A Day in the Life

一天从闹钟响之前开始，到灯关掉之后结束：做饭、家务、身体、街区的人和消息，以及那些不动声色的小快乐。

Morning

Before the Alarm

I wake three minutes before the alarm, and I have done this for so long that my body no longer waits for it. The night is usually still on the other side of the window. The light is grey, not yet white, and the street outside is empty except for one person who walks a large dog and never looks up. I lie there for a while and do nothing at all. That is my first decision of the day, and it is a good one.

Yesterday I washed the sheet and put it on the bed late at night, and the room still smells faintly of soap. My phone says twelve degrees, which is cold for this month but somehow feels fine. I stretch, and my shoulders say hello to the ceiling. This is a habit now, a routine, and I would not want to lose either one.

The alarm goes. Morning arrives whether I am ready or not. I am often ready, and sometimes I am not. On Mondays it takes me ten minutes. On Saturdays it takes one. The clock on the wall says the same thing either way, and I have never once argued with a clock and won.

I stand, and the first thing I do is open the curtain fully. There is no other way to begin. The size of the day ahead is not yet clear to me, and I have learned not to try to make it clear too early. That is a second piece of wisdom, or possibly the same one again.

The Kitchen at Six

The kitchen is the warmest room in the flat, and by six it is the only one with the light on. I cook a very small breakfast most days: an egg, some milk, and coffee in a heavy white cup. If it is raining, I add tea. I do this with almost no thinking, which is the point of a routine. My hands know the order. They know where the plate is, and the bowl, and which drawer holds the knife.

I eat at the table, and I eat slowly, which almost never happens later in the day.

Lunch is the meal I plan and dinner is the meal I improvise. That arrangement has worked for years. In summer I eat more vegetable and fruit: tomato, cucumber, a potato salad, and whatever the market had that morning. In winter the menu is narrower and heavier. A fish with rice, chicken with salt, cheese and bread when I am too tired to stand long.

I do not pretend this is a perfect diet. I know the health score on my phone is not good, and I know my weight moves slowly and then, suddenly, not at all. I eat one ice cream in the summer and one chocolate bar in the winter. I have never once felt guilty about this, and I recommend the method to everybody.

Cooking is not a passion for me in the way it is for other people. It is closer to maintenance. But there is a deep and quiet satisfaction in a clean kitchen at the end of it, and that is enough. I wash the pan, and the sink is full of hot water, and I stand there longer than I need to, watching the tap drip twice.

The House and the Garden

The Work of the House

The apartment is small. I have two rooms, a floor of old grey stone, and windows that do not shut properly in August. The wall behind the bed has a pale square on it where a picture used to hang. I keep meaning to do something about it and I never do.

Dust is the only real enemy. It gets into books, into the carpet, into the corners of the furniture where the mirror throws light and shows me a stranger. I clean on Saturday, always, and never on Sunday. Sunday is for nothing. This is not religion. It is a rule, and rules are cheap.

Laundry takes longer than it should. A shirt goes in wet and comes out a different shape. The coat needs a button. The boots dry near the heater and the whole room smells of rain. I keep a spare pair of shoe by the door, and a hat on the hook, because I have learned that the day will ask something of me and I will not be ready.

Winter clothes have their own logic. A jacket, a belt, a long scarf I keep meaning to replace. A skirt I wear in summer, which is only possible because nobody at the office sees me on a weekend. In summer I wear a cap if I have washed it. This is not fashion. This is simply what is clean and does not hurt the neck.

The bath is the smallest room and the best one. A hot shower in the morning buys me about forty minutes of patience later. The brush I use for my teeth has been losing hairs since March, and I have kept it far too long, out of a kind of loyalty. I still go to the barber once every two months for the parts a brush cannot fix.

Once a year I cut my own hair with scissors from the kitchen drawer. The first cut is always worse than the second, and my neck tells me about it for two days.

The building has a strip of earth along the south side, maybe four metres by two, and four years ago three of us got permission to dig it up. I do most of the work. The others water it when they can, which is not often.

In the first year almost everything died. The soil was poor and full of stones, and I am no expert in this. We learned three things quickly: the ground must be drain well or the roots rot; you must add something to the soil every year; and you must not expect a plant to forgive you for two weeks of absence in August.

