But Money gives me pleasure all the time.
That’s a brave little poem. Hilaire Belloc was 53 when he wrote it, a widower with five children and often short of a dollar, so it’s unsurprising money pleased him. What is surprising is that he said so. Poets are supposed to care for higher things. Money has the base indecency of sex. If you’re not convinced, ask anyone exactly what they earn.
I had an article to finish. I’d worked on it the day before and not been pleased with it. There are two ways to solve a writing problem: walk or sleep. Both nullify the conscious mind and let its smart unconscious sister get to work. Time and again when walking I have heard the right words drop into place. Time and again when waking I have known just the surgery needed on a piece of prose to bring the thing to life.
And so it was that morning. The faults I couldn’t see the night before stood out like warts on a baby, and well before lunchtime I was done. I ate eggs on toast - so hard to beat in its simplicity - went briefly to the supermarket and bought deboned, deskinned, denatured chicken for my dinner, then laid me down, as I have always done if time permits, for a siesta. It comes as naturally to me as breathing, and brings me bright dirigible dreams.
Later that afternoon, refreshed, I joined three old men at the squash courts. I have written before about our regular little jousts, and our constant failing effort to pretend we no longer care who wins.
I won. I beat all three of them. In the pub afterwards I didn’t mention it, and neither did I have to. I knew they knew, and my beer was brewed by angels.
For years, I managed not to own an air fryer. I had an oven and a range of frying pans, so what need had I of something that was neither one nor the other? It would be just another gadget destined for the cupboard of neglect and then the tip.
But last month, and much against my judgment, I acquired one. The thing’s a wonder. I use it every day. It’s a mini-oven - quicker, cleaner, easier. Now I chopped my pink disnatured chicken into bits, encrusted it in oil and spicy salty stuff, and while it cooked I made a bowl of salad out of what I had - though not, of course, with leaves. Consider the giant panda. The poor thing lives on nothing but leaves and consequently has to spend the greatest part of every day just chewing. No time for squash or writing or a brief luxurious siesta.
I lit the log burner - the evenings are still chill in Lyttelton - uncorked a bottle of shiraz (Australian shiraz, as dark as blood and rich with summer heat), tipped the cooked encrusted gouts of chicken on to the leafless salad and took it to the sofa. As I sat, I felt the tiredness of day’s end. I turned on the television and found a five-day test match just beginning in Sri Lankan heat.
Is there are prettier thing than test match cricket, the players all in white, the ground in green, and the sense of quite magnificent fatuity as 22 grown men devote the best part of a week to a game of endless subtlety but no inherent purpose? I’ve loved it all my life.
I forked some crusted chicken to my mouth. The salt and spices had bewitched it. My day was done. Sufficient unto it was the evil thereof and there hadn’t been much of that. Ahead lay only chicken, wine and cricket, the cricket slow and intricate and beautiful, then bed.
And if, as already mentioned, it is possible to speak of moments, to isolate them in the endless onward rush of time, the thought occurred to me that at that moment, in all its fullness and complexity and with all that had led up to it, I was, and I think it worth observing, happy.
