An Unexpected Poet and a Meeting in the Woods.

I call, merrily, ‘Goodbye, Gilly. Lovely to see you.’

I wasn’t at all merry an hour earlier. I woke up, as I sometimes do, with a sense of pressure and portent. I usually put into action a potent combination of hippy dippy and spit-spot to deal with this waking doom. Some days it is easier than others.

I’m wrestling with a big piece of work, which is in danger of winning the fight. I have lost all faith in my elected representatives. The Brexit omnishambles makes me want to chew my own arm off. And I made the mistake of watching some American political programmes last night, and came face to face with the latest Trumpish incarnation. (I often think of the brilliant and extremely naughty Evelyn Waugh line about James Joyce and Ulysses. ‘You can hear him going mad, sentence by sentence.’ Mr Trump makes Joyce look like an amateur in the bonkerness stakes.) 

Oh, and I’m in the middle of the dear old menopause, so there are hormonal storms which blow up out of nowhere. 

Which is why, this morning, I had to bring all my Mary Poppins and all my Blitz spirit and all my All You Need Is Love to bear. I had to hunt for the silver linings like a truffle hound. I had to go out and forage for the good stuff. 

This blog is called The Small Things for a reason. It is in the small things that I find my daily salvation. And today I found my first consoling small thing on Twitter, of all places.

Someone had retweeted a poem by a man called Nick Asbury. It was so good that I didn’t have any words for it, and I live by words. All the usual superlatives I use - brilliant, dazzling, stunning - somehow felt gaudy and gimcrack. 

I went and investigated this Mr Asbury. It turns out that he has written daily poems about the news, and Brexit, and the current political madness. That sounds rather mundane and demoralising, but he’s somehow turned base metal into gold. 

I can’t even begin to express how human, funny, melancholy and lyrical the poems are. He’s taken some of the things that make me feel slightly sick every day, and turned them into the stuff of dreams. I know a bit about writing, but I have no idea how he does that.

And, as if the universe was giving me an extra present, it turns out that there is also a Sue Asbury, who makes ravishing pictures which match the poems in spirit and soul. So there is prose beauty and visual beauty.

I don’t understand, I thought, how I have lived in the world and not known about the Asburys.

The sense of doom lifted. There is goodness and fineness out there, if only one digs a little. And I went out into the woods with a little lift of hope in my heart. The dogs ran about in their usual giddy way, filled with the hilarity of living, and the sun was shining and the air was clear and the colours were gleaming and beaming. I made some videos for the writing group I run. ‘Get momentum into your sentences,’ I said. ‘Give them somewhere to go. Let them dance.’

I thought about my own sentences. I thought of letting them run across the open plains like Mongolian ponies. (My current favourite writing metaphor.)

It’s all right, I thought. I shall make it through this day. It won’t be a masterpiece, but it is saved. The Asburys saved it, and the Scottish sunshine saved it, and the woods saved it, and the lurchers saved it; all the small things saved it.

And that was when we saw Gilly. I was absurdly pleased. Gilly is a very big, extremely handsome and comically friendly dog. We see him often in the woods, and he likes to play with my boys whilst I have a chat with his human. This morning, he was not with his usual person and the smiling woman walking him looked slightly surprised when he bounded up to me and I greeted him with cries of joy. I explained how we usually see him with his other human. Her face cleared, as if reassured that I was not a complete freak. 

And we talked for a moment, about our dogs, about how funny and sweet Gilly is, about the bright autumn weather and how lucky we are to have it. The smallest of small things. We did not speak of the meaning of life or the secrets of the universe. It was a tiny, ordinary interaction, a matter of quick minutes. But it meant something. It was a little fillip, a reminder that not everyone is shouting and arguing and accusing each other of treachery. Some people are walking their dogs and being polite to strangers in hats. 

And that was why, when I waved in farewell and called out, ‘Goodbye, Gilly,’ I said the words merrily. You can’t just expect loveliness to be there, waiting for you each day, when you wake from troubled dreams. You have to go out and find it.