Holiday Time - Essay no. 7

It's the holidays and I can't keep a grip on time. The idea of 'gripping' time is, of course, ridiculous; I can imagine Jenny Odell, Oliver Burkeman and Tish Warren all wearily shaking their heads at me over such a thought. Time is not here for me to corral or bend to my tiny will. It cannot be tamed, tackled or teased into serving my purposes. 

What I mean to convey in my opening statement is that the school holidays - those blissfully gluestick-free weeks in between each term - upend my conceptions of time. Time is usually something I'm terrified of mismanaging or losing; I'm prone to treating it like a child I've assumed responsibility for. In the first week of the holidays, as my alarm is switched off and incoming emails dwindle to mailers from publishing companies, I relinquish my grip on my time-child, eventually getting to the point where I lose her entirely. 

Still, something has to occupy my days. Saturday morning brought with it a take-all-the-breath-out-of-you conversation. 'I'd like to hear from you less,' the other party concludes. Replaying it later that day makes me throw up in my mouth. There is no squirrelling out of the situation; hours of internal processing have been lost trying to make sense of shifting dynamics, culpability and lost love. Further hours lie ahead, I know, but in lieu of lying in the fetal position 24/7 and losing all grip on reality, I've opted to pivot, hard,  towards one of my favourite retreats: reading. 

A stack of books more than a foot tall sits to my left, waiting to be written up before being re-shelved and returned to personal and public libraries. I have lost huge chunks of time to Jewel's fantastic memoir,  more afternoons still to Bridget Jones and her crew in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. After finding the exact book that I was up to in the series in an op-shop on Thursday (could there be any surer pointer to one's next reading choice?), I returned to Three Pines and a down-but-not-out Inspector Gamache as he investigates yet another murder in the otherwise idyllic Quebecois town. This morning, after putting on a load of washing, I sat at the kitchen counter with the final pages of Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, aching and in awe at her commitment to bearing witness to her life. 

What has occupied my time less, for reasons both grasped and hazy, is writing. Keeping my writing appointment this morning has required that I ignore the whorls of hair swirled across the light-grey tiles of my bedroom and hang out the washing after rather than before church. Domestic rites have held more than their usual allure for me recently; I crave the sense of creating order from chaos, at a much faster clip than what is usually required to order my slovenly thoughts. Mantel is responsible for bringing me back to my desk and re-girding myself for the task. "I am writing in order to take charge of [my] story," she says. It's time for me to return to the same. 

Mercifully, I have not been left entirely to my own mind or book stack this week. My youngest brother, Jeremiah, has been up from Christchurch, a gift for which we can thank the education scheduling powers-that-be. I have dragged him out for urban walks; he has introduced me to a life-changing device that allows me to play music through my car speakers. The older sister/younger brother dynamic lives on. My friend, C, invited me round for a delicious dinner and hang on Thursday. I sat cross-legged on her couch and nibbled happily at white chocolate & raspberry slice as we discussed the latest season of Taskmaster and the ads we are now subjected to as Women of a Certain Age. 

The upcoming week will bring with it a return to reality, or something like it. My mind is filled with to-do-lists, starting with what I'm hoping to achieve in my classroom on Tuesday. Stapling art to the walls and de-cluttering overburdened shelves is no miracle cure, but it'll go a long way in easing this overburdened teacher's mind. 

Time is reaching out for me in the dark; I reach back. 

Blessings - Essay no. 6

Write about your blessings. About what it was like to wake up today, about the people you love, about the songs that have lifted your spirits. Write about the wind in the trees, or rebirth in spring, or of freedom. Write about whatever gives you life, which - especially in troubled times, we remember - is so precious. 

Prompt written by Mavis Staples in The Isolation Journals, Suleika Jaouad's Substack. 

My Saturdays of late have been drenched in pleasure. Slow starts have cascaded into long walks, conversations with friends, good films and even better food - sometimes made by my own hands, often others'. I move, on the sabbath, as I imagine a bird does on a morning after rain: slowly, and with reassurance of continued bounty on which to feast. This has happened almost without my intending, although it has not escaped my notice. 

My sabbaths are heavily guarded, I remarked to a friend, and essential with the busyness of my weeks. If I don't set aside this one day on which I don't check my work emails or tweak my planning, I lose touch with reality beyond teaching, and the world beyond the four walls of my classroom. On the sabbath, I sleep and play and read for extended periods as on no other day of the week. If, on first waking, my body protests, I listen, roll over, and return to the land of sleep. I allow myself culinary treats - a pastry, a coffee, a cookie. I turn my eyes and ears and hands towards beauty. 

