Small Pleasures Read online

  There was a wooden chest with her special things: some old coins, a fan made of ivory, a tiny pencil made of gold, a photo of her at a beach and a slightly sinister one in which she’s standing next to a man in soldier’s uniform which she says was taken ‘during the war’. You were being introduced to an outside world bigger than your parents. It was alien, but because of her involvement, it is still one you are connected to.

  A grandmother can function as what the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object. A transitional object (like a favourite blanket or an increasingly grubby knitted rabbit) stands for home, but it can also accompany the child in its early forays into the wider world. It provides an extended psychological lifeline back to maternal love and security. In its presence the child feels emotionally safe and can therefore risk experimenting with things that are at first a little frightening or alien. The grandmother is kind and gentle, and in her reassuring presence the child can start to encounter ideas that are potentially distressing: the fact that the world is very big, with a huge, complex past and filled with strangers.

  There is a sweet alliance of the elderly grandmother (who is gradually becoming weaker) and the young grandchild (who is slowly becoming stronger). But at the moment, from opposite ends of the spectrum, they both understand frailty quite well. There’s an open-ended tenderness in the grandmother’s attitude. Her awareness of her own short tenure on life makes her feel the preciousness of mere existence. She’ll probably die before the course of your adult life is established. She might not be able to talk about Minecraft or know how to make a spaceship out of Lego; she can’t make an obstacle course round the sitting room out of cushions and upturned chairs. But she’s very interested in whether you still like Toblerone and if you might be feeling a little bit cold. She may be the only person who simply wants you to be happy. She’s good at being cosy. It’s nice to snuggle up to her while she reads to you. She embodies a species of wisdom: the knowledge that achievement is in the long run overrated, that simply being comfortable sitting next to another person watching a gardening programme on television, or carefully watering a potted geranium in the company of a small person, can be deeply important.

  Ironically, it is this pure kindness which is so irritating when you become a teenager. She’s delighted – of course – if you win the long jump and will obligingly coo over your maths exam results. But you sense that she would be just as warm if you had two left feet and couldn’t make any sense of algebra. Because her love is unconditional, it has the potentially maddening tendency to look right past some of your actual merits, which are the present focus of your own sense of who you are. She wants to hug you and tuck you in and do a jigsaw together.

  She seems – in a way that will become awkward – to represent the opposite of sex. When she was 22 she was very different. She’s actually been through every permutation of experience. But it doesn’t seem that way when you are 13. Excitement doesn’t touch her now. Inevitably – but quite wrongly – you feel she’d be shocked and upset to know of the inner complications of your growing imagination. You were still too young to realise that even though she likes patterned jumpers and takes care going down stairs, she’s the same person who once spent a riotous summer shacked up with a drunken conceptual artist in West Berlin.

  The parent is desperate that the child will grow up well; the lover wants to be understood; the friend wants a companion in adventure. The grandmother doesn’t want anything from you, except your presence. It’s a disconcerting innocence: the lack of calculation and an absence of desire. She doesn’t appear to acknowledge any of the driving forces in your life. It’s not actually because she never knew them but because they no longer particularly impress her terribly much. She’s seen boys grow into lawyers and then judges, or A-grade students, doctors and then surgeons – and it doesn’t amaze her because she’s also seen these people have messy personal lives, decline physically, develop prostate issues and die suddenly. It means she focuses on now and can therefore seem boring: for example, her interest in mentioning that there used to be a dry-cleaners where there’s now a health food shop; her habit of saying ‘the’ Facebook; her confusion at how her phone works.

  The pleasure we take in the idea of the grandmother is a way of acknowledging how much we actually like tenderness. Ordinarily, relationships should learn a lesson in love from this slightly funny situation – the encounter between an elderly lady and a child. It doesn’t look like a likely classroom where we can gain much of an education. But this is the true crucible of love – a topic which we are so invested in but around which we have so many failures. What we learn is how important modesty of ambition is. It’s where we see how love can be so beneficially detached from expectation and from reciprocation. The grandmother never hopes to be understood by the child. It is enough to spend a nice day, without doing much: we saw a pony, had some milk, played a game of cards, tried doing a painting of a flower. Quite soon, the 6-year-old will start to think this is a ridiculous day. And it may take six decades before they relearn that it is the purpose and meaning of life.

  The longing, embodied in the happy idea of the grandmother, is that we can learn this lesson a little better and a little sooner: that we will be able to decant a portion of this love-wisdom before too much of life is past.

  5

  The Friend who Listens

  Given how much we value friendship, it’s strange that we’re not so focused on one of its central pleasures: being listened to.

