GOOD DAYS
An A-Z of Hope and Happiness
MICHAEL ROSEN
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For Emma
Contents
Introduction 1
A is for Arouet 5
B is for Bad Days and Bannisters 15
C is for Curiosity 25
D is for Death 35
E is for Experiment 45
F is for Fiction 55
G is for Grounded 65
H is for Hummus 75
I is for If 83
J is for Journeys 91
K is for Kvell and Kvetch 101
L is for Little by Little 109
M is for Memory 119
N is for Nights 131
O is for On (Pressing On, Pushing On, Getting On …) 141
P is for Play 149
Q is for Quest 161
R is for Reflection 171
S is for Speaking (and Listening) 181
T is for Tiggs 191
U is for Union 203
V is for Van Morrison 215
W is for Writing 223
X is for X-ray 235
Y is for Youth 245
Z is for Zephaniah and Zimmerman 255
Introduction
This is a book of days.
One way to make a book of days is to compile a book of interesting things that happened ‘on this day’ in any year. Robert Chambers made one like that in 1864. As he tells us, his book is full of the ‘Oddities of Human Life’ and the oddities are attached to the days of the year. You read a calendar of odd things that people have done. It’s fun. A good way to spend some days, in fact. I hope you’ll find that there are a good few oddities of human life in this book of days too.
My book of days is arranged differently, though: it is a book of what I think are good ways to spend my days, arranged in alphabetical order – what I’ve thought about and done which help me to have a good time. I’ve put these down as hints, reminders, tips and suggestions for how you might imitate, adapt or adopt some, any or many of these for yourself.
If at any time you think I sound as if I’m telling you what to do, then do please edit these out of your mind. At best, I’m just being enthusiastic. At worst, I confess, I’m showing my bossy side. Please forgive me by ignoring them.
So, to be clear: it’s not a book of blueprints. It’s not a guide. It’s a book of what I hope are sparks and inspirations. As you read, I hope you’ll find common ground, and think along the lines of ‘I could give that a go’, ‘I could do something like that’, or ‘I used to do that; I could go back to doing it’.
I hope there’ll be some surprises, jokes, echoes and resonances. When I read a book, I find that I get the most satisfaction if a book lights a blue touch paper, and I go off thinking, writing, researching, reading and doing. I hope that this book will work as a trigger for you.
But why?
It hardly needs saying but I’ll say it anyway: we live in hard times. Things that some of us thought could and should have been solved, haven’t been solved. Things that some of us thought would show signs of progress, haven’t progressed. In many ways, wherever we look – locally, nationally or globally –there are things that have got worse. I don’t need to list them. I know and you know that these things weigh on us. I was in a café recently and a man told me that he had struggled to get there up the Holloway Road – a long main road in north London. He then ‘went off on one’, a long diatribe about the hell that is the Holloway Road. He seemed particularly furious about the fact that though it’s wide, it’s slow. Unless this major moan was cheering him up, it did seem as if he was someone overwhelmed by ‘now’, ‘where we’re at’, ‘the way things are’ and ‘how everything’s got worse’.
At that very moment, I was enjoying some lovely spicy green olives, my favourite lentil soup, hot falafel, mixed salad and freshly made Turkish bread. I know the Holloway Road. I once lived on it with my late-teenage sons (and half the time with my younger ones), at a time when things in my personal life were tough. I remember lovely late-night excursions with my teenage boys to a great kebab joint just over the road from where we were living. The Holloway Road sits in my mind as an oasis in a desert of troubles. And only a day before this chat in the café with my angry stranger, I had used the 43 bus that runs absurdly conveniently and directly from my house to a university theatre on the Holloway Road, where 350 children and I were celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the great Journey to Jo’burg with its wonderful author, Beverley Naidoo.
Why am I telling you all this? Because where that name ‘Holloway Road’ triggered annoyance and misery for my café
man, for me it was, and still very much is, full of pleasure, delight and pride. I need such moments both in the here and now but also when I live amongst the memories, even though there is sadness, in that one of those teenage boys died.
So, I’m going to make a big claim: we can’t do anything about the things that bring us down, if we are oppressed and depressed by them. We have to have hope. We need to be hopeful creatures in order to live. No matter how much events seem to point towards despair, telling us to be pessimistic, I think we have to find strategies and techniques to be hopeful. In spite of everything, we have to find reasons to go on. As someone once put it in a book, ‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We’ve got to go through it.’
I can’t make you feel hopeful. I can’t guarantee you’ll be happy. What I can do (and it’s what I’ve tried to do) is tell some stories and give you some thoughts, which I hope, in themselves, will give you a moment of cheer. But more than that: as you will have guessed by now, I think that having moments of cheer is one of the ways we can have hope. Happiness and hope are linked.
