As humans, we are all inherently curious. We want to know more and then more and then more.
If we can’t find answers, we go looking for them. In theory, this is quite a beautiful thing but in reality, the world we live in has fast become a place of fast food and fast news. There are very few surprises anymore – unless (as is a long held dream of mine), your friends jump out from behind a sofa screaming ‘surprise’ on your birthday or some such thing.
I’m guilty of bringing up trash news sites on my laptop and reading trash clickbait, scrolling through instagram like my life depends on it, sometimes for so long that an hour passes, leaving my chin almost permanently welded to my neck. One thing I will say about this, is that I really don’t believe most of what I read or see online, most of it is there to trigger a reading frenzy or a sense of emotion we may otherwise not feel if we just went for a walk to while that hour away, lost in our thoughts and free of our screens.
This morning when I woke up, I turned on the radio for the news – a daily ritual to see if the world had ended while I slept – before reaching for my phone to check the family WhatsApp (that is my greatest connector, usually bringing a whole lot of joy to the morning) before opening Instagram so that I could fall into a Sunday morning Instagram fest, if only for a few minutes before coffee then becomes a thing and a list of ‘to do’ and ‘what I really need to do’ is created.
I was pleased to learn that the world hadn’t ended while I slept, but I had been curiously logged out of Instagram, which for anyone who has ever been ‘there’ before is slightly terrifying. No amount of Face ID or fingerprints were going to help with this one, I was directed to a help centre which wasn’t really all that helpful, and as the early morning shipping forecast wrapped up on the radio (don’t sail anywhere this week, it’s choppy out there) and the coffee began to smoothly stream out through the pipe of the cafeteria on the stove, I was in a medium sized five minute panic with visions of a future without facelifts, table scapes and videos of home restorations, suddenly and seemingly a rather panicked possibility.
The anxiety was short-lived and while I really don’t know any of my passwords to anything, I did managed to press something which activated a code which then saw the phone light up with a whole lot of Easter table scapes and Sunday morning spring garden shots all before my eyes.
“Phew” I said out loud, “that was close” – again, said out loud, seeing the pigeon on the balcony puff up in a nod of agreement.
Our obsession for ‘knowing more’ was ever-present and sickly apparent over the past month or so, following one of the most high profile people in the world announcing that she was going on leave for a surgery that would see her (god willing) hopefully return to public duty after Easter. The fact that the person took leave in the first place, would suggest that she was undergoing something quite serious, just as so many people have, in the ‘real world’, taken leave when they too have an operation, and as far as my calendar shows, Easter is not until March the 31st, 2024.
But, the world and its media wanted more, so they made up their own version of events and people drank it up in jug loads.
Put frankly, this made me feel really sad, as ‘fiction’ pushed it’s distant cousin ‘fact’ out the window, and while I’m the first to add a bit of mayonnaise to a story “the Iris in his garden were the size of ten people” (for example) I really do have very little tolerance for blatant mistruths or made up anything. Particularly when it’s vindictive or even the slightest bit mean.
I’m not going to write more about the aforementioned sick leave, we’ve all been put in our box now and I feel only sorry that it had to come to this for a mother of three young children only trying to do the right thing by her people and her family, while the public (and the world for that matter) greedily and cruelly wanted more.
In the olden days when the news came from things like a daily newspaper, and then the tellie once that became a thing, it was curtain twitchers not TikTok, spreading exaggerated and most likely made up bits and pieces down the street, seeing how far it would fly. Now, and so suddenly, social media as expanded its often awful wings, taking up a space in our lives that might have once been made up of good old fashioned perspective and accountability, particularly when it came to information and the way in which things appear.
Once the coffee had well and truly entered its ‘second cup’ phase of the morning, I read through emails I’d received overnight, two of them really touching on what formed the basis of this blog. The first was from a couple I met during the week who have become clients following a really special day out and about exploring the city with Halima and I, where we went down rabbit warrens of artisan wares and all the things we love. They were so touched by the whole experience and kindly made that clear in their email.
A theme of the day we spent together was conversation, questions and curiosity, neither of them have a social media presence and both love design, beautiful things and photography. As the day drew to a close, we ended up on a roof terrace taking photos of the beautiful bay of Tangier – all of us exhausted as dusk set in following a day of exploring with very little on offer to eat and drink, with the town all but shut down for Ramadan during the day, only to come alive later each evening once the fast has been broken.
Nothing phased either of them, and I was charmed by their enthusiasm and willingness just to take it all in, and I treasure heartfelt emails like theirs, particularly when they arrive first thing and the only living creature I have as an audience is the pigeon who sits on the balcony each morning.
The second email was from an old friend who I haven’t seen for years but who keeps in touch from time to time and has written some really encouraging responses to the bits and bobs I post online. This mornings email spoke about my life here and the way it looks – the good the bad and the ugly, and this really made me think. We all have an opportunity to make things look more exciting than they are, to only post the good bits (when we look incredible and made up in a sparkly dress), to appear as if life is easy, but as I responded to her- I don’t necessarily post about the conversations I have in the mirror to myself (yes, truth) which are quite often grim (the pigeon is no good in moments like those), only because there is enough sadness and grief shoved in the spade load in our collective directions through other channels, but I hope to present a balanced view of some sort of reality.
While my reality is very different to the next persons, we are all faced with challenges and moments of ‘what if’ and ‘I read the other day…’ the older I get, I can’t help feeling that if we focussed on the here and now rather than what is being made up and fed to us as nonsensical propaganda, we might be a happier human population. Halima is a wizard at this, often reminding me that the things that I can’t control and that wind me up, only complicate matters, and I should just be ‘here’ and ‘now’ managing what I can actually manage and without external influence or events that have no relation to the actual moment, or my life in general.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be aware, and that so much of what is happening in the world as I type isn’t horrific and unfathomable, most of which makes my heart ache that it is allowed to go on, but to take a moment to step away from all that we are fed, isn’t such a bad thing, and to pause our curiosity about things that we don’t fully understand or have a fully formed context around, is not such a bad thing either.
As the bells tolled at the sweet little English Church of Tangier at 11 o’clock this morning, the flag flying strong in a rather maddening east wind, we entered for a beautiful hour celebrating Palm Sunday, exiting an hour later stringing sentences together in flurried English (imagine!) in the courtyard outside, making plans for the Easter week ahead – champagne and Easter eggs are on the menu for next Sunday with lots of lovely visitors to Tangier arriving throughout the week in time for the long weekend.
Tonight the Ramadan prayers seem to be longer than normal, and as they sound outside from the neighbourhood mosques, the wind has dropped, the French doors are wide open to my kitchen balcony and all is peaceful on the streets below – save for the odd car and motorbike zooming by as people return home to break their fast.
Earlier today I found myself fascinated by a video that showed a potter in London throwing fifty candlesticks on the wheel in her studio during the week, all in one day. A good fifteen minutes was then spent watching more videos of perfectly thrown pots in her most beautiful studio with daffodils in a vase on the window sill, before I closed the phone, turned on the radio and began writing this.
As I close the computer for the night, I’m off to have a look at how to thatch a roof – I saw this on Instagram today after my pottery viewing and just had to save it for later. Whilst the likelihood of me buying a barn and thatching a roof any day soon is pretty slim, I’m also very curious to know more about how it is in fact done, particularly in a world where we could just as easily buy tiles.
In closing, I was quite heartened to learn today that things like thatched roofs do still exist.