Thanks to the cat.

I have that underlying feeling of anxiety today. A sort of hum beneath my surface. I go to do almost anything and I get a little jab in my chest, my brain jumping to something sad or unpleasant. My shoulders rising to my ears with the tension I keep holding. 

It is okay. It won't last. Perhaps by the afternoon it will have faded away. I know why I feel this way. Time of the month. Global pandemic. Climate change. Incompetent, self-serving government. The lingering remnants of a heartbreak, almost vanished but still there. 

Whenever I feel this way it is often my cat that restores a sense of calm. God knows what I did in the days before him. 

Today he stepped in from the garden and, as cats often do, immediately decided to turn around and go back out. But when I went to open the door he sniffed my feet lovingly before looking up at me with that imperious manner as if to say "it is time for a cuddle." 

I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. He circled me slowly. I picked him up. He settled on my thigh. We sat looking out into the fresh morning, the sun warming his fur and my face. 

For a moment I felt so still and so calm, that anxious hum fading away. It was just me, the cat, and the sun.  

What a deep pleasure it is to be chosen by your cat for a moment of shared stillness. 

Simple pleasures.

I have a routine now. Thank god. For three days a week I commute into London to train at a drama school.  It is completely delightful. 

The sense of purpose in itself feels like a huge relief. The movement from one place to another, the ability to leave my house for the day and see something new and different each time is a privilege I'd never have thought to be so thankful for. 

Perhaps the commute is unusually enjoyable because there are so few people on the trains. There isn't that bizarre bustle for the last few remaining seats, nor is there any need to sniff in a stranger's armpits as we are packed like sardines into the tube. Although I long to be near other people again, and I can't touch or hug my new friends. 

I love a routine that makes me feel like I am going somewhere, literally and figuratively. I secretly love the hustle of getting past bad drivers in their Chelsea tractors on their way to dropping small children at school. I love the feeling that everyone has somewhere they need to be getting to. How strange it was for us all to be standing still. 

I am not writing one of those Dettol adverts that attempted to romanticise the soul destroying office work that we will all be glad to see the back of. I just like the busyness, the energy lifting up again, the ability to see other humans in all their shapes and sizes. 

I love that one morning I stood at the platform and across the tracks I saw a young mum and her son share a moment of pure bliss, their love radiating all the way to where I was standing. He pecked her with a kiss, and another, and another and I was witness to their lovely, happy moment. Now every time I see them across the platform I smile to myself, my mood lifting with the memory. 

Some mornings I hear James, the station master, speak into the tannoy. "Hello, Mollie" he says. I wander over to the office and we speak through the glass. He asks how I am, how my mum is. He tells me about the leaf fall timetable changes, and the holiday he is going on. He'll see me in November, he says. 

I love the feeling of going somewhere. Of seeing other people going somewhere. To be slightly over the top it puts a spring in my step. 

It is a simple pleasure, and I am extraordinarily grateful to have it.