A Glassful of Life

Two little doggies with pixie-cuts - Kerry is the one with the resting bitch face. I am trying to write a happy blog, but everything comes out all sad now. How can I laugh and smile when people are being bombed? Every night when I go to bed, I lie in the dark listening to the girls breathing slowly, in and out, grateful for their presence and I weep as I think of the war. Every morning I wake up and relive the dreams from the night before. They play like one of those old scratchy newsreels in black and white that depict the horrors of war. It should be from a time long ago that can’t touch you now, but it is touching us now. Perhaps I should stop watching the news and just watch videos of fluffy kittens or cute puppies with eyes of liquid amber. I could do that and convince myself that the world is ok. But to do that would deny the suffering that is going on. It is hard to be happy in the current climate and yet it is spring, and the trees are gently coating in green, and we have...

My two little old ladies after their impromptu shower I am sitting writing at the Läckö table that I found out by the bins a couple of weeks ago. It amazes me the amount of stuff that people throw out on a regular basis. It’s only a little bit broken and I have tied the legs together with cable ties. A dog is eyeing me from her vantage point on the sofa—Candy likes to know where I am at all times. She is snuggled into a blanket and is looking a bit curlier than usual after a natural shower this morning. Our walk was a quick one—there was not the same desire to stop and sniff—Candy and Kerry don’t like getting wet any more than I do. I reorganised my living room today, a bit of a spring clean, I guess. A rainy day is a good day for a tidy-up. For the past four weeks, I have lived with bits of wood, boxes of screws, and one or two power tools littering my living room. I was finishing off my kitchen counters but stalled with just one tiny corner left to do—I can be so ...

A dog or two on the sofa to snuggle I hold onto the little things, the little things are the things that anchor me and remind me there’s a point to carrying on. The world seems to be falling apart in so many ways—there’s the pandemic, now endemic, but is still killing people and causing rifts between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers or maskers and anti-maskers. I take an avocado from the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, and I gently squeeze the tip of it the way my mother taught me. “Never squeeze the whole thing or you’ll bruise it.” I feel it yield, so I take my sharp knife and cut around it, it opens to form two perfect pears, one filled and one empty. It is the rich green of a 1970s bathroom suite and I test the edge to see if I can peel it. Some avocados have to be scooped out, this one peels perfectly, very satisfying. I slice the flesh; it has a pleasing softness. In the other half the great big shiny seed protrudes like an enormous brown blister. I lift the fruit in my hand and the...