Now there is a tree at the far end that I planted from a seed my neighbour gave me, and it is still only a yard of height, but it is alive. I have also had a bad injury there, slicing my hand on a broken tile in the first spring, which is the reason I now wear gloves and look foolish doing it.

The grass at the edge is not really grass, it is whatever decided to grow. There is a strip of flower along the fence, mostly things that survived my ignorance. In May the whole thing looks good enough that people stop on the pavement to look at it, which is a strange and slightly embarrassing feeling, like being applauded by strangers.

In summer I water at seven in the evening. That is my ritual. I know the whole neighbourhood drinks water at that hour, and for ten minutes we are all out there doing the same thing, and nobody talks, and it is a quiet form of company.

I do not grow anything to eat, except one small bush of herbs by the door that has taught me that plants will die if you want them to and live if you forget about them. Which is, I think, a fairly good description of a lot of adult life.

The Body

The Body Sends Letters

I went to the doctor last month, which I recommend to nobody and everybody. The hospital near my building smells of floor polish and old paper. A nurse took my blood pressure four times because the first reading was strange, and she did it without making a face, which I appreciated more than I can say.

I am not sick. But I am not well in the way I was at twenty either. My back complains when I lift heavy things, and my knee has an opinion about stairs. I stretch in the morning and I walk half an hour at noon, and that is the entire extent of my exercise. The doctor says I should do more. The doctor is right.

Once or twice a week something small goes wrong: a cough, a cold, a strange pain in one tooth that appears on a Tuesday and leaves on Thursday. I recover each time without medicine, which my mother says is luck and my doctor says is probably age. My old symptom of worrying about nothing has not improved at all.

To be fair, I have no idea what is serious and what is not. A friend once had a terrible stomach for three days and it turned out to be bad fish. Another time a pain in my shoulder was the beginning of something that took six weeks and a lot of paper work. So: recovery takes time, and doctors take appointments, and I try to be a patient man about both.

Once I was truly ill and the hospital kept me four days. What I remember is not the illness at all. I remember the food arriving too warm, and a nurse in the corridor telling a joke at two in the morning, and the screen between the beds that I could see the shapes of people through. And a small glass of orange juice, and the taste of it, which was the best thing that happened to me all week.

The point is not to be perfect. The point is to keep going, quietly, until the afternoon arrives and it is somebody else's problem.

Here is what happens while I am not paying attention.

My heart beats about a hundred thousand times a day without asking me. I have read that number and it has never once improved my life. My lungs do their work. My stomach turns a meal into something usable, or does not, and announces the failure. Something at the back of my throat tightens when I am anxious, and I have never found out why, and my doctor has never found out why either.

My nose knows more than I want it to. Rain coming. Bread. A faint smell of something wrong from the fridge two rooms away. My inner ear tells me which way is down when I am trying to sleep, and I have spent many nights lying on my left side convinced the room is at a slight angle.

I bite the inside of my cheek roughly three hundred times a year. I have done it since childhood. Nobody has ever asked me about it and I have never mentioned it. Now you have been told.

When something goes wrong, my first reaction is always the same: a warm wave across the face and neck, then a horrible calm, and then the actual worry arriving about four seconds late. I noticed this pattern once and then stopped noticing it, because noticing it made it worse. Some machinery is better left alone.

I weigh myself on Monday morning and nothing else. The scale is old. I have deliberately never thrown it away, because a new one might be more accurate and I am not sure I could take that.

I am the equal of my own body, in the sense that it gives me what I ask for and no more. If I sleep badly, I am tired. If I walk, I can walk further. It is the most fair relationship in my life.

The doctor says: *moderate exercise, plenty of water, and stop drinking so much sugar*. I have stopped drinking so much sugar roughly eleven times.

Money

Money and the Walk to the Bank

Twice a month I walk to the bank, because the machine near my building is slow and often broken. I take the key out of my coat, open the door, and go in for six minutes. I take out cash. I pay a bill. I put some money into an account for things I cannot plan, which is most things.

I keep a budget on a piece of paper in the drawer, not on the phone, because paper does not send me a message at midnight about my spending. The paper is short and plain. It says: rent, food, transport, and a small amount of nonsense. The nonsense is the important part. I save what I can, and I have never once regretted it.

