The Little Things

I’ve been pondering. We’re still in lockdown here, and life is still peculiar and worrying. My family and I are safe, thank goodness, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that we aren’t all missing. I don’t want to dwell on things to make us all maudlin, or to forget the necessity of why we are all making the simple sacrifice of distance and isolation to protect each other, but, I wonder, what’s the first thing you’re looking forward to doing once we are out of lockdown? I know that there will be loved ones and friends that you can’t wait to throw your arms around, but I’m thinking of something a little bit more mundane. A little treat to yourself that you’ve been unable to enjoy for the past few weeks.

 

Let me tell you about mine.

 

Another thing I’m certain I’ve mentioned before is my love of coffee. I’ve got a nice coffee machine at home, and a swift espresso is a key part of my routine on any given day before I get thrown around by the hurricane of parenthood. However, once we’ve packed the kids off to school, and I’m ready to get stuck into my head to do some writing, I’ll sometimes make my way into town to grab a coffee in a coffee shop. I like to take my laptop, find a quiet corner, and write, enjoying the sights and sounds of a busy café and the bubbling conversations that come from every table. It provides a comforting soundtrack to my work, an endless variety of topics that bounce off the walls of the shop, that I appreciate on several levels – from the professional, where cadences and phrasing heard can be vital in making dialogue sound authentic, or finding some expression richly humorous and “worth keeping” but also reassuring and fascinating.

 

“We have more in common than we don’t” certainly holds water. It’s one of those things that I never fully appreciated until it was gone. But it’s not gone forever, and once we all get through this most testing of times, and once things get back to whatever “normal” we find on the other side, I’m going to go back to my favourite coffee shop, order a coffee, and only pretend to do some writing, and just let those little conversations and human interactions wash over me again.