Awakening from a nightmare in which someone gets away with a series of heinous crimes and I end up in prison for several years despite having done nothing wrong, I am conscious that I can’t feel my legs.
As I gradually come to, it becomes clear that 27 kilos of prime Labrador is lying across the lower half of my body leaving more than 50% of the bed completely unused and a strong sense of injustice that my kindness in sharing the bed with a hound can lead to such selfishness.
What makes me ruminate over things not turning out the way I want them to while I can let others go?
It would be easy to put it down to the perceived significance of imagined consequence but, if that were the case, why do I still remember my infant school teacher, Mrs Murcott, smacking me for some misdemeanour I don’t recall but was innocent of? It was fifty years ago.
Why did I feel it must have been delayed karma when I heard that my primary school headmaster had died some forty years after he gave me the cane for pissing in a cup that someone else had placed invitingly in the urinals when I was seven years old?
And why do I always hope that the motorcyclist who routinely takes a shortcut across approximately 10m of pavement at the end of my road instead of driving the long way around, will be stopped by an opportunist police officer lurking behind the dog poo bin and banned from driving for five years?
In utilitarian terms, I know it’s unlikely that anyone will suffer through a selfish cock driving up the outside of a contraflow and pushing in at the end, but deontologically it feels infuriatingly wrong.
I was bullied at school for a time, but I never think about my tormentors and find it easy to let go of the anger and hurt I once felt at their cruelty. This is in sharp contrast to the grudge I can hold for an inordinate length of time when someone parks their car in the resident’s bays across two spaces.
Something in me discriminates randomly between the experiences I can reframe or forgive and those that stick fast, like the piece of chewing gum I once put up my nose as a child resulting in what still feels like a disproportionately angry response from my mother. When one of your nostrils is blocked by a lump of Wrigley’s ‘Juicy Fruit’, it’s not the best time to be reminded that chewing gum belongs in your mouth.
In the death throes of the last Conservative government, I found myself increasingly incensed at the daily injustices of power. So when our Prime Minister climbed inside a fridge to avoid the questions of journalists, and the disastrous one after him, lasted fewer days in office than the time it took for a lettuce to rot, I hardly knew what to do with myself mired as I was in a feeling of abject helplessness.
In the end, I had to take some personal responsibility, if not for the mindbending occurrences around me then for the way in which I allowed myself to respond to and deal with them.
When things don’t happen the way I want them to and I can’t find a way to change it, there’s not much left other than accepting the way things are and trying to chart a course that takes me through whatever’s coming as unscathed as possible.
When my favourite contestants get voted out of ‘Bake Off’ for two weeks running, or my mother, on the last evening of her life as she’s wheeled out of the home in which I grew up on an ambulance trolley, calls out, ‘I love you, Clare,’ to my sister but says nothing to me, these are moments I could do nothing about, but I still have to cope.
My friend Martin once told me that, amid the madness of his active alcoholism, he dropped a teaspoon on the floor and hit his head on the open drawer from which it came when he stood up again having picked it up. ‘That was enough to justify another day of heavy drinking,’ he told me. A feeling of random unfairness sufficient to have him turning on himself in a fit of self-destructive rage.
If injustice in the form of selfishness, lack of compassion, cruelty, sexism, racism, general bigotry and minor driving indiscretions are to be addressed at all, we surely have to take responsibility for doing what we can to make even the smallest and most imperceptible changes for the good. Anything else feels like surrender, and where is there to go from there?
A feeling of helplessness usually means we need to reassess our perceived span of influence. If you bring it in far enough there’s always good you can do for yourself and those around you.
Returning to bed, having stretched my deadened legs along the landing to the bathroom for a wee in the dark (the best kind of wee), Daisy is now sprawled across on the diagonal.
I climb back under the duvet, lift her head gently putting it back on my hip, scrunch the soft fur under her chin with my hand, and fall back into a peaceful and grateful sleep.
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