Day 102

Tuesday 30 June

It’s Adora’s 16th birthday today and although me and Lisa have been at work, she has had a lovely day. She wanted a dress-maker’s dummy and was made up with the one we got her along with a basket of vintage threads.

More presents this evening followed by take away Turkish food and an evening walk. Her Grandad and Grandma came round, so did Bar. Her two best friends surprised her earlier by bringing lunch.

My brother recommended a recent episode of the BBC Radio 3 programme, Private Passions. It’s great when he sends me little items that he knows will interest me. The guest this week was the author Helen Macdonald. She wrote ‘H is for Hawk’, part chronicle of bereavement, part record of falconry, it’s quite an incredible book.

The programme itself has guests name their classical ‘desert island discs’ and the personal reasons for selecting them. In her new book she refers to a special audio cassette from her youth as being a ‘numinous ordinary’ object. On it she had recorded a symphony by Sibelius that had inadvertently captured crackles from an electrical storm that was happening at the same time.

Nature had invaded a piece of perfection in the symphony but had added something almost spiritual to it at the same time. Alongside the dramatic, unwanted and savage time in her personal life came this special object with music and sound that resonated with her. It made that cassette a divine and ordinary object.

I love that term, numinous ordinary. With a hundred days under my belt now, I understand why I am writing these posts to myself. I am looking for those numinous-ordinary objects or moments that constantly happen all around me, every day. I often don’t see them, though I am getting better.

It’s about putting the rays of late evening sunshine spilling on to the barley field with the simple act of walking with the most precious people in my life. Add the precise temperature and smells in the air at that moment. Then juxtapose it all with the various occurrences of the day, good and bad. Putting all of that together, right there, right then – that’s the numinous ordinary.

Now that I understand that. Now it all makes sense to me. Bringing those sensory factors and layers of thought together. I realise that I am a very, very lucky man.