This sabbath practice has kept me human for almost a year now. I can no longer imagine my weeks without it, nor do I want to. But I am aware of contentment seeping into my life not just from this one full cup, a respite, a well, an anomaly. 

Contentment creeps in at school, when a child hugs me as if she can't help it, arms wrapped firmly around my waist. It takes me by surprise when I stretch my legs in bed at the end of a long day, happily aching from a day's labour in heels. I find contentment in a patch of afternoon sunlight on my orange armchair; it arrives at just the right time for me to sink into it with a book. My physical surroundings, with their quotidian, suburban beauty, feed contentment continuously. On walks, I ponder and notice, along with Mary Oliver, "the sweet, electric drowse of creation." 

Pay attention/be astonished/tell about it writes Mary Oliver in that same poem. I will. 

A Life's Work - Essay no. 5

For 50, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week, I am a teacher. On good weeks, most of this time is spent actually teaching or planning for teaching. On not-as-good weeks, it's spent replying to emails, ticking boxes and staring at various calendars, trying to figure out which deadlines I've yet to meet. I'll let you guess what the balance is between good and not-as-good. 

Given that teaching occupies my hands, my head, my body and even my subconscious (I dream of parents and planning docs) for so much of my time, I guess it's a little strange that you wouldn't know it from reading this blog. References to teaching, I've discovered while scrolling through the archives, are scant. 

Part of it is that I view writing as a reprieve from my work. For these thirty minutes every morning, I do not assume the identity that I inhabit for most of the day. I am simply myself, sitting bleary-eyed at my desk, trying to convey something of what I'm dreaming, planning, thinking about. Although I am always dreaming, planning and thinking about things related to school, for thirty minutes, I try to set those particular concerns aside. 

Part of it is that I don't want my whole life to revolve around teaching. I see some teachers at my school whose lives have been consumed by their work. "I can't not look at my phone when a new email comes through," one tells me, a slightly manic look in her eye. Actually, I've discovered, you can. Turning off email notifications on my phone was one of the best choices I made last year. No-one has died or even been greatly offended because I haven't responded immediately to an email received after 8:00PM. 

Teaching, particularly in the primary context, is a profession dominated by women. Many of these women are either mothers or older single women, a phenomenon of which I was aware even before officially entering the teaching workforce. "It's a good career for mothers and spinsters," I said to my friend, M, when I decided to retrain. "So I'm covered either way." Most of the administrative work in my school is shouldered by women who are either single or whose children have left home. However, the single women bear, quite literally, twice the burden of those with families, overseeing two teams instead of one. 

I balk against this. As a single woman who could see herself being single for quite some time, I resist the idea that I have to sacrifice every aspect of my life on the altar of teaching. Just because I am single doesn't mean that I don't have other legitimate things to occupy my time. I get to rest. I get to enjoy hobbies. I get to invest in other relationships. 

And yet... there is a part of me that recognises the significance of teaching as a vocation. The time, love, expertise and attention invested into your students and your potential disproportionate effect (for better or worse) on the rest of their lives is no small thing. They are part of what makes teaching, as Rachel Cusk once said of motherhood, 'a life's work'. 

***

There is nothing like being in a classroom full of kids hungry for your care and attention. To sit in front of them on Day One, with their shoes not-yet-scuffed and their eyes wary and anxious, is to be confronted with something holy. Will you love me? They ask with their eyes. Are you safe? Are you on my side? The answers they receive and perceive to these questions will shape the course of their year, maybe even their lives. 

I do my best to shoulder the weight of my job without crumbling beneath it. On a daily basis I greet, smile at, instruct, laugh, correct (both gently and firmly), train, encourage, discourage, joke with, read to, invite, coach, look in the eye, hug and explain things to my students. I seek to shape them into better versions of themselves, while never giving them the impression that my love for them is contingent on their performance. 

***

We have started off the year with descriptive writing and spoken a lot about the role of the five senses in describing well. "What does it look like? Feel like? Smell like? Sound like? Taste like?" I have asked a thousand times in the last few weeks. 

So much of teaching is seeing. Yes, I see you, quiet girl who struggles with English, but whose Maths is spectacular and demonstrates a deep knowledge of how numbers work. I see you, boy who has been labelled "naughty" almost from birth, and who is desperate to claim almost any other label. I see you, girl who receives no discipline at home, and who needs a firm adult to provide structure and consequences. 

