Summer Musings: 1

August is holiday time for me, more or less. So I thought, for my next couple of newsletters, I’d just spill my thoughts onto the page a bit. And this week, I’ve been thinking about pleasure, or rather that specific kind of pleasure that comes from suddenly having much less than usual to do.

On Monday, I dropped our 12-year old twins at camp for 5 days and drove the short drive back to the beach house where we spend our summers. When I got home, the house seemed almost to hum with the absence of the children and weekend guests. I waved to my husband working on his computer at the window upstairs, then wandered through the house and right past all the detritus that would usually stop me: wet towels clumped on chairs, books and chalks, pots of slime and squishies on all the available surfaces. The back garden was a map of surfboards. I ignored all of it and sunk onto the bench outside, my open book nothing more than a gesture on my chest, and fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up, everything seemed different, as if I were Dorothy stepping from her tornado-transported house into the bright clarity of Oz. Newly refreshed, I noticed not just a generalised beachy soundscape but the exact timbre of the sea as it spilled in and out over the pebbles, a single small plane wheeling in the sky, the brief querulous piping of someone else’s child. When I sat up and looked around me, my vision felt altered too. I saw the individual cushions on the outdoor sofa, mostly faded but one a deep blue; a jug of gerberas my husband had placed on the outdoor table, petals impossibly bright, stalks so green and tubular. I even noticed the grain on the silvery wooden arm of the bench. It was as if the removal of my kids, and that brief profound sleep, had made room for my senses to unfurl. For the first time in ages, I felt completely peaceful and alive.

Like many of my generation I suspect, bodily pleasure wasn’t only not celebrated when I was growing up; it was actively disapproved of. And I don’t just mean the big bad joys of sex and gluttony. Even gentler sensual indulgence was frowned upon. Apart from our summer holiday to Ireland, when I would find my mum blissed out with a book in the long yellow grass of the seaside house we rented there, she was always on her feet. And even during those annual breaks, my dad couldn’t bear to see anyone sitting around, unless they were reading something astringent. ‘Hedonists’, he would mutter, only semi-jokingly, when he walked in on a bunch of us adolescents lolling around the TV, ‘Sybarites’ if he caught us in the act of snacking on cokes and crisps between meals.

I’m not of my dad’s persuasion, but I accept that there is something tricky and perhaps a little distasteful in talking about pleasure, even the rudimentary kind that comes from the easeful feeling simply being inside a body which is mostly okay. Because to grasp even this joy implies enormous privilege. Most of the bounty I’ve felt this week, delight in the sea and sky, and objects appearing to me in all their colourful stoutness in the house, has emerged from the essential conditions of prosperity and peacetime that so many in today’s world don’t have.

And yet, anatomising and relishing pleasure is surely preferable to taking it for granted? It’s 6.52am on Friday 7^thAugust. Yesterday, I was at the hospital, tomorrow the house will be teeming with family. But right now, everything is quiet. The doors are wide open and, in front of me are layers of grass, low wall and hydrangea, then pebbles and sea. The only sounds are of small waves, the odd gull in the sky, the patter of my fingers on the keyboard.

The scene is tranquil too. The sky is watercolour blue, the sea below it a thick navy stripe. A red and white container ship sits high on the horizon, the Isle of Wight is distinct in the distance, a thumbnail of pale cliffs topped with a cap of green hills. All these different colourful elements– sky, land, sea, ship – feel as basic and true as a child’s painting.

I believe that living inside a body offers more than sensuality, that there is a quiet morality in observing our changing internal landscape and describing it faithfully. And this accounting shouldn’t just itemise what is difficult - the private contours of our often shameful desires, functions and failings - but should include celebrating the body in all its manifest, glorious vitality.

This afternoon, my husband and I will collect our dear girls from camp, and return to a house that will fast become messy and noisy again, as the new weekend gets underway. I’m so grateful. I know what it means to wonder if a child might never come home again. I know what a fortunate life I have. But in this moment, there is the blessing of this past week, the way these few days have allowed me to feel at home in my body again, who cares that it’s getting older and less lovely.

So, in celebration of simple bodily joys, here are 5 things that have given me pleasure this week while my kids have been away:

1/ The gin and tonic I had on returning from the hospital yesterday. Glass-misted, pinked with rhubarb and sprigged with mint. Full of ice - I take my G&T seriously, and ice is the essential ingredient.

2/ The roadside vegetable stall between the beach house and the studio where I do yoga, with only an honesty box for money. My favourite, the brown paper bags overflowing with tomatoes so rich, red and soft I can wolf them on the drive home like peaches.

3/ My eldest daughter arriving unexpectedly on the train for a night. Swimming and sitting by the fire with her and my husband. Finding her bikini next to mine on the washing line after she left the next day.

4/ A silent house with no kids in it, knowing the kids will return.

5/ Swimming in the sea every day under the great bowl of sky.

I’m so happy you’re here, reading my Substack. So please tell me - what simple pleasures have you managed to enjoy this week, thanks to the marvellous vessel of your own physical frame

(The beach house where I am right now)