Near the bank there is a shop that sells everything and understands nothing. The price of everything in it is expensive, and yet people go there because it is warm and the woman behind the counter knows their names. I buy milk and a newspaper there when I have nothing better to do.

At the other end of the block, a family store sells vegetables at a price I cannot believe, and their apples are cheap and enormous. It also sells one thing I cannot stop buying: a single bunch of onion on the top shelf, four for almost nothing. The woman puts them in a paper bag and the bag always leaks a little on the walk home.

At the station end, a hotel took a young designer and turned it into a clothing store with a small shelf of paperbacks near the door. Two years ago it sold bread at four in the morning. It closed, and the street got a little ordinary and a little less alive.

I buy less than I need. This is my only real system. On the way home I stop at the discount place and buy one thing I do not need, and the day becomes suddenly fine.

Cash, Cards, and the Man Who Counts

The man who counts the money at the bank has worked there for thirty-one years and he knows the day I come in the way other people know a season. He does not say good morning. He says, "Same as Tuesday?" and I say, "Same as Tuesday." That is the whole of our conversation and it is more than enough.

He can count a coin pile faster than I can find my keys. I watched him once with a paper bag of small change, and he did the whole thing in ninety seconds without looking up, and I decided that whatever else happens to me in life I would like to be able to do that.

We have moved from coin to card without anyone noticing. Cash is now what I use for the market, the bus, and the two men who still come to fix things. A card is what I use for everything larger than that. I do not fully understand how any of it works and I have decided this is a reasonable position.

Paying is a strange small ritual. The screen on the machine says Please wait, and I stand there and watch the amount appear, and for two seconds I feel a sour corner of myself. It is not a big feeling. It is a sour note and then it is gone. Everything I buy, somebody else once made or grew or dug it. It is remarkable, when you say it out loud, how cheap the good days are.

I try to earn honestly. Whatever my job has been, I have never cheated and I never will, and there is no particular reward for that except the small quiet feeling that I am not a scoundrel. My mother's father lost his business because a partner went bad on him, and my mother told me once, seriously, that this is the only story she ever needed to tell me about money.

There was a time, a few years ago, when I was flat out of money in a way that was genuinely frightening. Not poor. Frightening. It was a bad winter and the work had stopped and I did not tell anybody. What I learned from it was not a lesson about budgeting. It was that the terror is worse than the fact, and that one honest phone call to the right person ends it in an afternoon. I am not proud of that winter. I am glad I did not make it into eight winters.

If you are doing this yourself: I am sorry, and it is temporary, and the people who look at you like you are a dummy are mostly just uncomfortable.

The Street and the People in It

People Passing Through

My flat has one bedroom and I do not offer it to anyone. But people come into my life constantly, and most of them pass through the living room holding a cup.

My sister comes on Thursday evenings for about an hour. She brings a bag of oranges and takes a bottle of something back. We talk about our mother, who is alive and well and drives us both mad in a different way each. It is a good hour. It is always the same hour.

Every summer a friend stays in my guest room for a fortnight, and it is the only time I clean it twice. She wakes at six and I am mad about it for the first two days and then I am not, because there is a switch in my own head that goes over somewhere around the fourth morning. After that the two of us are like a pair of old dresses that hang together.

We do not do much. We take the bus to the beach, we eat too much, we swim, we talk about nothing until two in the morning. Once she cut her hair short and came out of the bathroom and I did not recognise her, and I said something honest rather than polite, and she was not mad at all. That was a good evening.

Twice a year there is a bigger party. We clear the furniture against one wall and somebody brings a speaker and it is always too loud. My neighbour complains, and always quietly, and then she comes down and dances badly in the hall with everybody else, and by eleven she is the popular one.

An old woman from number twelve comes by every Tuesday to borrow a tool she could buy for the price of a coffee. She is eighty-one. She has a holiday coming, she says, and does not say where. She watches a movie on my television and asks me to rewind the same scene twice. Then she stands up, and takes a bow, like it is a performance, and goes home. I celebrate that visit for a week.

Children come sometimes. One boy once asked whether he could play with my tools, and I said only if you put them all back, and he did, exactly, which is more than I can say for myself. A toy on his floor made a noise I found unbearable, and I noticed that I was mad about the noise and not about the child, and I thought about that for a while afterwards.