I see, too, the panoply of events that unfolds in my class on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. Just this week, we had several lost teeth and an actual foot to the mouth in the swimming pool! A squad of bodyguards was formed to protect our class mascot, Avan, the stuffed avocado. Descriptions and acrostic poems were written, maths strategies consolidated. A new student's baby-ish tones and requests were giggled at by the rest of his classmates. "Can't" was misspelled, with offensive consequences. 

One of the great privileges of teaching is that, if I let them, my students see me, too. A Deputy Principal, whose daughter is in my class, came in to see me on release on Wednesday. We talked through an issue related to an upcoming field trip and as she was leaving, she paused by the door. "Stacey* came in the other day and she was like, do you know what the best thing is about Miss Manickam? It's that she reads. She reads every day!" My DP was mock-offended by the fact that her own daughter hadn't seen the fact that she read, but was clearly impressed by the reading of her teacher. In me, Stacey had found a kindred spirit. 

***

I am going on a field trip today. It's my first one in charge, my name and signature on all the procedure forms. 28 students today are dependent on my love and care and corralling to stay safe. One is in a moonboot. A few have a tendency to wander off. I am running a list of things to do at school in my mind, over and over to make sure that we have everything covered. 

The kids have no sense of burden about today. They have been breathless when they approach me on the playground, sleepless with excitement. This is good and right.

Lord-willing, we will learn something, get our hands dirty and stand in the sunshine. We will experience joy as we do all of these things. 

At some point in the day, I will stand with my hands on my hips and survey the 28 small humans in front of me. I will smile and give thanks. I will get back to work. 

*Not her real name.

Lilies & Sparrows - Essay no. 4

"Don't you know? 

Your Father in heaven knows just what you need and

Seek him first

And everything else that you need will be given.

Don't you see?

He loves you much more than lilies and sparrows.

Come and rest.

Don't waste today being scared of tomorrow."

- Lillies & Sparrows, Jess Ray 

I see him as I near my house. "Oh no!" The words leave my mouth though there's no-one around to hear them. 

He's lying on his side on the concrete, bright green wings shockingly vibrant considering that all breath has left his body. 

I kneel to pay my respects. Ants have begun to circle his head. 

I search around for something to pick him up with; I can't leave him on the footpath. I'm crying as I locate a piece of bark. 

I walk back and bend down towards him again, trying to angle the bark just-so to scoop him up. My first attempt doesn't work because his skull has stuck slightly to the concrete. I cry a little more. 

My second attempt is better; I use the bark to lift his head and my hand to cradle the rest of his body. 

His wings are the softest things I've ever felt. How strange that only his death would allow me to touch them. 

I lay him under a bush and dig my fingers into the surrounding soil. Sprinkle it over his body. Stand. 

I have to get ready for Bible Study.

The gentlest whisper floats through my mind as I walk back inside, accompanied by a holy shiver: this is how I feel, too. 

***

Jess Ray's 'Lilies and Sparrows' has been the song of much of my January and February. It immediately stuck out to me on a first listen of MATIN: Rest and pulled me out of black holes on hard days. 

My Father in heaven cares more for me than these little sparrows I so love, I thought. I can get through the day. 

As February dragged on, requiring more of me than even last year, I began to doubt my God who cares for lilies and sparrows. Where is God in the midst of this drudgery? Could my class be any more challenging? Was I ever going to feel like I was on top of things? 

Lilies and sparrows ceased to flit through my mind. I dreamt only of emails and parents and principals. 

Towards the end of February, I began to find my footing in the new school year. I found strategies that worked for (some) tricky students; I committed to always observing a full day of Sabbath on Saturdays; I closed my laptop at 8. I began to feel more human. 

On Wednesday, when I embarked on my walk, I had been paying particular attention to the birds. Lines of swallows perched on the phone lines; a rosella glanced cautiously up at me as he flitted across the path. And then, at the end, there was my little green friend lying motionless on the pavement. 

True, he wasn't a sparrow. I flicked through the pages of my New Zealand bird book as I re-heated noodles and discovered he was a Rifleman. A juvenile. 

Riflemen are plentiful in New Zealand, particularly in Auckland. One could say they are as ordinary as sparrows. 