  Few of us know how to do it, not because we are evil, but because no one has taught us how and – a related point – no one has listened to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialised egoism. Like most things, it’s about education. Our civilisation is full of great books on how to speak – Cicero’s Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest in the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called ‘The Listener’. There is a range of things that the good listener is doing that makes it so nice to spend time in their company. Firstly: they egg us on. It’s hard to know our own minds. Often, we’re in the vicinity of something, but we don’t quite close in on what’s really bothering or exciting us. We hugely benefit from the encouragement to elaborate, to go into greater detail, to push a little further. We need someone who, rather than launch forth, will simply say those two magic words: go on … You mention a sibling and they want to know a bit more. What was the relationship like in childhood? How has it changed over time? They’re curious where our concerns and excitements come from. They ask things like: why did that particularly bother you? Why was that such a big thing for you? They keep our histories in mind, they might refer back to something we said before, and we feel they’re building up a deeper base of engagement.

  Secondly: they urge clarification. It’s fatally easy to say vague things: we simply mention that something is lovely or terrible, nice or annoying. But we don’t really explore why we feel this way. The friend who listens often has a productive, friendly suspicion of some of our own first statements and is after the deeper attitudes that are lurking in the background. They take things we say, like ‘I’m fed up with my job’ or ‘My partner and I are having a lot of rows …’, and help us to focus on what it really is about the job we don’t like or what the rows are really about. They’re bringing to listening an ambition to clarify the underlying issues. They don’t just see conversation as the swapping of anecdotes. They are reconnecting the chat you’re having over pizza with the philosophical ambitions of Socrates, whose dialogues are records of his attempts to help his fellow Athenians understand their own ideas and values.

  Thirdly: they don’t moralise. The good listener is acutely aware of how insane we all are. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened about this. They’re skilled at making occasional little positive sounds: strategic ‘mmms’ that delicately
signal sympathy without intruding on what we’re trying to say. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they’re reassuring us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed we are. Saying one feels like a failure could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by.

  Fourthly: they separate disagreement from criticism. There’s a huge tendency to feel that being disagreed with is an expression of hostility. And obviously sometimes this is right. But a good listener makes it clear that they can really like you and, at the same time, think you are wrong. They make it plain that their liking for you isn’t dependent on constant agreement. They are powerfully aware that a really lovely person could end up a bit muddled and in need of some gentle untangling.

  When we’re in the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful pleasure, but too often, we don’t really realise what it is about what this person is doing that is so nice. By paying strategic attention to the pleasure, we can learn to magnify it and offer it to others, who will notice, heal – and repay the favour in turn. Listening deserves discovery as one of the keys to a good society.

  6

  Take-off

  Few seconds in life are as ecstatic as those in which a plane ascends to the sky. Looking out of a window from a machine standing stationary at the beginning of a runway, we face a vista of familiar proportions: a road, oil cylinders, grass and hotels with copper-tinted windows; the earth as we have always known it, where we make slow progress, even with the help of a car, where calf muscles and engines strain to reach the summit of hills, where, half a mile ahead or less, there is almost always a line of trees or buildings to restrict our view. Then, suddenly, accompanied by the controlled rage of the engines (with only a slight tremor from glasses in the galley), we rise fluently into the atmosphere and an immense horizon opens up across which we can wander without impediment. A journey which on earth would have taken an afternoon can be accomplished with an infinitesimal movement of the eye; we can cross Berkshire, glimpse Maidenhead, survey Bracknell and overtake every car on the M4.

  There is psychological pleasure in this take-off too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that had loomed over us.

  The new vantage point lends order and logic to the landscape: roads curve to avoid hills; rivers trace paths to lakes; pylons lead from power stations to towns; streets, which from earth seemed laid out without thought, emerge as well-planned grids. The eye attempts to match what it can see with what it knows should be there, like trying to decipher a familiar book in a new language. The lights must be Newbury, the road the A34 as it leaves the M4. And to think that all along, hidden from our sight, our lives were this small: the world we live in but almost never see; the way we must appear to the hawk and to the gods.

  The engines show none of the effort required to take us to this place. They hang in the inconceivable cold, patiently and invisibly powering the craft, their sole requests, painted on their inner flanks in red letters, that we do not walk on them and that we feed them ‘Oil only: D50TFI-S4’, a message for a forthcoming set of men in overalls, 4,000 miles away and still asleep.

  There is not much talk about the clouds visible up here. No one thinks it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we flew past a vast white candyfloss island which would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that, out of the window, we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.