So welcome to my book of days. Feel free to read it in any order you like, but I will point out that I’ve put my more general thoughts (dare I call them theories?) towards the beginning. As you read, you may well find me saying things like ‘and that was a good way to spend a day’, implying, ‘why not try something like that yourself?’ If you spot that I haven’t said this, then please do go ahead – imagine I have written precisely that, and dabble with the idea of trying something like that yourself. After all, what else can we do but share our experiences and ideas and hope that others will take them up and make them work for themselves?
Ais for Arouet
Who or what is Arouet?
Arouet is here right at the beginning of this book because it begins with A. But that ‘A’ is hidden behind three acts of disguise. A book appeared in Geneva in 1759, with a title that shows us the first two disguises. The title can be expressed in English as Candide, or Optimism, translated from German by Dr Ralph. But it wasn’t translated from German and there is no Dr Ralph.
The next disguise is to say, as indeed everyone does say, that Candide was written by Voltaire. It was as certain as it’s possible to be certain that it was written by the person who called himself Voltaire, but Voltaire wasn’t his name. His name was François-Marie Arouet.
Now, if you want to have a good day, right now, then please let me suggest that you spend a couple of hours reading Candide. Of course, I could recommend many different books but there’s a particular reason for choosing this one by way of a starter for this book, and it’s not just because the title promises ‘optimism’, which should surely be a place to start when thinking about your good day (although, as we’ll see, it’s a bit more complicated than that!). Yes, I think it’s funny, clever and witty. I also think it’s a wonderful, poignant satire and an eye-opener to ways in which people have deceived themselves (or tried to deceive others) about what to believe. It’s also a book that has given us several phrases that are in every dictionary of quotations – like ‘pour encourager les autres’
(‘to encourage the others’) – a bitterly ironic phrase that can be said at a time of an execution: they chopped off his head ‘to encourage the others’.
Or this one, which features more irony: ‘I am the best man in the world, and yet I have already killed three men; and of these three, two were priests.’
Or this one: the reason why we use the phrase ironically ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ is because one of the characters in the book, Pangloss, says in the midst of horrors and disasters: ‘It is demonstrable … that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for things having been created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.’
That represents the ‘optimism’ of the title (a philosophy belonging to the German polymath Leibnitz). Leibnitz put forward the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God.
So Candide is not a tribute to optimism. If anything, it mocks optimism. And yet here’s me giving you a book about ‘good days’ and I kick it off with recommending a book that seems to mock the very thought! What’s going on?
Ah, but we haven’t got to the last line of the book. I could put up a pretty good argument for saying that it’s almost impossible to write about how to have good days, how to feel good about ourselves or feel good about life, without dealing with the idea that is in the famous last line of Candide. In French, it’s ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’, which can translate as ‘We should cultivate our garden’ or ‘We must cultivate our gardens’ (though other versions are available, as we shall see!).
This is how the line appears: Pangloss has just given Candide a pompous little speech about how everything has worked out very well:
‘There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.’
‘All that is very well,’ answered Candide, ‘but let us cultivate our garden.’
[Gutenberg translation]
When I first read Candide 60 years ago, this came as a big surprise. After all, I had taken the book, right up to this last moment, as strong stuff, taking pot shots at people in power and the hypocrisy that keeps them in power. Pangloss is still wittering on right up to the very end about how everything works out for the best, even though we have seen that for millions of people it doesn’t, and so we turn to Candide (who has been our witness to all that’s wrong in the world) for some words of wisdom. And all he can offer us, I thought, are a few trite words about looking after your garden. Well, of course, it’s not really Candide doing that. It’s Voltaire getting him to say that, from within Candide’s character, but positioning it as the last words of the book seemed to give the words some authority, the authority of the author, perhaps. So, does Voltaire think that the way to be hopeful in life is to look after your garden? Or – another possibility – is he mocking Candide for being so limited, so narrow-minded as to think that the solution to all the awful things he’s seen in life is to just look after your garden?
This is part of the infuriating delight of fiction. We can never know which of these two Voltaire intended, or indeed
if he intended both at the same time, or neither! What we can do is speculate. (Please take that word ‘speculate’ as one of the pleasures of life and indeed one of the ways in which we can have ‘good days’.)
So, let’s do it.
