It is just after six in the evening and I am having that beautiful moment when I realise that all my work is done for the week and I can let out a deep breath and step into the weekend. I can enjoy the sunny evening (for our Scottish sun is shining) and look forward to a gentle Saturday and start dreaming of the sweet family lunch on Easter Day.
This all feels like the utmost luxury to me.
But - and here’s the interesting thing - there is a part of me which is slightly shocked. That part is scrabbling around in the faintly manic belief that there must be at least another twelve things on my To Do list. It is not at all sure that I am allowed to luxuriate in rest and conversation and free time.
This is perplexing. I was brought up by a family which was half hedonism, half the virtue of hard work. There was drinking and singing and parties every single Saturday night, and horses and trips to Deauville and all sorts. (Mum and Dad really did live quite a rackety life in the sixties and seventies.) But at the same time, my father was up every morning, rain or shine, at 5.30am, and he’d go out into the dark yard and muck out three horses and ride out three lots. Then he’d have breakfast and disappear into his little office, which overlooked a rather rambling apple orchard, and do all his admin and paperwork whilst his secretary, Evelyn, of whom we were all in awe, watched him beadily from across the room.
My mother’s job was to do the public face of the business - all the entertaining and making people welcome and presenting an appearance of effortlessness and fun. This meant that she was endlessly cooking and tidying and primping and planning and making lists and looking fabulous (which did matter, in this context and in those days) and doing mysterious things in the garden and getting up at dawn to pick mushrooms. I don’t really know why I thought of the mushrooms. It was one of her great things and I was remembering it, only this morning. And, for no reason that anyone could work out, it did have to be done at dawn.
When I was younger, I definitely went with the hedonism part of this equation. It didn’t help that I was obsessed with Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round table. In my mind, they were always dashing off to Paris or taking ocean liners to the South of France or sitting about drinking very dry martinis and swapping bon mots. I saw only that glamour, and wanted some of it, in my youthful folly. But now I go back and re-read Fitzgerald’s letters and notebooks and I see the ruthless hard work that went into his writing life. You don’t get to write The Great Gatsby if you are merely lounging about with the glamour crew, being fabulous. He thought about writing every day and he practised writing every day and he drove himself to do more marvellous things with words every day, and that’s how he wrote the finest novel of the 20th century. (Well, that, and a dazzling, tragic dose of pure talent, which I think was born in him.)
I don’t have any use for glamour any more. I’m fifty-six and I spend a lot of my time in muddy gumboots with metaphorical and literal hay in my hair. I’m in the field with the horses and I’m on the Zoom and I’m tap, tap, tapping away at my keyboard. There is no time for Paris or ocean liners. I still catch a glimpse of glamour from afar, the kind that doesn’t really exist any more, when I see an old picture of Peter Beard or Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and it makes me smile. But it’s not my life. Now, I’ve got the work part drumming in me, and I have new ventures and clients to deal with and the charity I work for and horses to bring on. I think a lot about Dad getting up at five in the morning and how much discipline he had, when he was not singing songs and telling stories and making people laugh.
And I think, as I write this, about balance. Everything has to be kept in proportion. I am allowed to take a whole weekend off; all of us busy humans need rest and pleasure and ease. But it astonishes me that I’ve got to a part of my life where I have to give myself that permission consciously and with sincerity, as the Never Enough gremlin starts shouting something about self-indulgence and time-wasting and not giving people their money’s worth.
I had forty-five minutes between clients this morning and the Never Enough gremlin told me to go inside and write hundreds of words. I defied it. I took my red mare out for a ride, because the sun was shining and because Scotland was at last looking as if spring might have sprung, with the daffodils out and some colour coming back to the washed-out landscape of winter. I wanted that pure, elemental pleasure of the power of my thoroughbred under me and the blue sky over our heads and the benign hills watching over us.
I had a companion for the first part of the ride and so there was the pleasure of conversation too, and I bumped into some Easter visitors on the second half, so there was the joy of seeing old friends.
Pleasure, which I once sought as if it were some kind of mad holy grail, is now something I have to allow myself. But I think it’s more than that. I start to think it is a non-negotiable. In this rushing world of technology and financial crisis and chaotic politics, where uncertainty is part of the daily news, I think we humans need pleasure for our minds and our bodies, for our emotional resilience and our nervous systems. We need the serotonin and the endorphins; we need the muscle release; we need the sheer rest from all those To Do lists.
And all that may be an absolutely massive rationalisation, but I don’t care.
Happy Good Friday, you dear Dear Readers. I hope you have a cup of pleasure, wherever you are.