Every hour is our whole life, or something like that. How do these hours anoint my soul?
Sam is in the kitchen already preparing fresh coffee in his cafetière. An act performed in the softness of dawn and total habitual abandon. He’s probably listening to the cricket, or more likely a YouTube video about last night’s AEW tag team tournament.
I am woken with the same soft light upstairs, by my baby boy shouting ‘mummy’ across the corridor as he too wakes. I say my simple line of morning prayer and go to greet him with a big cuddle and, let’s be real, a heaving and stinking nappy.
I change him, we go downstairs to greet daddy in the kitchen and the breakfast ritual begins for the two of them - they must have their own things, as must I.
Returning upstairs, I shower, dress and look forward to a long but never long enough day of spending time with family, with friends, with strangers, in nature, in art, in love. In other words, we step into our mighty little universe which we have so carefully placed around us, yet have only been able to call ours by what the lightest of sceptics would name Complete Accident of Birth. Or if, like me, you are less of a question mark and more of an ellipses: God's perfect will.
We leave the car dozing in a bay on our long street, where parking is always a fought-over and highly prized treasure, and opt for one bus and two underground trains instead. These are our child's favourite modes of transportation (generally, his favourite subject du jour is transportation - I chuckle at this boyish stereotype which was never taught but has emerged from nowhere at all and may or may not subside one day as he grows).
Don't ask me where specifically we're headed, I only know the way: in deep and serious conversation about our groceries and whose parents' debt we would pay off first if we won the lottery; whether we should let our baby boy out of the buggy to run around on the slender, unbroken line of the eastbound Metropolitan before it becomes overcrowded at Harrow; if we could stop off at a few charity shops before heading over to meet our people at whichever museum or gallery we've agreed; and so on until we must detrain.
A day like this in the privilege of light and inconsequential conversation amongst the most treasured company. For little things such as these are privileges - ones that, with the grounding of our parents' unconditional sacrifices, people like us have carefully worked and scrimped and saved to be able to afford. And which are only ours by some great, miraculous and puzzling accident, otherwise known as the perfectly unsolvable will of God.
