Day 205: Drool

Gorgeous walk in the Cotswolds today, the pale autumn sunlight splayed across the gentle hills, lines of crops growing in the tilled fields, the golden needles from larch trees bunched on the ground. Shadows from the trees dark on the forest floor, the sky empty overhead, the air hazing to nothing off at the horizon.

Woodland cafe with the family, lunchtime meals and cups of coffee, everyone checking their phones. Baby Cleo blowing little bubbles with her drool.

Back home now. Evening feeling sad. Went out and bought Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge ice cream, cocooned myself in my room watching Netflix. Still feeling sad, only now I have a Ben & Jerry’s headache as well.

Been watching Big Mouth, the latest beyond-the-pale adult animated show after South Park and Family Guy and Rick n Morty and the rest. It’s OK. Premise is that it’s about a bunch of high school kids who are just starting to go through puberty, with their raging hormones manifested as winged and hoofed demons who follow them around, yell inappropriate comments in their ears. Lots of plotlines about bodily secretions, nocturnal emissions, fears about sexuality, sleepovers fraught with a thousand dangers.

Refreshing for it to deal with these things so openly, and I can only see it being a good thing to watch if you’re of that age, to have your worst internal doubts and secret voices brought into the open and seen as pretty mundane after all, the same as everyone else’s internal doubts and secret voices. But beneath the initial shock of the subject matter it’s lightweight, breezy, interested only in easy jokes and easy resolutions.

Passes the time when you’re feeling crap though, which is basically the point of all of television.

Gonna put on some rain sounds and lie in bed now, see if I can sleep. Tomorrow is another day.

Day 166: Unique

London - Liz and Jamie have gone to bed, and I sit writing by lamplight as the kittens chase one another across the carpet and the fridge splutters and grumbles and a television set plays in the next flat along.

The city is overwhelmingly vast, as it always feels when I first arrive. Too many lives, too many happenings; how is there space in the universe for all these thoughts? All these people believing they are each of central importance, buying their bagels, choosing their handbags, fretting over whether to take that job offer, how to wear their hair next weekend, who's going to notice the spot on their chin. Each a shimmering ocean of complexity, a cosmic spiral of atoms, and a hundred thousand of them all pouring forth down this road. Mad. Wild. Unfathomable. Too much to take in.

Day of newborns today, baby Cleo and boisterous kittens. Held Cleo for a long time, her tiny head pressed against my chest, her breath quickening and slowing as she dreamt. Ju and Dan look tired. Eyes strained, movements slower, getting only an hour or two in shifts a few times a night. Cleo only sleeps in their arms, they have to sit up fighting drowsiness through the long lonely hours of the night. And operations, and specialists, and anxiety over every single thing. And the happiest they've ever been in the lives.

And now kittens with heavy eyes, play fighting ending, clambering up to the sofa and between my legs. Curling into one another, Rey (no, Arya) licking affectionately at Arya (no, Rey)'s ear. Fuzzy cloud-soft fur, twitching whiskers, stretched belly-gangled bodies flopped in sighing savannah sleep. A million billion cats and people, all atomic identical emptiness, and each one unique.