Things to do at 4.00am #1

It was some weeks ago that I took the pre­cious jewel from the box in which I hide it — a box which I usu­ally only open when there are thoughts of you and me and us and them whirl­ing through my mind before the break of day. I’ve now rubbed the jewel so soft that it resembles noth­ing more than the sort of small gleam­ing pebble you might be lucky enough to find nestled between the whites, greys and browns on a stony beach. The sort of pebble that you might have missed if your feet had fallen dif­fer­ently across the uneven coastal sur­face. The sort of pebble that, excitedly, you would bend down to retrieve, hold in your palm, clutch your fin­gers tightly around it, and run back to the sea­side B&B you’re stay­ing in.

There, you would spend the next rainy day indoors, star­ing at the mul­ti­far­i­ous ways in which the light reflec­ted the sur­face of the stone, whilst listen­ing to a reas­sur­ing silence only broken by the gentle tick­ing of an imit­a­tion car­riage clock on the mantlepiece.

Life can be simple like that, if you want it to be. Or so I’m told.