I have stopped keeping score of how often people come. The count would not mean anything. My friend says I am far too friendly, which from her is a diagnosis.

The River, the Flood, and the Sheep

The town I grew up in had a river and a flood. Not a dramatic flood, not once in fifty years, but the sort that happens every few years and takes the low street and the lower floor of the shop on the corner.

The flood is a conventional subject at home. Somebody mentions a heavy autumn and the whole family starts talking about the water level at the bridge, and everybody knows the story by heart, and nobody minds telling it again.

The river has been altered upstream for a very long time. The water arrives now at the wrong time, faster and higher than it used to, and the wall that holds it back is old. Everybody in town knows this and no two people agree about what to do.

On the top road above the river there is a farmer with forty sheep. I have visited him twice. He is sixty and does not talk much, and once I spent twenty minutes looking at his land while he said almost nothing at all, and it was the most restful twenty minutes I have had in months. The sheep are distant. They are always in the field in a long pale line, and the dog that moves them is a black shape against a green shape, and from where I stood I could not hear a sound.

His grandfather kept sheep, and his father kept pigs. There is a horse on the far side of the valley that he points at and says nothing about, and I have thought about that a fair amount.

Walking back from there, I always feel exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with my legs. In the city I am constantly wearing out. Out there the day has a shape and the shape fits me.

If you go to a place like that, wrap up properly even when it is warm. Bring more water than you think. And remember that distant hills look close and take twice as long, which is a fact I have learned on several hills.

The Shop on Vane Street

Two streets over there is a secondhand shop that is really an edition of another century. It sells coats that were beautiful in 1958, a designer's chair with one arm, four opera records, and a coal stove that has not been lit since my grandmother's time.

It is owned by a gentleman named Mr Hall, who is in retirement and who dominates the room simply by sitting in the middle of it. He has worked in the clock trade for forty years, which is why he fixes things nobody else will touch. If you bring him a broken radio he will spend twenty minutes with it, and if he cannot save it he will tell you so, and then tell you what the same money would buy you new.

I go there when I am sad and also when I am happy, which my mother says is the healthy part.

Last Tuesday I bought a small silver bowl for two dollars. Mr Hall told me it was worthless, and then he told me the story of a woman who brought it in in 1974 and asked him to keep it safe, and he has been keeping it safely for fifty years because she asked. The story was better than the bowl.

He has a display of stamps in the back, and one of them is royal, and green, and worth more than the whole shop. He will not sell it. He says a classic thing should stay where it is. I think about that sentence more than is reasonable.

The shop is where the neighbourhood keeps its history, because everyone comes in. The retired teacher knows the name of the old man who had the shop before him. A young woman from three doors down now works there on Saturdays, and she is learning to spell the price tickets wrong and to correct them. She told me she wants to study literature at night school. I told her she should absolutely do that.

There is a zone of shops like this all over the city, and every year one of them closes and the street loses a small piece of what makes it worth walking down.

What the Neighbours Are Actually Like

Ten flats, one staircase, a landing, and a limit on how long anyone can stand it. It is a small society with its own customs and its own stupid pride, and it has taught me more than any book.

The woman on the first floor has kept a cow in her life for thirty years. She is from the north, and twice a year the whole building smells of cheese. She brings plenty of it and insists nobody say anything kind about it.

The man on the fifth floor is a fantastic liar and everyone knows it. He once told a famous story at a funeral and three people in the stairwell recounted it afterwards with completely different details. It is the best story we own.

The boy on the ninth floor is fifteen and keeps a pride in his bicycle that I find touching. It is not a fast bicycle. He cleans it every Sunday with a cloth. I asked him once if it was fast and he said no, and then said that it was his, and I have thought about that sentence more than about the sheep.

Nobody knocks on a door unless there is a reason to. If somebody knocks, something has happened. That is the whole rule, and it has never once been wrong.

Last month the boiler went and we all met in the stairwell by boost hour, which is a ridiculous hour, to decide who to ring. An old man at the top, who has lived there forty years and never spoken at any of these meetings, said one sustained thing. He said, "We are going to argue for an hour and then phone the same man we phoned last time." The subsequent action took nineteen minutes. He was entirely right and everybody was visibly mad about how right he was.

