A nice thing
A nice thing happened to me today. This is good, because it has been a week of horrid things. Burglar break-ins, niggles, and work that won’t bend to the will of a restless brain.
But the nice thing was very nice, and reminded me that whatever the world has to offer, the people are the bestest thing of all.
Some of you might already know the saga of the plastic bag. I won’t bore you by mentioning the details again - apparently I was becoming obsessed.
Probably.
I can never decide whether my obsessions are a good or a bad part of me. But they are very much a part of me, so I like to think they’re not all bad. This blog is becoming an obsession. As was the plastic bag. I got obsessed with Scrabble once. And knitting. And pavements.
Anyway, the plastic bag contained two signed poetry books by Julia Darling. I got them by skipping off naughtily in the middle of a Tuesday (or it might have been a Wednesday) to hear / see / absorb her reading the poems out loud. And she was full of vitality and presence, so much so that I can hear her exact intonation in my head as I read them back to myself.
Read them back? How can I read them back? Surely a hapless cleaner threw them in the bin by accident? Well yes, she did. And as soon as I discovered my loss, I sent Darling, Julia an email headed something like “A minor tragedy”. I needed to qualify the “tragedy” to prevent her thinking something bad happened to a person, instead of a book. Because books are important, but people are importanter.
Then Julia got quite ill, and I thought she was probably too bogged down with it all to be bothered about signing new books. And I kind of hoped she wouldn’t worry about it, because I didn’t want to be any trouble.
You’ll have guessed the punchline by now. An envelope, on my desk at work. Which mystified me, because I didn’t think I’d given her an address. But then I remembered the sign-off that foots all my work emails... and hey presto, a miracle sent by a Darling angel in a white Jiffy bag.
She says I have verve. In capital letters: VERVE.
I like that.
But the nice thing was very nice, and reminded me that whatever the world has to offer, the people are the bestest thing of all.
Some of you might already know the saga of the plastic bag. I won’t bore you by mentioning the details again - apparently I was becoming obsessed.
Probably.
I can never decide whether my obsessions are a good or a bad part of me. But they are very much a part of me, so I like to think they’re not all bad. This blog is becoming an obsession. As was the plastic bag. I got obsessed with Scrabble once. And knitting. And pavements.
Anyway, the plastic bag contained two signed poetry books by Julia Darling. I got them by skipping off naughtily in the middle of a Tuesday (or it might have been a Wednesday) to hear / see / absorb her reading the poems out loud. And she was full of vitality and presence, so much so that I can hear her exact intonation in my head as I read them back to myself.
Read them back? How can I read them back? Surely a hapless cleaner threw them in the bin by accident? Well yes, she did. And as soon as I discovered my loss, I sent Darling, Julia an email headed something like “A minor tragedy”. I needed to qualify the “tragedy” to prevent her thinking something bad happened to a person, instead of a book. Because books are important, but people are importanter.
Then Julia got quite ill, and I thought she was probably too bogged down with it all to be bothered about signing new books. And I kind of hoped she wouldn’t worry about it, because I didn’t want to be any trouble.
You’ll have guessed the punchline by now. An envelope, on my desk at work. Which mystified me, because I didn’t think I’d given her an address. But then I remembered the sign-off that foots all my work emails... and hey presto, a miracle sent by a Darling angel in a white Jiffy bag.
She says I have verve. In capital letters: VERVE.
I like that.