Triumph of the ordinary

It is difficult to remember ordinariness of life between misery, conspiracy, disaster, financial irregularity

When you live on a diet of distilled misery, conspiracy, disaster, murder and mayhem, financial irregularity on a cosmic scale and an exploding population fornicating itself into extinction — it can be a little difficult to maintain touch with the ordinariness of life outside the miserable bubble that is daily life. Pretty much all of us that scribble for a living exist like this. Picking through the entrails every day to write the stories that fill the pages you read now. Simply — good news is not good business. Scratch the surface of any superficially happy story and there is a hidden darkness, a sliver of innuendo, an unsourced rumour that lifts it into the comfort zone of borderline sadness if not crippling depression.

It was a book (which will be reviewed separately) that kicked the midden this week. And the gardener. It is all too easy to drift off when you have the sort of domestic help that I have — a part-time house manager who coordinates everything, a cook-cleaner who lives in, a carer-driver-handyman who also lives in, looks after father-in-law and an all-purpose on-call everything person who could probably build a nuclear reactor from scratch with whatever he found in the storeroom. Then there is the man who looks after and services all the computers in the house — and the gardener. This group of men and women make a pretty-much impermeable layer around me. It only requires an injection of cash at specified intervals to maintain it and it works very well thank you very much.

But back to the book. It is about ordinariness. Mundanity. The tick-tock of life rather than the alarums and excursions. The itches that are scratched absent-mindedly. Not quite a litany of good news but not far off and it made me step outside for a bit and have a look around. And guess what? It’s pretty ordinary out there.

Ultimately it is all going to worms for Pakistan is the increasingly settled view of a basket of far-see-ers but not just yet, and that is fifty years down the line anyway. It will have all gone to worms for me long before that, and the twilight of my adopted home is also the twilight of my own life. Somewhat conveniently there is a period of quietus before the Four Horsemen canter in for a final run around the track, and Death, War, Famine and Pestilence have yet to saddle up.

So what we have is the Triumph of the Ordinary. Well, for twenty years perhaps. It gets a lot less ordinary after that. Terrorism has been boxed in and reduced to manageable proportions. The military have better and more profitable things to do than take over and run the country. The eternal playpen of politics is full of a cuddle of babies happily flinging their teddies about to no great purpose. The lumpen proletariat remain miserable and dissatisfied but not enough irritated to disturb the status quo. There is hunger but little by way of starvation. Yet. Most stuff works for most people an increasing amount of the time. Some stuff works quite well. Not enough stuff doesn’t work to trigger civil unrest.

Back to the gardener. If there is one thing us Brits are a bit partial to it is a lawn. A square or rectangle of green that is lovingly tended, mown, watered, edge-trimmed and sat out on in the height of whatever is the most pleasant season on the plastic version of the Iron Throne there to give the impression of being master of all one surveys. And the lawn was looking a tad sickly.

So sickly that the gardener tapped my bubble, then inserted himself between one of the gaps in my reality and drew me in the direction of said sickly lawn. ‘Trees’ said he pointing upwards. Indeed says I, clicking through the cogs in the ordinariness gearbox. Then it all happened very quickly and there were men and boys and axes and dragging of felled branches and suddenly the lawn got the sun and a smile on its face. Whether you have a lawn or not I warmly commend a visit to Planet Ordinary. Take care y’all. Smiley emoticon.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th, 2017.

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