The landlord sends one email a month with a photograph of the building and a word like reassuring. The word is exhaustive. I have stopped reading them.

Work

The Middle of a Weekday

Here is the part nobody photographs. The middle of an ordinary weekday.

Somewhere around ten the daily work settles into a kind of quiet, and for about ninety minutes I am not tired and not busy. This is the best hour of the working day and it passes quite quickly. I use it to drink a second coffee standing at the window, and to look at the garden opposite, which belongs to the school and which nobody looks at except me and one woman on the second floor who waters it at the same time every morning. We have never said anything to each other about it. I think of her as the co-owner.

At eleven I go to the shop and buy a tie for a meeting I do not enjoy. It costs too much and I buy it anyway, which is a pattern. Then I tie it badly, look at myself in the glass door of the lift, untie it, and put it in my bag.

At noon I lean back in the chair and put my feet up, which is against the rules, and which nobody has warned me about, because nobody cares. That is the closest thing to happiness that the middle of the day offers.

At one I eat. At two the emails arrive and I answer about a third of them properly. At three my head is dirty with it and I go and stand outside for ten minutes whatever the weather. There is a bench and a cat lives near it in a cardboard box in the summer.

At four I start to make small mistakes. I write the same sentence three times. I pick up the phone and put it down. I think about something I said in 2011.

At half past four I lock the door and go down the stairs slowly, because the stairs are the one thing I still do badly. Climbing them twice a day, four floors, five days a week, is more than a hundred flights a week. I have done it for eleven years, and I have never once counted them until now.

At five I am almost free. At six I am free. The difference between those two hours is the entire shape of a working life.

I rest at the weekend in a way I cannot describe. Nothing happens. A beer in the afternoon. A film I have already seen. The kitchen is already clean and I do not touch it. I do not plan this. A plan for a weekend would turn it into a weekday, and I have enough of those.

Messages, Films, and Old Songs

I do not write many letters any more. My handwriting is slow and my patience is short. But every month I write two, on paper, to two people who are not on the internet much. I buy the stamp at the counter and I put it on carefully. A letter is heavy in the hand. An email is not.

Text messages I send forty times a day, most of them to nobody in particular. The phone is in my pocket and it buzzes and I do not always answer, and there is a kind of peace in that. When I do answer, the message is usually about a delivery, a dentist, or a photograph I do not understand.

I post the letters on a Monday, which means I think about them for two days first.

My media habits are old-fashioned. There is a radio on the shelf and a television in the other room that I turn on for company. In the evening I watch something with no interest in the picture. In the afternoon, a great deal of music.

I have a folder of old songs from my mother's time, and when I am tired I sing badly along with them. My voice has no pitch and no volume to speak of, but the kitchen is mine and I do not have to be good. A photo of my mother hangs in the hallway, and every time I pass it I am stopped for a second by her expression, which was always the same: half laughing, entirely serious.

Once a month a few friends come over. We invite people, we feed them too much cake, and someone always brings a gift of wine that nobody opens until the last minute. Those weekend nights are warm and loud and I am very glad to be at the edge of them.

Once a year we have a real party, at somebody else's house, for a reason that seems very important in January and slightly absurd in March. We take a photo of the whole room. Somebody always drinks too much and tells a story he has told before. It is a good night. I always sleep well after.

Once a month I go to the cinema alone on a Tuesday afternoon. A film, a bad seat, a large drink. The theatre is almost empty and the screen is enormous and the room smells of popcorn and old carpet, and for two hours I dream that I am a different person with a better life. Then I come home and water the plant.

Every so often a friend visits from another country, and for three days my home has an accent it has never had.

Wednesday, and the Meeting

There is a residents' association on my street. It meets on Wednesday evening in the hall of the primary school, and I have gone for eleven years. I am not a leader by any measure. I am a man in the second row who takes notes and is glad to be useful.

It sounds dull. It is not. It is the only place where I have heard the word civil used with its full weight, meaning the kind of society we are trying to keep. We argue about a proposed building on the empty lot, about the new legislation on noise, and about the policy of the council, and it turns out that every policy is somebody's initiative and most of them are expensive.

