “But doesn’t he suck his thumb pretty much the entire time?”
Her: “Yes.”
At 8.30am, I was driving home and the car made a noise like a vacuum cleaner inhaling a large rock. I didn’t stop and drove it back to our house while it screamed in protest. I felt guilty, like a jockey whipping a lame horse around a track. Apparently, our car was also very ill. I satisfied myself that there was no smoke coming from anywhere and left it in the driveway.
For the rest of the day, I dabbed sparkling water into stains made by bodily effluvia, googled cruelty-free thumb-sucking prevention, brought Ian various broths in bed and bounced a whimpering Archie on my hip.
A mobile mechanic came and confirmed that our car did actually suck up a stone into its engine (what?) and handed me a bill for £250.
That night, Rory woke up crying. And then threw up on me.
A bad day? Arguably. Compared to what, though? If, at the end of my hopefully long life, I tot up the bad days, I’m pretty sure this one isn’t making it into the charts.
And what if I compare it to a bad day in a life outside my privileged bubble? I’d grab my nursery bugs back before you could say “blegh”.
This is the philosophical question of whether suffering is relative or absolute. Should you put your problems in the fun house mirror of comparison, shrinking or expanding them compared to others’? Or should you surrender to the fact that you can only know how it feels to be you, right now?
Here’s what Zadie Smith says about it (when in doubt, turn to Zadie). She wrote this essay about the nature of suffering in 2020 when the subject of “who’s allowed to complain” was very much on people’s minds:
It is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable. Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it. Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.
It does prove quite difficult to outsmart your bad day when you’re in it. Two weeks later, I can do it easily, laughing at the image of me covered in sick. A mere two times! And by people I love!
Think of the NHS nurse who gets covered in worse, from strangers, and has to go on to the next disaster, for 12 hours, never sitting down.
It’s a helpful comparison, but are any comparisons helpful when we’re really going through it?
I do have one failsafe happy thought that always works when silver linings are in short supply, though: everything is copy.
Charles Darwin having a bad day, via Shaun Usher
The thing
Ever the early adopter, this week I bought an air fryer. Whoah, guys, why didn’t anyone tell me?! Why did not one person ever say the words “air fryer” to me before now?
Ok, a few people might have mentioned it. But I thought if I had an oven and a microwave and a toaster and an excellent clay pot for making roast chicken, I didn’t need another ugly appliance on my counter top in my already cluttered kitchen.
I was wrong. I was so wrong. I did need one. And so do you. Kids’ food takes 12 minutes, instead of 52 minutes. It’s so laughably easy and it all goes in the dishwasher afterwards.
I got the Ninja one, by the way. Ninja by name, ninja by nature. My life is changed.
The thought
I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to this story when it came out in July, but it is staggering. A UK soldier in the special forces accidentally sent an email (talk about bad days) with the personal details of thousands of Afghans who had applied for settlement in the UK, making them a target for the Taliban. Then two UK governments kept the leak a secret for two years. Anyway, I now know the meaning of a “superinjunction” which is that certain information is banned as well as the fact of the injunction itself.
Anyone who has overly loving grandparents in their life will laugh at this from Bess Bell Kalb on “actual things her parents said while watching her son’s swimming lesson.”
I’ve almost finished India Knight’s amazing new book called Home and it’s a delight, like everything she does. It’s filled with practical things like how to choose bath mats and light bulbs, and then more rambling life advice like inner child work that involves trying to remember what really gave you joy as a little kid and tapping into that when you create your interior spaces. I don’t know what to call the genre of book when wise, older women give you specific advice about things but it’s the best.
As a side note on this, she has a part about choosing round things to soften a room: “You are a soft, curved human, surrounded by hard angles. It’s not relaxing. That’s why you don’t feel cosy. You need round things. Round things have magical, interiors-dilemma-solving properties.” So, I went out and bought a terracotta pot that was lovely and curvy for my bay window. However, I obviously only looked at the front of the pot, because when I got it home I noticed that one side was all black and singed.
(This is the singed side, which I obviously turn towards the back. Also this is a rented house and I didn’t choose those blinds, just so you know).
Anyway, Ian saw it and asked if I got my pot from Pompeii. Savage. But quite funny.
I loved Mr Scorsese, the Apple TV documentary about Martin Scorsese, made by Daniel Day Lewis’ wife, Rebecca Miller. It’s got EVERYTHING: cocaine-fuelled rages, Isabella Rossellini referring to his “tiny body”, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie (yet more groaning from Ian, for a different reason), Mick Jagger, and that part in the Last Waltz where The Staple Singers sing The Weight and Mavis Staples’ voice is the eighth wonder of the world (go to exactly one minute in).
Ok that was long and that is all. Thank you so much for reading the (increasingly sporadic) Thursday Three! xxxx
Call me. I’ll pop over next time. 🤢
I just love your Thursday three!