For the next month I’m doing something a little different… My friend and often partner in crime silliness is away for a month, so I’m doing a locum for her. This used to be my job back in the dim dark ages before kids, and I bloody loved it. Working in someone else’s practice is invigorating and fresh in ways that defy good sense. I mean, chiro never changes, people are similar the world over, and anatomy doesn’t have that much variation. Yet stepping into someone else’s practice is delicious and strange. It’s almost like reading someone’s diary, when they say you can. You’re not doing the wrong thing- they gave you the key- but you know you are peeking behind the curtain. And I love what’s behind the curtain. I love being allowed into the workings of another person’s mind. I love trying to see the world as they might. Working in someone else’s space is a little like that. It’s fun and curious and humbling all at once.

So this morning I’ve crossed the bridge, left The Shire, and set myself up in Sam’s office. I bought some creature comforts; my own activator, my own computer, and I’ve stepped into some of hers, whilst following the procedures manual to the letter. (I’m good with a list).

Even though I’ll be doing the work I’ve done for eons, and probably even reuniting with some people from our old days when we worked in the same office, my world seems somehow different today. I had a new spring in my step as I walked through the shops just now, and I have felt extremely professional and competent turning on lights, popping out the signage, checking the messages.

Full disclosure: I am a bit of a dolt sometimes, so I am aware that there will be some plot twists and winding side roads over the next month (I’ve already been asked about someone’s third-party payer that I have no idea about), but there is something intoxicating about setting forth on new adventures. Sometimes a change in geography is all it takes. I feel a little like Bilbo.

So this weekend, I hope that you have something different to look forward to this week. Our brains of course love habit- they try to make as many things in our day habitual as possible because it’s soothing, but this little brain also loves novelty, and so it is getting some nice little zings as this newness unfolds.

Wish me luck.

And Sambo, sorry if I mess up your EFTPos. I think this is fairly likely- I’m sure you are expecting that.

My little slice of paradise

Do you believe in magical thinking? I do. I know deep down that what we sing about, we bring about. And by that I mean: the things we love to think on, the things we give energy and good juju to, are the things we attract. Of course we have to add lots of fun and allow for time, but it seems to me, if we want things enough and are prepared to do the work for them, we very often get them.

And then there’s magical thinking.

I got thinking about magic a couple of days ago when I went into Unit Two’s garbage dump bedroom and noticed this picture by the gorgeous Kate Knapp on the wall. We got this for Coco when she was a little screamapillar, probably more for us that for her (she couldn’t read, after all) so we could think of a future for her that was more sunshine and unicorns than the one the medical staff were suggesting. Her bedroom these days is littered with half used lip gloss tubes and Minties wrappers, back then it was filled to the brim with life-affirming slogans and brain-enhancing paraphernalia. It’s been a long moment since I noticed this pic, with Saffy the skaterdog living large. Take a look: she’s wearing roller-skates. And guess what Coco’s fave activity outside of scroll-holes and hot-water-depleting-showers is? Yep, give the lady a prize, it’s rollerskating. Magic? Or coincidence?

Then there’s the vision boards I’ve created over the years. At one stage the kids told me to be careful what we put on them, because “everything on them comes true”. (Well duh, dummies; that’s the point). It think it was the day that I was putting a picture of a restaurant I wanted to go to, replete with food porn pic. The kids were going through what we shall call their “culinary white phase” so the rainbow of nutrients gave them palpitations. (Don’t worry kids, you were not invited any way.)

So I looked around at the other pics that adorn our walls: the painting of Nath and I staying true to our promises. The Leunig that reminds us to be where we are. and who we are and shut out the “next shiny thing” noise. The blackboard scrawl reminding us of how lucky we are. The little bookcase light that says, “Do things that matter” and helps me to shrug off the things that don’t.