At the last meeting a young lawyer gave a report in formal language and made a poor first impression on half the room and a very good one on me. She is now on the committee. I did not object. She is responsible and she works hard, and I would rather have her than a comfortable neighbour who never speaks.

There is a competition in this business, though nobody calls it that. If you want a new pavement you must compete with the people who want a parking zone, and if you want the parking zone you must find enough people who identify with driving. It is a zero-sum score, mostly. We argue, we write letters, we drink tea in plastic cups, and sometimes we win.

We have to be careful, because a decision we take in one season will still be here in ten years. Nobody forgets anything on a street like this. I have a clear memory of the last big fight, and so does everybody else, and it took two years to get past.

The assessment of the plan is due in the spring. The developer's description sounds good on paper: unique housing, more light, a green space in the middle. I have read the literature they sent us. I do not trust it, and I have learned to say so politely. My main role is to check the numbers, and to add a line to the note, and to sign the sheet at the end. I am good at that. I was a basic kind of clerk for thirty years and this is the same work in a different coat.

What I like about the association is the level of the talk. Nobody asks me to be clever. And nobody treats it as a game. Well, almost nobody.

Once a month we explore one small thing seriously. We read four pages of the actual planning document. Someone finds out that the provision for trees in the new plan is exactly twelve per street, which is below the level the council claims. We write to them. They write back. It is slow, and it is not hopeless.

The best part is the participation itself: twenty people in a cold room, arguing about a slope, a drain, a curve of road where water stands after rain, and finding out that the whole scheme fails in one small place. It is formal and it is also companionable. You cannot do that on the internet with people you have never met. I have tried. It is clear to me afterward that a passion for a plan is worth less than a presence in the room.

Secondly, and this surprises people, I enjoy the boring parts. The total cost of the drainage, the water pressure, the noise report. I like a boring number, honestly. Numbers do not shout at you.

If the argument gets loud, somebody old stands up and says, quietly, "Sit down." It works. It has worked for years. It is worth more than any assessment we have ever written.

How I Got Here, Which Was Not a Plan

I want to be direct about this, because there is a version of my life where everything makes sense and that version is false.

I left school at eighteen with no advance on the world and a fairly clear sense that I was not special. My mother worked in an office for thirty years and she employed me for a summer at a firm that handled finance for small companies. I was the boy who fetched the coffee. It was specifically the summer I learned that a debt is just a piece of paper that somebody has agreed to keep quiet about for a while.

I applied for eight jobs and got three. The third was at a travel agency in a first-floor office above a sports shop, and I stayed four years. The woman who owned it was apparently difficult and in fact simply busy. She taught me to answer the phone directly, to write down names immediately, and never to abuse a customer who was rude. She was right about all three, and I have been using it every week for twenty years.

When the agency closed I was unemployed for five months, and the appointment letter I got the week before it closed said, welcome, and I have that letter framed. Nobody tells you at eighteen that the first job you ever love will end for no advancement of reason at all.

Since then I have had seven jobs. Three of them were suitable on paper and wrong in the room. Two were terrible and useful. Two were a vast improvement. I have never been self-employed, which people find strange, and which I find fortunate, because the only thing worse than being bored is being bored alone.

What I have learned about enhanceing anything, in work or otherwise, is that it is almost never done by adding something. It is done by removing a small irritation that you had grown used to. This is an outline, not a rule, but it has held up far better than my actual rules have.

I have never earned much. I do not have a complex financial life. I have a flat, a job, a bus pass, and a garden that mostly does not need me, and against any reasonable standard this is a life that has worked.

Small Errors and Accidental Wisdom

A short list, kept in no order, most of it wrong.

I recently turned the oven on and walked out. I was gone for approximately twenty minutes. The gas man came and was very polite about it and charged nothing, and I warned myself afterwards in exactly the tone of somebody who has learned nothing. The next day I did the same thing with the electric kettle. There is a frequency to this that I find faintly mad.

I once let the lease on my old flat run for two months after I had moved out, because I never posted the letter. That cost me nearly a month of rent. It was stupid. I had already moved. I had the keys. I simply did not send the paper.

My cousin went through a divorce last year and it was far more expensive and far longer than either of them expected. I learned nothing useful from it except to keep my own household papers in one folder, which I now do.

