Phone notes: Change your mind, change your life

Yearn for the vast and endless sea

Staying a village with two friends who I met at university nearly twenty years ago - one we chose because it was geographically helpful more than anything else.

The house we’re renting has a laminated booklet of info, including frequently asked questions. In response to ‘who owns the house’? The answer is: ‘my brother John.’ What a perfect answer.

We head out for a wander and a coffee, and walk past a hypnotist with words on the window: Change your mind, change your life. I wonder aloud what we’d all change if we could.

Me: I think I’d want to change myself so I didn’t care what anyone thinks of me.
L: I’d want to be more decisive.
C: I’d make it so every time I had two drinks it actually felt like five, but I wouldn’t get the hangover of five.

Other excellent things C says over the weekend:

• When I dress my kids in matching cute outfits it’s so they’re more tolerable - to me and to other people - when they are behaving appallingly

• Why does a hoover always smell like dog even when there isn’t a dog?

• When I see a twin and I’m not sure which one it is, I always just tell them ‘oh yes, you’re the fun one’

There’s a charity shop closing down and we peruse happily for quarter of an hour or so. I choose a pack of twenty yellow pencils for £1 and take them to a counter.

Attendant: ‘If you want those you need to buy ten packets for £1.’
Me: ‘Sorry?’
Attendant: ‘If you want those you needs to buy ten packets for £1. I can’t sell you less than ten packets.’

On a dog walk and there is a what looks like a solitary Malteser in the middle of the path. Tread on it, and the noise confirms my suspicion.

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If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of Le Petit Prince)

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They make me tea with a packet of loose leaf. They describe how their grandfather used to make it. How he knew exactly how long to brew it before adding the milk, and would spend a calm few minutes waiting and then fishing out the odd floating leaf with his teaspoon before knowing implicitly when the temperature was just right for the first, delicious sip.

—

My dad finds a box in an outhouse containing my mum’s childhood Cindy doll’s clothes. Open it and immediately see they are made better than 95% of adult human clothes now. Teeny tiny pairs of tights, complete with seams at the back, a blue quilted jacket with faux fur trim, a floor length PVC black coat. There is also a toy dog on a lead, a framed picture of who I assume is Cindy’s boyfriend, and white plastic boots which I would quite like in my size.

Good things to click on:

• Wow this was a ride

• My friend Kiri absolutely smashed Live At The Apollo, watch it if you need a real belly laugh

• Ever wondered what historian Dame Mary Beard did yesterday?