On Wednesday I waited with the front door ajar, freezing wind whistling through the gap and chilling the hallway and me to the brick and bone, for the postman, who had just delivered a parcel into my hands, to be out of earshot before I closed the door, lest the sound of the latch clicking behind him make him feel rejected.
The parcel turned out to be my copy of the book called The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, by Sarah Knight.
Sometimes even the most rational of us must accept that the universe is trying to tell us something.
Now, I have long believed that Marie Kondo’s decluttering bible, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, ’pon which Knight’s book self-evidently riffs, is essentially the guiding text of a death cult (your stuff is you! Tidy yourself away! Fold yourself into oblivion! Seek annihilation by sock drawer!). But Knight’s paean to mental decluttering is a much more life-affirming prospect. (She is American, of course. If she were British, her book would have been called The Life-Changing Magic of Nothing: Just Get on With It.)
The key practice she advocates is devising for yourself a “fuck budget” – deciding how many times each day you feel obliged to care deeply about something, and then making sure you use your allocation sensibly.
Say, life is good and you have 10 in your emotional arsenal today. You maybe want to give one to sending your child to school in a presentable uniform, three to going the extra mile at work, and one to small talk with a colleague or someone on the train; you still have five to distribute among the many demands on your time and resources when you get home.
On a bad day, you may have three, and you had better husband your resources accordingly (and, probably, warn your husband that your resources are not to be depredated by enquiries about the location of his phone/socks/tax forms).
It’s a beautiful way of streamlining your psyche – actually a worry, anxiety, neurosis and guilt budget all rolled into one. Stick that in your sock drawers, Konverts, and you might find you don’t fear life so much after all.
Frosty receptions
The reception staff of 90 GPs’ surgeries in Bradford are being sent on a three-hour course to learn how to be polite to patients. More than 800 staff will retrain. This is, on the whole, a mistake. Power-mad, full of unspoken bitterness and a fathomless desire for a nameless vengeance, terrifying doctors’ receptionists are a British institution. And, like most British institutions, they perform an unrecognised but valuable service. They make people stop and think. Am I ill? Yes. Am I ill enough to convince Brenda/Jean/Margery that I need to see a doctor? Not by some considerable margin. And so a good 30% of people pop a couple of aspirin and go to bed without ever bothering their overworked GP.
Some of them will turn out to have quite serious, possibly even fatal, conditions, of course. But no British institution was ever perfect. Brenda, Jean and Margery will write their own chapter of The Life-Changing Magic of Nothing: Just Get On With It.
French frighteners
Meanwhile, in Japan, McDonald’s has launched McChoco Potatoes – french fries drizzled in milk and/or white chocolate, promising “a wonderful salty and sweet harmonious taste”. Really? To me, chocolate and chips are two things that should never be brought together. Like carpet and tiles, man and bun, homeopathic and medicine. Shut it down, Maccy D. Shut it down.