  Food that, if eaten in a kitchen, would have been banal or offensive, acquires a new taste and interest in the presence of clouds (like a picnic of bread and cheese that delights us when eaten on a clifftop above a pounding sea). With the in-flight tray, we make ourselves at home in this unhomely place: we appropriate the extraterrestrial landscape with the help of a chilled bread roll and a plastic tray of potato salad.

  The clouds usher in tranquillity. Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs, all of them now infinitesimal, scratches on the earth. We may know this old lesson in perspective well enough, but rarely does it seem as true as when we are pressed against the cold plane window, our beautiful purposeful machine a teacher of profound philosophy.

  7

  A Night Alone in a Hotel

  You’ve been in the air for 12 hours. Now this anonymous box. It was your company’s idea. You’d have a chance to sleep a little, then catch the next 11-hour flight, before heading straight into the conference.

  You’ve been assigned a room at the top western corner of the building from which you can see one side of a terminal and a sequence of red and white lights that mark the end of a runway. Every minute, despite the best attempts of the glazing contractors, you hear the roar of an ascending jet, as hundreds of passengers, some perhaps holding their partners’ hands, others sanguinely scanning The Economist, head out over the Straits of Singapore.

  You’re hungry and hunt out the room service menu. ‘Pacific snapper, enhanced with lemon pepper seasoning atop a chunky mango relish.’ The always dour ‘Chef’s soup of the day’. But perhaps, in the end, there’s never a better alternative to the club sandwich, which you’ve never eaten (or even noticed) anywhere but in places like this.

  There is a knock at the door 20 minutes later. It is a strange moment when two adults meet each other, one naked save for a complimentary dressing gown, the other (newly arrived in Singapore from the little village of Ujung Batu in Indonesia and sharing a room with four others near the sports stadium) sporting a black-and-white uniform with an apron and name badge. It is difficult to think of the ritual as entirely unremarkable, to say in a casually impatient voice, ‘By the television, please,’ while pretending to rearrange papers – though this capacity can be counted upon to evolve with more frequent attendance at global conferences.

  You have dinner with Chloe Cho, formerly with CNBC, now working for Channel NewsAsia in Singapore. She updates you on the regional markets and Samsung’s quarterly forecast. You wonder what Chloe’s outside interests might be.

  It’s impossible to get to sleep. The prehistoric part of your mind, trained to listen for and interpret every shriek in the trees, is still doing its work, latching on to the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets in unknown precincts of the building. The sky is a chemical orange colour.

  Being unable to sleep night after night, for weeks on end, is – of course – hell. But in smaller doses, insomnia in a lonely foreign hotel does not need a cure. It’s an asset with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial things you need to think about get a chance to unfold here. During the day, back home, you are dutiful to others, you’re part of a team of 30. The emails come in by the dozen every ten minutes. Here, for once, in this box at the end of a long corridor, you can return to a bigger duty: to yourself.

  The hotel on the edge of the runway is a corrective to the demands of the community, to the inability to think in the normal press of the day. It’s like a monastery in the times of old. You can turn things over. The thoughts of this long night would sound weird to your partner, your friends, your children. These people need you to be a certain way. They cannot tolerate all your possibilities and desires – and for some good reasons. You don’t want to let them down; they have a right to benefit from your predictability. But their expectations choke off important aspects of who you are.

  Now, in this endless night by the airport, with the window open and a clearing sky above, it is just you, the universe and an A380 on its final approach from Dubai.

  In the rush of th
e day, there is no time for the higher-order questions: where is my career going? How come there is so little tenderness in my relationship? How could I reconnect with my kids? What do I really want from this brief life? To be turning over such issues and yet to feel like a mere beginner is worrying, but you go with it nevertheless. You’re taking notes on the hotel pad. You have the protection of the night and of a foreign land where no one knows of you or cares about you in the slightest. You could disappear here and hardly leave a trace.

  You are naturally very inclined to want to be normal. Yet thanks to this insomnia, you are granted a crucial encounter with your weirder, truer self. The daytime-office you is a misleading picture of what you’re like. This insomnia is a gift, and this lonely plastic hotel is its precious, unexpected, generous guardian.

  8

  Sunbathing

  You haven’t come to Rhodes to explore the medieval old town or the ancient temple of Apollo. You’ve not been drawn by a longing to try the local delicacy of chickpea fritters and unsalted ewe’s milk cheese. Your more sophisticated acquaintances would think it trivial. But you have come here for just one thing: to get some sun.

  On the beach, here, there are recliners under big straw sunshades. The water is warm. The heat envelops you and seems to ease the knotted muscles in your left shoulder.