Finger- nailing it

Can it really be already a little over a week since I posted that last half-formed rambling-guillotined screed? Committing to quitting was a good thing, I think. Certainly I felt lighter for the rest of that day than I had done for a while. I’ve also abandoned, for now at least, the attempt to write with any degree of detail and specificity, about the fostering experience. There is just too much potential for emotional damage, not least to me. I am sure I will return to the issues involved, and perhaps, eventually, to the particulars of the story itself; but if the latter, the likelihood is that you won’t know about it, as it would need to be anonymous. But putting it on one side, and now saying so, to however few others, feels like a further unweighting.

It is an opportunity to return to what I wanted this to be: a playground, not a prison. So, here goes.

Last week I picked up an attractive little hardback in a charity shop. ‘Delight’ by J B Priestley is a collection of very short essays on the small joys of being alive and it is, well, delightful. What I particularly like about it is that it recognises that delight is not a right to be seized and smeared across the face of life’s mishaps and miseries, nor an elusive state to be stalked through esoteric practices. I am only a few essays in, but it has already eclipsed with its tiny greatness the kind of self-promoting self-help nonsense that I occasionally succumb to for ten minutes when Amazon offers me a 99p Kindle deal, promising to reveal the secret of how to achieve happiness and fulfilment through keeping your fingernails trimmed, or whatever is the latest grift.

Ready, already, for another scour.

Perhaps you delight in ‘discovering yourself’; in the thrill of the new. I must strive not to be curmudgeonly about such things, and I am getting better, I think, at being open minded to people who find that ‘manifesting’ or embracing hygge or wabi-sabi gives them purpose and direction in life. But purpose and direction have proved elusive enough for me that I prefer to focus on matters such as keeping my fingernails trimmed. Not, you understand,  as a system, a life-goal, or even as a symbol or metaphor. Simply as paying attention to slow-growing parts of me that I can no longer bite off owing to the shift in alignment of my teeth caused by bone loss brought on by gum disease initiated by the genetic crookedness of my incisors and impacted molars (a number of which, regular readers will be aware, I no longer possess).

More precisely, I delight in looking at my fingernails, picking the dirt out with a cocktail stick, and thinking ‘ I really must go and find those nail clippers. Sometime.’ Picking the dirt out with a cocktail stick is a small delight, but a pure one. Finding and wielding the nail clippers offers a greater, deeper, pleasure; one more serious and transcendent — but one alloyed by the tinge of melancholy that once done it cannot be repeated for some time. The nails, though, will be dirty again tomorrow.

As I mentioned, I am only a handful of  essays in to Priestley’s book, but they all have self-explanatory titles so I know he doesn’t include finger-nail-dirt paring or nail-clipping, but I feel confident that he would have found the same delight — and dissatisfaction — as I do in these activities. I can see him finishing his gin and tonic and potato crisps (essay ix), his tongue searching his mouth for stubborn remnants of salty starch, then tearing the longest of his nails two-thirds of the way across , on an index finger, or perhaps a thumb, and bending it at right angles to form a makeshift toothpick to reach the most stubborn of irritating dental lacunae where morsels of sufficient substance to be worth eating could be dislodged and enjoyed for a second time.

What an AI image generator thinks J B Priestley would have looked like, picking his nails. Three hands! A true genius.

Then, he would have a good scrape of the filmy tack in the interstices between his imbricated canines before inspecting (perhaps with a surreptitious sniff) the compacted debris he had removed, perhaps now commingled with  sub-ungual pipe tobacco from his latest novel blend (essay viii), before excavating  it, perhaps (his g&t having been garnished with a simple lemon slice; no cocktail stick) with the sharp vertex formed by folding his crisp packet into a triangular wedge.

“Here,” he would surely have said, had he not been already a celebrated writer with a reputation to think of, “not in gin and crisps, but in digital detritus, is true delight.”