Showing posts with label Larkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Larkin. Show all posts

Wednesday 4 March 2015

May you be ordinary

I sometimes think that my life isn't really exciting enough to write a blog. Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all (as the band Del Amitri might have put it). If I'm to write anything, I generally have to stick to my interior life. You can do some clever things with your imagination.

A front door opening out onto a driveway
Safe in our bubble
When I look round at the comfortable existence I lead with my husband, our two children, the dog and the cat, I wonder if this is what we were striving for all those years ago. Hours of essay writing at university, playing office politics during our twenties, running drunk through Soho... it was all leading to up this: domestic humdrum in a Home Counties bubble.

But that is the trade-off when you have children. Any appetite for risk diminishes almost overnight. I love that scene in the Paddington film when groovy Mr Brown drives his pregnant wife to the maternity hospital on a motorbike and then picks her up the next day in a new Volvo estate. Safety first, wildly fulfilling life second