The Wonderful Everyday

Does life-writing heighten and accumulate feeling, or abrade and reveal?

Last week my daughter came home from university for the first time for her driving lesson. An old and familiar routine set in a new context. She fed ‘her’ cats, stayed for tea, and we took her back to her halls of residence (only a few miles away: a routine training run could take me there, and back) laden with loo rolls and stuff she’d left behind but decided she wanted after all. It all felt pretty normal. But, of course, our youngest child leaving home can’t have no effect, and a recent poem for the @TopTweetTuesday online poetry community led to some anxious enquiries from acquaintances fearing a bereavement or estrangement:

Did the process of writing that poem, constrained by the challenge to use exactly fifty words, pile an excess of sentiment on a relatively routine moment of transition, or did it crack my beetleshell and reveal the bodily strangeness of loss (the photos stripped from her blu-tack pocked walls having reminded me of others as I, paint-roller in hand, white-washed her walls of the physical traces of memories that mark me more indelibly)?

This is a preamble to the post I didn’t post at the time I wrote it.

Here it is.

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Ikea: the Wonderful Everyday.

It’s a good slogan. I like it. And I like Ikea. Lots of people find the place nightmarish and I can think of lots of reasons I ought not to like it. I feel uncomfortable by the meticulous way it guides customers on a route around the whole store so that…

I’m not finishing the sentence because it’s not true. I think uncomfortable rather than feel. What I feel is a sense of relative equanimity, of calm enchantment even. I enjoy the sense of flowing along the meanders in this river of stuff (and of knowing some of the sneaky shortcuts across the oxbows if I decide I do really need to nip back for  that dinky little mobile phone holder after all). Look at all these nicely designed, not very expensive things! And they’re (kind of) from Sweden, which I think of as a good place, broadly speaking, so the excesses of capitalist resource and human labour exploitation are covered with a comfort blanket of social responsibility. That this yellow and blue (that makes green!) veneer is probably less thick than the wood-grain printed foil covering the chipboard of a Billy bookcase cannot erase the mildly intoxicating sensation of filling a trolley with ingeniously ordinary solutions to storage problems we haven’t got.

On this occasion I felt the balance should tip more towards ‘wonderful’ than ‘everyday’, for ‘we’ includes our daughter and we are among a relatively few shoppers late on this weekday evening, but almost all are combinations like us of one or two middle-aged adults accompanied by a late-teenager, because it is off-to-uni time.

We search on our phones for further details than Katie has already secured of what she will ‘need’ in her halls of residence. Does her shared kitchen provide pans? We can’t be sure. One page suggests yes, but maybe that’s for a shared flat, not the halls? A set of three is put in the trolley, taken out and — well, more will always be handy — put back again.

Katie is not much given to outward shows of excitement on her own behalf. She is full of ‘I don’t minds’ as a rule, not wanting to make fuss, not wanting impose, and there are plenty more of those tonight. ‘Do you need some more mugs?’ She shrugs. But also, there is a particular bedding set she likes, and yes that toothbrush holder and soap dispenser rather than this one. My instinctive thriftiness — can’t you just buy soap with a  built in dispenser and refill it? — is suppressed.

She can have whatever she wants.

Going away from home, going to university is not ‘everyday’, yet I don’t feel a sense (yet?) of this being particularly momentous. We’ve done this before with her brothers, and my foremost concern is less the prospect of missing Katie than the fear of missing out on the plant balls, mash, gravy and ‘jam’ if we don’t exit the labyrinth and get through the tills before the restaurant stops serving.

I won’t be there to take her — the date clashing with a long-booked trip away with an old friend to an esoteric music festival, and I do regret that, a bit, even though I’m looking forward to it. Coming home to a weekday-empty house after that is when the ‘everyday’ feeling will be replaced by the ‘wonder-full’ fact that my only daughter, our third child, is away at university. That my days will not now be punctuated by her coming downstairs as I sit here writing, or as I’m putting the washing on, filling the dishwasher, or whatever other everyday task that I’m doing and that we often ended up doing sort-of together, as we travelled earlier, sort-of together on the train en-route to Ikea, each choosing a separate window seat to look out across the estuary, and be with the sounds in our ears.

She did show a little excitement yesterday, I think, and there are more hints of it , perhaps intermingled with a little trepidation, in the little unregarded dance moves and half-sung asides aimed inwards but allowed to reach us between the storage jars and silicone spatulas.

I would, I sometimes think, have liked us to share more spectacularly wonderful things. I never did get round to organising that dad and daughter Morocco trip that she surprised me by liking the sound of, and no matter the succession of new Christmas bikes, we never took that imagined fortnight out of the summer holidays from Lands End to John o’ Groats.  But these would have been wonderful more for others, “Look what we did!”, than for us, if I’d forced them against our quieter, more domestic inclinations.

Instead, lasting wonders are heart-hidden in the quotidian: the wonderful everyday, that every day we have quietly, undemonstratively, accumulated as a hoard I shall draw on in her absence.