1. Every night I go to sleep with my fingers entangled in John’s hair. (When he shaves his head, I just rest my fingers on his head instead. It’s more tactile when he has hair.)
2. The horses are back again in the field around the corner. On our way back from walking to the shops the long way around, we stop to feed them small chunks of carrot and stroke their noses. Later, John, who doesn’t really like horses, says it’s one of his favourite moments of the day.
3. The lasagne is perfect.
1. Even though we don’t have to get up particularly early for work – and work from home, it’s still a pleasure to have an alarm-less morning at the weekend.
2. I nibble off the piece of bacon extruding from the bread and it’s delicious – perfectly salty, perfectly crisp, bacon at its best.
3. Despite being together nearly all day every day, sometimes we don’t actually see each other that much – working together or working in the same room but not together, or as has been the case recently, being in the same but being ill aren’t in any way “quality time”. Today – a day off work and the first day neither of us has felt particularly ill – is a “quality day”, even though we don’t do much. We sing silly songs with each other, we make dumb jokes, we provide sarcastic commentary to the media we’re watching, we awww at cats, we tell stories and we kick ideas around. Even now, when I’m in bed hurriedly writing this, John interrupts to ask about the use of “had had” in the book he’s reading and we have a discussion about that, “it it”, “in in” “that that” and my favourite, “not not”.
1. I wake up and tell John that I had a dream I was being wooed by another man. He was a very pretty Italian boy who worked as a waiter and repeatedly brought me great pizza. John understands why it would be hard to resist that and we decide that I should allow the dream waiter to continue to pursue me, and share the doughy reward.
2. We – John, Dan and I – play Guitar Hero until the room starts to scroll away from us and we see coloured dots whenever we close our eyes.
3. We’re feeding the neighbours’ cats over Christmas – two next door and three next door but one. I make small talk as I spoon out the meat and conduct rollcalls.
4. People start disappearing from our private work chat channel throughout the day, with messages of “see you in 2010”. The individual years of the decade have crept by without me really noticing but 2010 feels like the future. 2009 has been a difficult year but I’m feeling positive about the beginning of the next decade.
1. John catches one of our lovely neighbours putting out our recycling bins – after being away, we’d forgotten what day it was but our neighbour didn’t want us to miss out on the monthly collections.
2. A day in the office, the first full team meeting since P started a fortnight ago; a day of tea, progress and laughter. At the end of the day, when everyone else has gone, G and John look at old Land Registry documents and make jokes.
3. The oil from the chorizo yellows the potato. Our trip to Madrid lives on.
(I elbowed him in my sleep. It woke us both up and I had the presence of (sleepy) mind to say that an elbow to the face was still a more pleasant way to wake up than his usually incredibly jarring alarm. He agreed. The bruise came up a few hours later.)
© 2024 Louisa Parry