And yet, his death showed how extraordinary he really was. There was nothing ordinary about his death. It was right for me to kneel and cry and look at this beautiful bird that had, only some hours before, been puffed with life. Our Father in heaven cares for him. 

***

March has begun and I'm looking ahead at one of my fullest weeks. Work continues to haunt my dreams; I'm reluctant to leave the house for church this morning. 

But the God of lilies and sparrows is still my God, even on this, a hard day, looking ahead at what I know in many ways will be challenging week. 

"Consider the birds," says Jesus, gently. Today, and each day this week, I will. 

Gut-punch - Essay no. 3

Lucky & Friend - glossy-haired agents of beauty and redemption. 

He said no. 

Polite and bashful, standing in front of the Granada apartments on View Road with a stretch of blue and red rubbish bins in front of us, he told me how much our friendship had meant to him. "There were times where I felt like it carried me," he said. "But I want to be transparent - I see you as just a friend." 

I thanked him, honestly. In both content and delivery, it was a masterclass of a rejection. He was gentle and kind and we managed to talk lightly of what was coming up in our weeks afterwards. He leant in for a hug; I reached up to crook an arm around his shoulder. 

I made it around the corner before pulling over to cry. I didn't bother wiping the tears away, just gripped the steering wheel and sobbed. I knew it was all going to be okay, but I also knew that sadness had unpacked her bags for a while. 

I sent off a few breezy texts to the friends who knew about the situation. "All good!" I typed as I cried. R read beneath the exclamation mark and called immediately. She let me sob softly into the phone and invited me over to her place. I thanked her, but politely declined. The best thing for that night, I knew, would be to head home and prepare for the next day. Twenty-two small children were waiting to meet me the following week. They needed name-tags and get-to-know-you games and lesson plans. 

That night, I slept for three and a half hours. Jolted awake at 2:30, I felt the sting all over again and turned in the dark, soaking my pillow from new angles. "I trust you," I told the Lord. "But I am so disappointed." 

I knew he understood. 

***

It's been three days and my mind has turned to spaghetti. I keep grabbing holds of strands of thought only to have them slip from my grasp a moment later.

Some strands are good and true and helpful. I love you, I love you, I love you, I hear the Lord whisper. I try desperately to hold onto it as I brush my teeth. I feel it slip down the sink as I spit and rinse. 

Other strands echo old fears. It's because of your body, one hisses. No-one has ever wanted it before, why would he now? This strand lingers a little longer on the fork. 

Why? is a strand I keep picking up. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? I remind myself that his reasons for rejecting me are none of my business. I could drive myself crazy wondering if it was because I'm not X enough or too X. I could probably solve one of those equations for X, but what would be the point? Whatever mysterious alchemy is required to make a romantic relationship work, some key component was missing for him. Pinpointing it would only lead to further heartache for me. 

Dolly Alderton's Good Material provides another recurring strand. 

"Reasons why it's good I'm not with Jen: she didn't want to be with me."

Reasons why it's good I'm not with D: he didn't want to be with me. 

***

I have to go through it, of course. In heartache as in bear hunts, we can't go under or over -- we have to go through. 

I'm caught off guard by tears. I cry at night. For the first time ever, I cry in my classroom. I'm fighting back tears in a seminar on how to support ELL students. I've cried on almost every car trip. 

"I just wish my story were different," I croak to the Lord while driving this afternoon. "I so wish it were different." 

I don't know why I have been single for twenty-seven years. I would give almost anything for this not to be the case. But as Tish Warren writes in Prayer in the Night, "we don't choose our preferred crosses." 

This particular cross is not one I understand. Despite this, along with Tish, I "[dare]... to believe that there is blessing in the fact that I don't decide these things." Pain and suffering are, of course, not original features of God's good creation. But they are means through which I can experience kinship and closeness with Jesus, who was no stranger to either. 

This particular bout of rejection is the first one where the gentle voice of the Lord, affirming my value and worth and lovability, has drowned out other more sinister voices. This is progress. This is grace.

***

Beauty helps. It doesn't tie everything up "in a nice metaphysical bow," as Tish says, "but sometimes it is enough to get [me] through the hour." 

Yesterday, I went for my usual walk around Monte Cecilia park. I paused to cry multiple times, sometimes slowing my walk to breathe in between waves of tears. The dogs were happily oblivious. Their owners offered distracted smiles. 

