On Sunshine (+ London Delights!)

Delights

The world seems very sunny today. My Lime bike ride over to a brunch took exactly the number of minutes I had on my Lime pass (win), I met a bunch of interesting people yesterday (win) and I’m heading to Bath to see my little sister (massive win).

I have Micheal Bublé’s ‘Everything’ looping through my Spotify and I’m feeling a bit mushy and a bit sentimental. I’ve tried writing about why Holly is wonderful, so have been marinating in a bubble of nice thoughts and gratitude. I didn’t manage to do her justice, so instead of my mushy ‘I love my sister’ post (sorry Hols), I’m doing some London delights - a compilation of things that have been making me happy recently.

(For those new here - the thinking behind delights is in ‘On Delights’, and there’s a couple of other delights in ‘On Autumn Delights’, ‘On Winter Delights’ and ‘On Meandering’.)

Miscellany: Teenage ducklings in Regents Park. The amount of water in London, the romance of canal boats. Light filtered through cowslip. A wobbly spell passing. The perfect jeans!* Realising I like my job (even if I’m not sure I’m good at it yet). Therapy. A tricky situation navigated well. Seeing clouds on the Shard from my balcony. Moorhens and herons. A fox jumping near-vertical over a fence, balletic, pulling through a right angle in a few fluid seconds. The iridescence on a pigeons neck, a little flash of peacock. The bobbing wobbling mallard that flew over my head in the Ladies Pond.

Friends: So many of my friends being happy and content - people have found their grooves, found their rhythms and I’m so pleased for them. It is a real joy of the mid-twenties that more and more people answer the question ‘how are you?’ with ‘yeah really well’.

Sometimes this is love - one friend has found a girlfriend who adores him, and has grown into a better man through her. Sometimes this is through jobs - from the consultants to the charity workers, I love seeing people find what they want to do and doing it well. Sometimes this happiness is simply the product of an awful lot of thinking. I leave every interaction with one friend feeling like a warm fuzzball because she has had to work through a lot - but she did, and it is paying dividends, and life is looking rosy.

I absolutely love these ‘yeah really well’s’ and love how happy so many of my friends are, and love too the steps that others are making - a masters, setting boundaries, moving jobs - to be happy. I’m so pleased to see so many of my friends happy.

(I just ducked out of my reverie to check where I was on my bus journey - and have managed to press the button my station in the nick of time. Another delight - near-misses are always massive wins.)

Work: Work! I had a lala week - not as productive as I’d like to be - and the world didn’t collapse. I like my job, like what I’m doing and I’m learning a lot. I like the people I work with, I like this job, and though I definitely feel an enormous amount of imposter syndrome, I also feel lucky to be now learning what I’m learning. I’m still figuring things out (and still have a lurking sense I’m going to get fired) but I'm very happy with this work, and life feels so much more manageable.

Lectures: The joys of predictable hours is being able to book things, and London has a staggering number of good ways to spend an evening. And - because I’m a nerd - for me that means lectures - on the role of maths in creativity, on what to do about space junk in low orbit, on the philosophy of memory. I love that I have friends who are willing to indulge my nerdiness, and love that people now suggest cool lectures for me to go to. Long live the nerd squad.

Arts: I went to see The Years (wow wow wow!) - which had the delight of elderly actors playing different ages. It’s amazing to watch those elderly bodies transform, drawing on muscle memory from decades past - becoming a six year old with a tilted hip and inflated cheek, slouching into teenagers the next. You don’t forget the wrinkles, the white hairs and restricted movement - but you also know exactly who they are portraying. It’s such a cool demonstration of skill, the ability to force an audience into this kind of double-think.

Also - ‘Astonishing Things’ by Victor Hugo at the Royal Academy. This was gorgeous - the drawings of a maverick man brimming over with creativity and fun, with finger painting, feather quills and hidden messages in his paintings (and the odd bonus of an ex in the mezzanine).

People: More generally - London is a city rich in serendipity. I’ve bumped into former colleagues, school friends, and so many good strangers. At points it’s felt like the city itself is trying to serve up interesting people. Highlights have been a politico in Rory Stewart’s run for mayor; a former international footballer turned cocaine addict and conspiracy theorist; a photographer dressed head to toe in red; a girl who sailed across the Atlantic; a physicist turned art dealer; a writer, and a philosopher of science (who described this Substack as the ‘new academic revolution’. For this I do, genuinely, love you.)

A funny moment. I went for sushi with a friend, and in front of us was a bunch of men from a run club. But not just any run club. A run club in collaboration with London Fashion Week. Bless my recently-dumped heart. Anti-objectifying-feminist-principles respectfully set aside for half an hour.

Food: I can RUSTLE THINGS UP! Mixed successes (my warm feta, pistachio pesto and roasted pepper pasta extravaganza was maybe… not the one) - but I am cooking without recipes. I’m throwing things together! Substituting ingredients! Rustling!

Confidence: My confidence was knocked by my breakup, which left me with a few niggling grizzles (grizzling niggles?) rattling around my head. I’d taken the approach of making a big shiny veneer of ‘everything is fine and dandy and I have a bunch of plans and lots of friends and I’m moving on and dating and it’s all COMPLETELY FINE.’

But I wasn’t that fine - not duh-duh-duh bad, but definitely a bit sad - and I finally had a very honest conversation with a very good friend about it, which gave me one of those periods of catharsis and mental quiet that feels so, so good. And now I’m feeling much more like myself. So hooray for that. (And a reminder to myself - sometimes there’s something to be said for a little vulnerability.)

Shirking: I’m not exercising loads. I said no to an unnecessary triathlon that was one thing too many. I’m not always reading or using my time, and I’m not always ‘on’. I like this, and like that I feel okay with it - that I don’t have a constant ‘should’ chuntering along in the back of my mind. I submitted a paper to a journal and it wasn’t the most perfect of pieces, submitted my dissertation with a few slapdash footnotes - neither are the very best they could be, but they’re good enough and that’s good enough.

Painting: I’ve started carting around my watercolours, and I’ve found spontaneous painting in a park with a friend = deep joy.

Spring: It had been two years since I’d had a spring, and my goodness - what a delight. Early sun and no storms meant the blossoms have seemed to go on forever, cacophonies of pink and white sprouting all over Bethnal Green. Love for primavera, this ‘first-seeing’, the spring beauty that acts as an invitation to remember.

(P.S.: For lectures - just type lectures into Eventbrite and there’s tons. I’m (hopefully - depending on how work/ life goes) seeing dreams to a better world on the 21st May; what even is the history of philosophy on the 29th; how the brain invents your reality on the 9th of June; life & times of Francis Crick on the 19th and a medic-ey AI one on the 7th of July - all free/ £>10.

Unfortunately I can’t make this but if anyone is free tomorrow there’s a watercress festival ?? in Hampshire?? Which seems like a good spontaneous Sunday activity. What a joy to live in a world with festivals for salad leaves - a bonus delight.)

*M&S Palazzos - thank me later