The cycle of the washing machine is nineteen minutes and I have stood and watched it enough times to know. The pump on the dishwasher is the part that breaks, and it costs almost as much as a new machine, which is a rare kind of joke that nobody in particular wrote.

My flat is too small and too expensive and I will not move, because moving costs money and trouble and I would have to learn a new route and a new door and a new face in the shop. I think about that and find it sad, and then I put the kettle on.

The medium through which I meet most people is a screen now. The image is good. The voice is usually strange. I miss a lot of things that only happen in bad weather and in rooms without windows.

You acquire a habit the way a dog acquires a route: slowly, by repetition, without ever deciding to. My mother says I have the same initial look I had at nine, which I take as a compliment.

The apparent reason I am a decent cook is talent. The actual reason is that I heat things and then divide my attention between two tasks.

Evening, and Other Things

Old Tapes, and the Machine That Still Works

My father left three tapes and a machine that still runs. That is the entire inheritance.

They are not tapes of anything you would choose. One is a ceremony from 1981, a school prize day, in which I am nine and receive a certificate for a handwriting competition and look apparently astonished. The applause is enormous and slightly embarrassing. My father was in the third row and you can hear him shouting something that is not a cheer but might as well be.

The second is an interview with a man about a strike that lasted four months. I know nothing about it. He is calm and occasionally bitter, and after about eight minutes he stops answering questions and starts talking, and the woman with the recorder lets him, and I have never forgotten that she let him.

The third is nothing: forty minutes of a kitchen, a radio, and a chair being moved. My parents arguing about money, then not arguing about money. That is the one I play most.

I play them directly into the earphone, the way the machine was meant to be used, though I have turned the treble up, which is not the point.

An hour of a family screaming at each other about a wage can be educational. It puts a lower limit on your own complaints. It also makes you understand that the person you were at nine is still present and is probably lucky.

I have thought about transferring them to a computer. I have thought about it for three years. I will probably do it in a particular weekend that is still some way off.

Things I Have Learned the Hard Way

A short list, kept in no order.

I know, the way you know a fact you learned as a child, that a day is not a small thing. It is the main unit of a life, and the base on which everything else is built. I spent years thinking the activity mattered more than the day. It did not.

I have learned that to achieve anything ordinary, you must practise it in accord with a plan that is not exciting. There is no other route. People who appear to have skipped a step have only taken it where you cannot see.

I have learned that a lack of money is not the same as a lack of knowledge, and that knowing a thing early is worth almost nothing without practice.

The older I get, the more I retain and the less I can focus. I remember a street from 1997 perfectly and I cannot find my keys now.

I do not deserve most of what I have, and I know that, and knowing it has made me slower and kinder.

I have made a mistake in judgement that cost a friend a job. I still think about it. He does not, which is the whole difficulty.

I used to achieve things to be seen. Now I mostly want to be useful, which turns out to be far less satisfying and much more satisfying.

A man once told me the best advice he ever got, which I recall every so often. It was: keep a list of what you are avoiding, and do the top item weekly, and never tell anybody about it. I have been doing this for years. It is the only real system I have.

The Bits Nobody Would Believe

True facts about my week, offered without context:

I scream at the television roughly once a fortnight, alone, at a man I have never met who is doing badly.

I have sweared at the printer in this flat and in two offices before this one. The printer at home is fourteen years old and it is going to outlive me. I have made a formal complaint to the company. They sent a sorry and an apology note and a discount on ink, which is a better outcome than most of my arguments.

I contributed eleven years to a scheme for a thing that does not yet exist and may never exist. My pride in it is completely unjustified.

I swore to my mother in 1998 that I would never live in a flat. I have lived in six. She brings this up faithfully and I am always lazy about defending myself.

I have a rule for a good day. There are three, in this order: someone cooked for me, I laughed out loud once, and I was outside for more than twenty minutes. That is the whole list. It has been the same since I was thirty and I have never had cause to change it.

The genuine limitation of a day is that it does not go on. That is not sad. That is the entire point of it.