On my second lap, I sat on a bench near the base of the big bowl. A Golden Labrador appeared in front of me. He was reading a plaque near a tree, more engrossed than his owner, who was gently trying to tug him along. In a moment, however, he was dragged from his literary pursuits by his kin: another Golden Labrador puppy who had tackled him in greeting. The dogs rolled around in the grass. They paused and stared at each other. Rolled again. Paused to stare. Pawed at each other again. I couldn't help but laugh as I watched them. Their fur was so soft, their tails so committed to showing their delight. They were completely happy in one another's presence, and for a moment, so, too, was I in theirs. 

At that moment I thought: yes, this week has contained one of the more painful experiences I've had in recent memory. But the sun is still out at 8:30pm, the trees in the park continue to tower over me and Golden Labrador puppies are delighting in each other in the summer-length grass. 

It's enough to keep me walking. 

Conversation pt. 2 - Essay no. 2

Okay, this is not really an essay, more like a grown-up recount, but I promised myself I would write about it, so here goes. The title is a reference to a post published about a similar situation, eight (!) years ago, on this very blog. 

Last Monday, I asked out the guy I liked and he said "yes". 

The ask came after a catch up at Cornwall Park, a site where I've gone on many an awkward walk and had many an awkward conversation. If it went poorly, as I suspected/dreaded/imagined a hundred different scenarios about, then no problem - par for the course with Cornwall Park. If it went well, as I allowed myself only the tiniest sliver of hope about, then it would redeem all those awkward conversations forever and ever, Amen. 

We talked for over two hours, walking at first, slowly, because he was sleepy. We sat at a pentagon-shaped bench and talked more as the sky changed from blue to a peach and pink affair. Dogs, elderly couples, runners and families trickled past us, ending their evening walks and picnics. The light was fading when I made the first move to swing my legs outward from the bench and head towards the car park. 

As we approached the paved lot, I reached the moment that I had told myself I would do it. The fact that my spirit appeared to be leaving my body at said moment was unfortunate, but not an excuse to delay the asking. 

"Hey, so, I wanted to ask..." I took a steadying breath as he offered a kind, "Yeah?"

"Would you be interested in... going on a date with me sometime?"

Here are the fragments of his response, transcribed in order of delivery, to a questionable degree of accuracy. 

"Oh wow! Thank you so much for asking, that takes a lot of courage, good on you." 

*Long pause*

"Yes. I mean, why not, right? We're such good friends and we're on the same wavelength..." *trails off*

"It's just so unexpected!" 

"I'm just thinking out loud here, and I may be getting ahead of myself, but like I mentioned, I'm just not sure how things would look in terms of being in a relationship with the season I'm in."

"I mean, yes, my answer is 'yes'."

"When you say 'date', what exactly do you mean?" 

*Gives me a hug*

"We'll be in touch!"

*Leaves*

What was I doing during this exemplary chain of external processing, you ask? 

Scuffing my shoes against the gravel. Trying not to cry and laugh (at the same time). Trying to breathe. Giving him multiple opportunities to back out of his 'yes'. Saying - I kid you not - "oh wow, I was fully expecting you to say 'no'." Clarifying what I meant by the word 'date'. 

I climbed into my car and immediately realised I was starving. I needed fries, stat. I was also aware of making a hiccupping sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cry (see efforts to suppress, above). The only thing that helped was placing my head in my hands and letting it all wash over me. 

I called S on the way to my friend N's house. She was excited, and encouraged me not to get too in my head about it all. I took N out to Burger Fuel, having been banned by S from going to Macca's. ("Not a celebratory meal" she said.) N was much more cautious than S; her feelings mirrored my own. "Here's to you," she said, "we can celebrate your courage!" I tipped my Coke bottle against her thick-shake. 

I arrived home and crawled into bed a little after 11. The ball's in his court now. If he messages me within the next 1-3 days, I thought, then he's interested. If he leaves it later than that, well, then, clearly, he's not.

He messaged at 7:40 the next morning. By the following morning, we have confirmed plans to go for another walk up a local mountain next Tuesday. 

***

My response to this remarkable sequence of events has varied from day to day. 

On Wednesday, I am nauseous about the whole thing. I draft a message to him backing out. "Thinking of sending this" I say to S. My mind makes itself sick by going over all the possible reasons why this was a terrible idea. He wasn't attracted to me. He had said 'yes' out of pity. He was secretly in love with my flatmate, J, and my asking him out had made him realise he needed to act on that. These are not pretty confessions, but here they are: a testament to the insanity of the love-uncertain brain. 