At face value, Candide listens to what Pangloss has said and hears it as a summing up of the optimistic philosophy which, from his experience, he knows is rubbish. So he counterposes something. Instead of nodding sagely as yet another disaster comes over the horizon, comforting oneself with the thought that it’s all working out OK in the end, we should do something. But what? What can we do? Let’s ask ourselves that question. We might say that we can try to save the world. We might say that we can do good things to others and for others (the New Testament seems to say that that’s what we should do and Voltaire would have been very aware of that philosophy). Or we can lower our sights and say to ourselves, we can only do what we can do ‘on our patch’.
Let’s be literal. Though it’s quite rare to hear anyone offer the cultivation of your garden as a philosophy for saving the world, or curing society’s ills, you do hear people talking of the joy and relief they get from growing things. My father was one. He spent thousands of hours pottering in his garden, prodding the earth, going to garden centres and choosing plants – and, just as important, I think – talking to people (even me) about cotoneasters, myrtle bushes and Polyspora axillaris, otherwise known as the ‘fried egg plant’ (not a fried eggplant, though).
He was, in a way, and for some of the time in his life, a walking embodiment of the last line of Candide.
But what if it’s more metaphorical than that? What if it doesn’t actually mean ‘do your garden’ but means more like ‘do your own thing’, or ‘sort out what’s under your nose’ or the like? I guess we are all familiar with people who are (or who
think they are) very good at sorting out other people’s lives but are pretty hopeless at sorting out themselves. You could put up a good argument for saying that for as long as we trust the kind of people who screw up other people’s lives, we will never solve anything. The terrifying stories of what has happened in cults has often come about as a consequence of people entrusting themselves to nasty maniacs. That’s an extreme and obvious example. Much nearer to home are the situations in which we’ve been obliged to obey someone or we’ve accepted someone who tells us how to behave, but then, further down the line, we’ve found out that they have been corrupt, hypocritical or have committed the very same ‘crimes’ that they condemned. Shakespeare spotted that 400 years ago in King Lear when King Lear himself says:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Just to unpack that: Lear is imagining talking to a ‘beadle’ (a court usher) saying that he is guilty of lusting after the whore and yet that’s what he is whipping her for. In a similar fashion, the usurer punishes the cheat at a time when usury was seen as a form of cheating. So, trying to sort out, or rule over, other people’s lives without sorting out your own, solves nothing.
Now back to the garden. Was Voltaire saying, if you’re doing your own thing, at least you’re not being hypocritical, you’re not exploiting others, stealing from others, being brutal or unkind to others? Is that what Voltaire meant? And, further, if everyone just got on and did their own thing, the world would be a better place. Would that work?
We know one problem with it: a lot of what you put in the garden or use to make the garden comes from the hard, low-paid work of others (seeds, lawnmowers, spades, trowels, fertiliser). Refuse collectors come to pick up the garden waste. To fetch what we need, we use vehicles and power. In other words, even when we think we are only doing our own thing, we connect with ‘society’. We can’t all simply or only do our garden. A lot of the people making it possible for us to do our garden may not have the luxury of being able to do their own thing.
Did Voltaire know that? Was he mocking Candide for being naively selfish, thinking that the solution to the awful things in the world was to be found in tending his garden, and that the same applies to all of us? Or maybe Voltaire didn’t have a solution. Maybe he didn’t have any more of a solution than his character, Candide. That last line of the book is, then, a challenge to anyone thinking that they have anything interesting or useful to say about how to live in this world.
So let’s take up that challenge: if it’s mindlessly optimistic (like Pangloss), then we not only delude ourselves, but we become cruel in thinking that people’s suffering is for the benefit of others. If we turn in on ourselves and think we are solving the problems of the world by telling everyone to do their own thing, we delude ourselves into thinking that our own personal peace of mind is a remedy for everything. However (and there’s bound to be a ‘however’, isn’t there?), it’s hard, damned hard, to do anything useful or helpful if you can’t find ways to have that peace of mind. I think that’s what my father thought. He found peace of mind in his garden, which enabled him to do the good things (often for others) that he wanted to do. But then you can turn that on its head and say instead, maybe one way to have peace of mind is to do things that are useful and helpful.
By the way, one of the reasons we get ourselves into knots about things like ‘am I doing this for me or am I doing this for others?’ is that we have, built-in to us, a view of ‘me’. We think of ‘me’ as someone ‘I’ make. We watch hundreds of movies, read hundreds of books, hear politicians talking as if we are each self-made beings. The truth of it, though, is that the ‘me’ is created with others. We arrive in a world that is already made and being made – by others. Others talk to us, play with us, educate us, employ us and the ‘me’ thinks back, talks back, plays back, discovers, investigates, makes decisions out of all these millions of interactions with others. We make each other as we make ourselves. Stuff happens; we respond. As we respond, we change. As we change, we change others. Though we divide ourselves into ‘individuals’ and ‘society’, or into ‘me’ and ‘others’, the truth is that there is no fixed border between myself and other people. Even the language we use that we might think of as personal is made up of words that have been used before by others.