There’s more of course: I’m a purpose gal- I don’t choose to collect things, ideas or people that don’t have significance to me, so it’s been fun to have a look at the things that our home is peppered with, and be reminded of how the magic can unfold. How affected we can be by slogans and ideas and pictures of the world we wish to inhabit.

This week I’ve been motivated to create some vision boards- one for the house upgrades we will be working on next, and another for my beautiful life over the next five years. I can already see some things lining up, simply by surrounding myself with the magic. Isn’t magic funny. It works even when you aren’t checking in on it.

Now the only concerning thing is this delightful little vision that Unit Two put on the ceiling above my bed a week or so again. Oh Cillian… why did they do this to you?

I’m sorry Cillian

Every Friday was book day in our house. Well, not for anyone else, but for me. Every Friday my Dad would head off to work, like he always did, suit and tie, polished shoes, moustache blazing. And every Friday afternoon he would come up the driveway, tie a little loosened, moustache a little awry (it was a magnificent mo’ and probably deserves a blog of its own) with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. I would watch him from the front room, trying not twitch the curtains too much as he came up the path with that slow loping gait of his. Unhurried, unflustered. That was my Dad.

He would come in the door, put his bag gently down, acting as if there was nothing unusual happening. He would continue on with his languid movements, kissing my Mum hello and pretending that he didn’t have a bounty of adventures under his arm. Meanwhile I would be hopping from one foot to the other, almost peeing my pants with excitement, and trying to act nonchalant (this was part of the charade we played) waiting, waiting. Hoping the paper bag was book-shaped and for me, and not Darrel Lee chocolate-shaped and for my stinking little brothers. Spoiler alert: it was always book-shaped.

I don’t know when bookdayFriyays started, but I lived for them.

And I don’t know if my Dad knew how much they meant to me. I wish now I’d told him. I wish I’d told him how I would wake up on Friday mornings with the delicious hope that today I would get a book. For it wasn’t like Christmas, when despite the threats of parents about good behaviour, we knew deep down that we’d at least get something. Bookdays weren’t guaranteed. Bookdays were a treat. And there is no day in the world that isn’t improved by having hope.

Eventually he would do that little cough he did before all important conversations, and say, “What’s in this bag, I wonder?” By then I’d be ready to lose my mind, but instead I would say, “Um, is it a Trixie Belden?” And for thirty six amazing weeks it was. Apparently as Trixie gained popularity among girls of a certain age, some of the books became difficult to source. So not only did he have to remember which one I was up to, but to find it in the bookshop after his “Friday business lunch” (it was the ’80s remember, and Bob approved of such things), no matter how elusive volume fourteen was. As the years went by the books changed, but to be honest, it’s the Trixies I remember the most.

And though I know that bookdays can’t possibly have been every Friday, when I rewind through the years, it feels like they were. It feels like I spent hours waiting by the window, and then even more hours reading on my bed, then later, under the covers, binge-reading by torchlight. I’d read it cover to cover on Friday, and then again over the rest of the week, savouringly. My Trixie addiction taught me to read for content and then for context, where on the second read I’d notice language constructs and finer details that I’d missed the first time. I still do that now, dog-earing pages, underlining, re-reading, and looking for treats that some authors leave for people like me who love the way words are put together.

People sometimes say I read a lot, and it makes me tilt my head to the side as I wonder what they mean. Compared to what? Compared to whom? Reading does so much for me: it’s where I learn, it’s how I make sense of the world, it’s my form of mediation, it’s where I make new friends and catch up with old ones, it’s where I go on adventures and lose my sense of self. I’ve lived a thousand lives through words laid carefully on pages, honed by wordsmiths. To read “a lot” is to live fully.

I do wish I’d had the chance to tell my Dad about the lives he’s helped me live. It’s been a wild ride: it’s been big and bold and full of bright colours. My lives have stretched through the centuries and even through the worlds: “there are other worlds than this.”* and my Dad gave them to me in a brown bag.

I hope he knew.

*From the Dark Tower by Stephen King

She’s had a life..