In Which Perkiness Ensues

It has been occurring to me recently that what is needed is a deliberate appreciation of the small good things that are all over the place. As such, for the next... shall we say fortnight? I have decided to make a note of three good things, no matter how small or large, with no repetitions allowed within the fortnight, every day.

Obviously it’s not what you’d call a highly sophisticated plan, but I’m pretty sure that this sort of thing does people good. Here are yesterday’s Things (and don’t worry, I’m not going to insist on posting them all, it’s just that we need a “latest post” which has a higher sanity quotient, I feel, so this becomes a blog post rather than a 6 word entry in my notebook).

Here goes: it may sound silly, but I really like that rustling noise my (and presumably your) hair makes when I walk into a slight breeze with my hair really clean and dry and untied. Maybe this is only a thing with long hair, and obviously it would only work with your hair out, but there’s this lovely silky noise as it lifts and settles slightly with every step. A sort of high pitched “shhsss shhsss shhsss” noise. Maybe that’s a bit odd, but I like it.

Next up, yesterday we had a lecture in which Awfully Nice Jenny and I sat together and listened but also sneakily ate Nutella (of which, for reasons complex, she had a jar with her) off bits of plastic fork. This cutlery-modulated mode of delivery is the best way to eat Nutella. Once you sully it with bread or whatever you’re supposed to spread it on, it’s all downhill (unless you’re making a fantastic dessert pizza, or maybe having it on banana or something). Obviously this is slightly idiosyncratic, as an approach, once you’re older than about 8, so it’s especially nice that other people have alSso feel that it is acceptable, even preferable to eat it thus. But mainly it was just an awesome little impromptu lecture-picnic, and that was lovely.

Lastly (for yesterday) I have, over the last couple of days, been going through my ridiculous collection of earrings, ostensibly to tidy them up (so that they’re not just some kind of tangled sparkly morass in my jewellery box/drawer, but rather accessible, with the two halves of pairs together, and fewer empty boxes, and not all tied together by necklaces) but really, secretly, to find my favourite Bunny earrings, which are completely adorable and which have been lost for months. Last thing yesterday evening (so much last thing that it was really this morning, because we’d stayed up craft-project-ing and watching Audrey Hepburn movies and Rage) I finally found them, and there was much rejoicing. They say “why is it that things are always in that last place you look?” and usually it’s because I take the traditional approach, whereby having found what I’m looking for, I stop looking. In this instance, though, I must’ve gone through easily 100 tiny boxes and pairs of earrings all tangled up, and the ones in question turned out to be in genuinely the 3rd last box to be sorted through. This is good, because it kept me all motivated for the other 96 or whatever, but because they weren't in the very last box I hadn’t given up hope. Also, cannot help but feel that the very last box of all would have been pushing it a bit, just slightly clichéd.

Obviously, there were lots of good things yesterday, (any day on which you watch old movies while sewin’ on the couch is a good day, at least in part) but I think that picking Small Delightful Things is the real spirit of such a project. It’s dreadfully important, surely to remember to be delighted by little things every day, and I’ve been a smidgin off-task in that respect this last week, so this is charming.

It’s only early in today, so I haven’t got my Things yet, (I don’t want to use them up early, or I could be sneaky and lazy later on, and not bother to pay attention to the nice bits of the world), but the beautiful weather and view out my window, coupled with the nice, ordinary neighbourhood noises (waves in the distance, the occasional car purring into the carpark, small children being excitable on scooters and suchlike, and sometimes the distant vague pop of the outdoor military practice shooting range on the next headland) is certainly looking likely to make the cut. Also, it seems like a good thing to use up “it’s a lovely day” now, so I can’t be all “eh, whatever, it’s a nice day, I guess?” to make up numbers in a week’s time.

Maybe I should be more specific, though, it seems lazy not to bother. I think it’s cool that there’s a spot opposite my house, on the edge of the park, where there often seems to be a congregation of folks (different folks each time, not some kind of weird park-based cult) pointing and looking into the middle distance, probably at boats or something. This is kind of lovely, especially when, as now, there is a very small boy running around and around the little group (pretty clearly his family) uninterested in the whales or seagulls or whatever, but rather zooming about with his arms held out flat and slightly flapping them. Like some kind of excitable bird-cross-plane thing. Gives one the urge to go out to the park and bird-plane at some seagulls oneself, really.