Thankfully Wednesday is for the most part, a blip. I am nervous, of course. But I am also genuinely excited and looking forward to talking with him, now that my cards are on the table and not clutched close to my chest. My sliver of hope has, against all odds and usual practice, grown. 

I am comfort reading, of course. Lily King's Writers & Lovers has calmed and distracted me in moments when I have needed it most. In pulling together this piece this week, I have remembered Casey's words on writing: "I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse." I have needed to write something, any small thing, to get down on the page how I'm feeling about it all. My journal has barely left my side. 

I've also returned to Prayer in the Night, finding solace and firm footing in the God who is present always, even and especially in darkness and uncertainty. I am not expecting heartache to come from this, but if it does, I will be okay. I am kept and held by a Father who has schemed goodness for my future. I am safe. 

***

It is Tuesday morning. I am about to head into school. Tonight, I will put on a green dress, drive to the mountain and... 

The Saturday Diaries vol. 11

At the beach with D & A

Welcome, welcome to this first instalment of the Saturday Diaries for 2024! I come to you from my usual perch in my room, newly returned to Auckland as of yesterday. 

"How did it feel coming back to Hillsborough?" asked my flatmate, as I was driving her home from the airport last night. I thought for a second before saying, "It felt like coming back to reality, I guess." My flatmate gave a laugh of surprise. "Okaaaayyyy..." "No, no, I don't mean that in a bad way, necessarily. I just switched into task mode and did jobs and will be returning to work. And that's good - I love work! It's just different."

It is different. I ticked off all the things on my to-do list yesterday and felt good about it, but I can already feel anxiety about the year creeping back in. 

Later, the three of us whose rooms are downstairs congregated in the hallway to chat about our holidays. One had been offered a place to read Theology at Oxford in October. The other had unexpectedly (but happily) gotten engaged on Boxing Day and was in the thick of trying to find and book a venue. They shared details of their big updates and I listened, half sitting, half-leaning against the stairs as they spoke. "Do you have any big news to share with us, Jovita?" one of them asked, turning towards me. "You recovered from Covid" the other interjected, quickly. "Yeah, and I have cool pyjamas" I joked, lamely, referencing a discussion the three of us had had earlier. Indeed. A recovery from Covid and cool pyjamas is about all the exciting news that my year has held so far. 

I think very often about the smallness of my life. I'm not carrying out life-saving work, I don't possess a highly-specialised skillset, I'm not in a profession that causes eyebrows to be raised into impressed looks. At the end of the day, no-one is waiting up for me at home, or depending on me for love and sustenance. I can move invisibly through most days, scurrying, rather than gliding as a friend once pointed out to me. Some days, the insignificance of my life has left me wondering what the point of getting out of bed is. 

But, in the spirit of my unofficial word for the year, I'm trying not to do that anymore. I'm trying to trust that the small contributions I make matter, somehow. The short prayers for people I love, the listening, the teaching tiny humans to the best of my ability - it matters. It isn't exciting or glamorous, but to do "small things with great love" as Mother Teresa once said, matters. I'm keeping that in mind as I move through this week's end and the new week ahead. 

One small thing at a time - it all matters. 

Reading: I picked up a massive haul of books in Christchurch and am happily working my way through them. I've just picked up We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. It's ostensibly a horror novel, so a far cry from my usual reading, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. Merricat is an engaging narrator and the sense of dread about things that have happened and will happen in this family is palpable from the first page. 

Watching: I got my little brother hooked on Law and Order! "I love McCoy," he said happily one evening, limbs akimbo on the couch. Me, too, little bro - me, too. Unfortunately Law and Order has now been withdrawn from Amazon Prime (Decision makers at Amazon - why???), so I shall have to settle for old episodes of its spin-off Law and Order: SVU, in addition to some of the wonderful films on there (I'm looking at you, Palm Springs & Marcel the Shell). 

Eating: Lunettes. *Happy sigh* My mum remembered how much I loved these and went to the Village Bakehouse on three separate occasions to get them for me, bless her. I am always so happy to be reacquainted with these brioche-y custard-y treats. 

Trying: I went for a swim at the beach! My friend, A, loves beach swims and is leaving NZ very soon, so I promised to join her for one before she goes. The mud was squelchy and the water still too cold for my taste, but let the record show that I did indeed swim and now I don't have to until another friend leaves the country. 

Happy Saturday, friends - hope it's a joy-filled one for you all. x