Four hundred years ago, John Donne wrote:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
[modernised spelling]
Do we have any reason to think that Voltaire might have been thinking about something beyond ‘do your own thing’? Candide talks of ‘our’ garden. But what is ‘our garden’? One story tells how once the whole of humanity had a garden – the
Garden of Eden. Then, the story goes on to say, humanity screwed up, and, as the Bible tells us, we got a lot of pain and suffering as a result. Voltaire was a ‘deist’. He believed that God existed, made the world and left us to work out what to do with it. The book Candide can be taken as a view of how humanity is screwing up, not getting things right. Not yet.
One more interpretation of that last sentence then: what if Voltaire meant the ‘garden’ of the Earth? We must cultivate (look after?) the Earth and all who live on it. Is there a way of thinking about that last sentence as if it were speaking back at the disasters and horrors we meet earlier in the book, saying that they happened because we weren’t looking after our garden? The garden that belongs to us. So, this way, it’s a plea to not accept the horrors we’ve met earlier, and it’s not a selfish plea to do ‘my’ thing but it’s more of a plea to do ‘our’ thing – together.
I find that thought helpful and hopeful. Helpful, hopeful thoughts don’t come along very often, so we should grab them when they do. And hang onto them, don’t you think?
SUGGESTION
As this book is both thoughtful (in the sense of ‘full of thoughts’) and practical, here comes the practical bit: why not read Candide?
Bis for Bad Days and Bannisters
It may seem strange that the second entry in a book called Good Days is ‘Bad Days’. Perhaps it should fall foul of trade description law.
Hang on in there, there’s a reason.
But first, let’s deal with ‘days’. What’s with ‘days’? I’m inspired by two pieces of writing: one by the poet Philip Larkin and the other by the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow. Larkin wrote, ‘Days are where we live.’ Sheryl Crow wrote, ‘Every day is a winding road.’ They each had a bit more to say about days, but let’s stick with the idea of a day. What is it and why might it be useful to think of it in the context of this book?
By ‘day’, I don’t mean the formal matter of 24 hours, and I don’t really mean a day to include – as it does technically – the time we’re asleep. The day I’m talking about is that conscious period of time between our major sleeps. Like Larkin, I’m of the view that this ‘day’ is where and how we live. We live ‘day by day’, ‘taking one day at a time’, ‘living from day to day’. You may have heard it said that for most people, the longest series of numbers we can remember easily without making any special effort is seven. Yes, for some people it’s fewer and some people can easily remember more. And with effort, practice and repetition most of us reach longer numbers, as with our mobile phone numbers. That said, there seems to be some kind of average, ordinary length that we can manage without much effort. I think of a ‘day’ as something like that.
This is how it works: a day marks a period of time in which you can do stuff. Most of us make the day-between-sleep when we do our eating, peeing and pooing – the basic stuff of life. Yes, some of us have to get up in the night and ‘take a leak’ (as my son puts it). Some of us also wake in the small hours and ‘get the munchies’ (as another one of my children puts it), but by and large we do most of that stuff in that day period. That’s the basics.
Then there’s whatever we mean by work. By definition, we do work when we’re awake and the times when we’re asleep mark the boundaries for it. Obvious. But this imposes a pattern on what’s possible – whether that’s imposed by employers or by your own routines as self-employed. You know that if you push it too hard, there’ll be problems the next day. If you mess about, ‘bunk off’, give up – again, there’ll be problems the next day. If you’re retired, there can be other problems – days can be empty and, we might say, ‘meaningless’. There doesn’t seem to be very much ‘to do’.
Even the idea of ‘days off’ and the ‘weekend’ are part of this routine of days, the ‘diurnal’ as it’s called. The idea of TGIF (or TFIF), the idea of the ‘Saturday night’, the way we think of some activities as being more suitable for a Saturday rather than a Sunday – all have their roots in the diurnal, with the old matter of sabbaths and worship running along underneath.
But what about emotions and feelings? Is there a way in which these are part of this idea that ‘days are where we live’? One way to think of feelings is that they run to and fro across time – past, present and future – as with memories from the past, reactions to events in a day, and then all the emotions involved in thinking forwards about the future: what might happen, what could happen, what we’re afraid might happen,
what we hope will happen and all the attendant feelings that go with these fantasies.
Our thoughts break out of the capsule of the day by going back into memories and forwards into possible happenings, but my argument here is that we live those emotions in the now, in the day itself. There’s nowhere else to live them. We go through the acts of remembering (past) and thinking ahead (future) in the reality of the now. The now is in the day. In that sense, even our mental life is in the day.