A Week, Entirely

Monday: nothing. Tuesday: the ride to the shop is slow and I get annoyed. Wednesday: the meeting, and a video call at four that could have been a blind email. Thursday: my sister, and the oranges. Friday: I said no to something and felt unfortunately good about it. Saturday: the cleaning, the laundry, the shop, the seed catalogue. Sunday: the tape, the garden, the long bath.

Soon it is Monday again.

Three small facts about money. There are, by my count, four cent-level decisions I make every single week that together cost more than anything I ever argue about at the meeting. I know the amount. I have never changed one of them. This is the most compound sort of habit there is.

My neighbour on the fourth floor has been dead set on a rebuild since 2015. He has been neither optimistic nor pessimistic about it. He has simply continued. I asked him once how he manages and he said, "There is no deadline." That is a sorry answer and a decent one.

I have never said no to a lady who asked me to take a photograph of her. That is my excuse for the eighty photographs of strangers' backs I apparently have.

The whole plan for the empty lot will go ahead and be overseen by a committee with a fixed budget, and somebody will be responsible for the trees, and two of them will be wrong. And I will be there, doing the same thing on Tuesday.

One more thing, and then I will stop. The engineer who came about the heating in November was a young man I called sir at least four times in twenty minutes. He laughed at me the first two times and then simply ignored it, which was worse. But it opened something up, and before he left we had a real conversation about his excess of work and mine, and we agreed at the door that both of us had said yes to too much this year. Then he was gone and there was dust to sweep.

On the way home I bought a packet of tissue for nothing, because I wanted it. I stopped at the corner and wrote a note in the margin of my diary in pencil, so it could be rubbed out. I rubbed it out. Then I wrote it again the next morning, because I did not want it gone.

The man on the top floor keeps a knife he sharpens every Sunday on the stairs, and a wool coat that has outlasted three governments. The coat is suitable for exactly one thing, which is standing still on a hill in cold wind, which is what he does. That habit in him is triggered by nothing and lasts all day. I have watched him do it faithfully for eleven years and he has never once waved. I am not sure he knows I watch.

If I could appoint one hour of the week to be unproductive on purpose, it would be Thursday at four. And I would carry on forth into Friday with nothing done at all.

And a week is similarly a year, and a year is a life, except that nobody is alive long enough to check the arithmetic, which I find a relief rather than a sadness, and which I will now stop trying to explain.

Evening

Evening is the good part. I wash the plate, or the bowl, or the pot, and the kitchen goes warm and small. I put on one song and then, if the mood holds, three more. I look at the pale square on the wall and decide again not to hang anything.

I eat something cold standing up. There is a pleasure in this that I cannot explain to anybody who eats at a table. Then I sit down with the television off and the radio on and no light except the one from the window, which is now the other colour.

I think about the crowd in the street at six, and the sound of the horn, and the way the old man on the corner shouts at a dog he does not own. I think about my mother's tongue getting faster as she gets older. I think about the coal smoke in the air of the town where I was born, and the smell of it in my clothes when I was nine.

At ten I lie down and read ten pages of nothing in particular. At eleven the light goes off, and I relax by degrees, and the sleep comes easier than it did at thirty, though the tiredness of the day has its own weight.

Tomorrow I will do most of this again.

It is not much of a day. It does not have a rise or a fall. It has a plate, a door, a window with a curve of old paint, a woman in the shop who knows my name, and a dog on the street that is not mine.

I would not change much of it, and I am not in a hurry.

If you want the same day from a wider angle, read The Shape of a City and The People Around Us.

One More Thing About Mornings

My sister thinks I am odd about this. She edits documents, which means she reads what other people wrote and moves commas, and she says the problem with me is that I have one mode and I stay in it. She is right. The usual story is that a person has three or four ways of working and selects between them by how they feel, and I do not. I have one. My days do not differ from each other, and they are not meant to.

We elect people in November, and I turn up, and I mostly know why I chose what I chose, and it takes about as much thought as choosing coffee. This is not a defence. It is only that the small votes are made in June, quietly, and the big ones in November are their echo.

The other evening a man was shot in a street two streets away, and the whole road came out to look at nothing. That is the truth of a neighbourhood: it will show up for a tragedy and miss the good day. I did not go out. I stood at the window and watched the door of the house opposite open, then close.

That is the day. It happens again tomorrow, and the day after, until it does not.

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