But I like it.
I do.
I think it's the best thing to be.
Jumping for joy is pretty cool, and the odd bit of misery is helpful in the perspective stakes, but, on the whole, being content the whole damned time would be a jolly good place to be.
So why don't we hear about it more?
It's hard to write about being content without coming coming across downright smug. That's why. But I'm going to have a bloody good go at it.
*takes deep breath*
I'm lucky. My job makes me jump for joy, it really does. Actually, jumping for joy pretty much IS my job - that's what teaching Zumba is all about, for me, and watching new people come into class for the first time, all nervous and psyching themselves up, then seeing them realise that I'm not going to half kill them, humiliate them, accidentally make them feel small and unfit and generally unworthy, and then watch them start to relax, then maybe smile a little, then begin to grin and, as the class goes on and then the weeks go on, start to bust some &*^$ing moves. Ahh - that makes me jump for joy at the time, and helps with the contentment in between.
Also, I love to cook. As you may have spotted. I really enjoy it. It's a mental challenge, thinking up new stuff to do and making it work. It's also of endless interest to me. I will never, if I cook a different dish every single meal for the rest of my life, have cooked every single dish it is possible to cook. Oooh hang on - I need to sit down - that's really freaked me out! I'm going to die without having tasted things - yoinks! Ohhh-kay. Starting to be able to cope with that idea.
The flip side of cooking, of course, is cooking for kids. Mine are pretty good. They like snails, squid, good hot curries, octopus, blue steak, scallops - the little sods, of course, have no business even knowing what half of this stuff tastes like. Meanwhile, they think mashed potato and baked beans are the devil's work, and seem to have divided up most of the remaining easily available foods between them so that what one likes, the other abhors. Which makes it fucking difficult to come up with interesting, nutritional and varied meals for the pair of them on a daily basis. Thankfully M is no longer allergic to tomatoes, but the years of no spag bol, Heinz spaghetti shapes or Queen Of Tomato soup were a challenge. School roasts lunches, twice a week, used to be a nice easy one, until O announced that she no longer liked school roast beef. I shone an anglepoise lamp in her face, got my jackboots on, and asked her why the .... heck not. "Because it's brown". I can't argue with that. Overcooked beef is a crime.
So while cooking, generally, has always made me very happy - shall we go the whole hog and admit contentment? Yes, let's - cooking for the ungrateful makes me angry, stroppy, very unhappy and, on occasion, positively bitchy, darling.
Gardening is a joy beyond belief. Gardening while listening to Radio 4 is sheer unadulterated contentment. For a middle-aged bint such as myself. Gardening while listening to Zumba music is even better, but can be dangerous. Well, YOU try droppin' it to da floor with a swoe in your hand and see what happens.
Going out to water the greenhouse and finding that some dark and eldritch creature has crept in through the door (left open by ungrateful beast children (I jest. I adore them. When they are eating up my food and not leaving the door to the fucking greenhouse open all night)) and dug up m'flipping runners during the night is soul destroying.
Listen, in case you think I'm having it easy, here - many far far worse things have happened to me in my life, and will continue to happen to me in my life, I have no doubt. But we're talking about contentment here, so we'll take it with a pinch of salt and let my private life, or at least some small parts of it, remain my own.
There are many many other things which make me content. Seeing my children succeed at stuff. Seeing them try. Having the time to make more or less any damned thing. Sitting here, right now, in the sun, when the forecast said it would rain, on the purple table and chairs by the pond, wearing my big straw hat so I can see my screen, watching the fish sunbathe, the waterboatmen dive, the pond skaters mate, and the great crested newts bask, while I type up this nonsensical stream of consciousness - that's feeling pretty good.
Last week was a horrible time, and I don't want to go back there. Luckily I can't, unless someone's been and gone and invented time travel while I've been watching the test match. Next week will be fabulous, I have no doubt. Or at least, it will be a cause for contentment.
I'm going to leave you with a stroll around my garden, and a series of things, in no particular order, which made me content just now.
The sound of massed mowers. I love listening to Men At Work.
Things coming up in my rainy-day-office - AKA the greenhouse, which is calling out for care and attention, which is why I won't mind when it rains next week, apparently...
Flowers and plants and weeds and sunlight
Daisies. So called because they are Day's Eyes. Why do people get upset at having
daisies in their lawns? Are there not other things to get upset about?
A happy frog, basking in the sunlight, who let me get close enough to take this ponto
(ponto?! Photo) with my phone.
Freshly weeded stream.
Trip trap, trip trap, over the rickety bridge. This is LETHAL and needs repairing, but the kids love to remove the slats and lie on their tummies watching the newts in the patch of slow water beneath, so I can't quite bring myself to nail the bastard back down again. You have my full permission to laugh and point when I break my ankle running up there in the dark to lock the chickens in one night.
Primroses. Always a delight, but now also food - yay!
Ground Elder. Formerly a horrible, rampant, strangling weed. Now reclassified as a crop - yay!
Swing, for sitting in, reading, listening to the pond gurgle.
One day I will have time to actually do this (yes, I split an infinitive - hah! Bite me!) but
meanwhile, just thinking about it is contentment enough.
Kids bouncing on the trampoline, with the incinerator in the foreground,
holding all its promise of tidying the garden and BURNING STUFF in it, while
toasting marshmallows over its eyebrow-singeingly hot flames.
So that's me, just at this minute, content.
See, it's bloody irritatingly smug, isn't it?! Even while trying hard not to be. So if it's any consolation, and if it increases your own feelings of contentment at all, this is how I envisage the rest of the day.
Someone will ask me what's for dinner. I will begin to panic, because I haven't thought this one through, and although I want grilled aubergines, that will go down like a cup of cold sick. I will then turn unreasonably snappy and take to the bottle. (Simon has just walked down the gorgeous garden with a dead rat on a shovel, by the way, just to prove my point, and I've had to bag it up for the bin - eeeeeek). There will then be a panicked rummaging through the fridge for - ooh, just remembered, we have three chicken breasts, which, if I slice 'em up and coat 'em in cornflakes, should feed three - better still, I'll get Olivia to do it. That will all take longer than planned so the promised watching of last night's recorded Britain's Got Talent will go on way too late, at which point everyone will remember that their school uniforms and PE kits are still filthy from last week, and will need to be hunted out and washed. Everyone will get increasingly bad tempered about all of this, then lunchboxes will be remembered and will be found to contain things mouldering from last week, and smelling, curiously, of old bananas, despite the fact that they are strangers to bananas old and new. We will then realise that school lunch tomorrow is "disgusting" to at least one child, but will have insufficient supplies in for decent packed lunches which won't be sneered at by other children with more organised mothers. I will then remember that it's bath night and all the towels are in the wash. Eventually, fed, clean and with uniform in the wash, the children will be put to bed at a reasonable but slightly later than planned time (and I'm a bedtime fascist, so "a bit late" is probably still quite early by most standards). Mr P and I will then collapse on the sofa and watch last week's Dallas or something equally unchallenging with a bottle of red, and crawl upstairs to bed, whereupon we will be confronted with the fact that we thought, when we awoke this morning, that changing the bedclothes was a bloody good idea, but we only got so far as stripping the bed and never actually got the fresh sheets on. Downstairs, airing cupboard, swearing, fight about whose method of putting duvet cover on is most effective, and, ultimately, collapse, horizontal, on the world's most comfortable bed. Which I've just remembered, I noticed this morning when we stripped it, appears to have sprung a leak.
Bollocks.
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