And there’s a limit on these thoughts. That’s to say, we can’t think them forever. As for me, I find that it’s not possible to stick with one train of thought for much longer than an hour or two. Admittedly, we can come back to that train later in the day, and indeed tomorrow, the day after, the day after that, but of course, each time we do that, in reality, it’ll be different. It’ll be at least as different as a film we watch for the second or third time and probably more different because it’s us who are, in a sense, making the film. It’s our train of thought that we’re making, so we can remake it, change it, develop it, revise it, how we want. But again, I’m going to claim that the place where these trains of thought live is in a day.
When we wake up, there’s a sense of us ‘starting again’ or ‘giving that thought another go’ in the time available – which will be in the day or part of the day. Days are our chapters. What else does Philip Larkin say about days? He says:
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
This reminds us that we don’t control days. Our diurnal existence is controlled by the rotation of the earth and our need for sleep – some combination of both, perhaps. By the way,
I’m not denying the lives of millions (billions?) of people who choose to or have to work at night. As I said, this ‘day’ I’m talking about is the ‘time between sleeps’. I’m not talking about ‘daytime’ or ‘nighttime’.
Larkin’s line ‘time and time over’ reminds us that not only do we live in days but when we think ahead, we often think ahead to a day or days. That’s where our life will go on: the day we’re going to get married, the day I’m going to meet my old friend, the day when I have my operation, the day when I do my exam. Quite often, if it’s an ‘event’ we plan a day around the event: how we’re going to get there, where we’re going to eat, what we might do afterwards, how we’ll get home – and hundreds of variations on that. So days are where we live and days are what we imagine coming up ahead.
Then Larkin says:
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Well, ‘they are to be happy in’ is what I’m trying to write about in the rest of this book, so I’ll leave that to one side for the moment. The question ‘Where can we live but days?’ is what I’ve been discussing so far in this chapter. Sleeping is obviously some kind of life, some kind of existence, but not the existence I’m talking about! Yes, there isn’t anywhere else to live but in days.
Now Larkin’s poem takes a twist. He writes:
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
In his own poetic style, we know here that he’s talking about religion, medicine, death and the afterlife, but it’s pretty clear that he wants to shelve all that. It’s not what he’s talking about. He talks of ‘solving the question’ by way of not solving the question! And I’m happy to join Larkin in that. I’ll come back to it when we meet my daughter telling me what kind of human being I am – as daughters do.
Now what does Sheryl Crow tell us?
She tell us: ‘Every day is a winding road.’
SUGGESTION
As an experiment, you can try writing a line that begins ‘Every day is …’
We’re led to believe from the words in the song that the line doesn’t come from Crow herself, but was one said by a ‘vending machine repair man’ with whom Crow was hitching a ride. It doesn’t matter if it’s the man’s line or Crow’s but it’s a nice expression of how our way of life – our work, how we live –often shapes how we see the world. If you’re driving about on the long distances of the USA between one broken vending machine and another, then indeed every day is a winding road. But of course, there are other senses to it too. As we go through a day, it winds around places, people, events, feelings. It’s a good metaphor. It shows us how, if we’re lucky enough to be active in our thoughts and bodies, we move. And that little
phrase ‘every day’ reminds us, yet again, that these movements of mind and body happen in the day, day after day.
But Crow has more to say about days. She says that the days in her song are when anything goes and she talks of each day being a faded sign.
The first of these suggests (as do other parts of the song) that the persona singing is ‘going along with’ what’s happening, perhaps being on the road with this vending machine repair man. The great advantage of travel is that the day appears to unroll for you. You don’t have to make the effort to roll it out through your own actions and thoughts.
The second (the one about the sign) suggests something different. Along the side of road there are always faded signs. A day might be marked or even described by one faded sign after another. I once wrote a poem about the faded signs I saw on the road between Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona and, by doing that, it told a story of past times in that part of America. But there’s another way in which our days are, as I’ve suggested, full of the faded signs of our own lives. We go through a day with fragments of our past life coming up on our mental TV screen. Our minds are full of ‘faded signs’. They come to us, as Crow says, ‘every day’.
As you might guess, I love this song!
But Crow hits another tone. In the song she wonders why she feels alone and, again, why she’s a stranger in her own life.
As if she isn’t puzzled enough by these thoughts, she also wonders if everything she’s seen was real – did everything really happen?
So what seemed a bit like a road movie, an adventure, a carefree friendship (a romance?), a matter of just seeing what goes, now touches on a note of loneliness and dislocation, alienation, of not knowing who she is. Why has this adventure