My grandfather used to call it sinnvolle Freizeitbeschäftigung. Meaningful leisure. Even free time, apparently, had to have a purpose. I still think about that sometimes, especially when I spend an afternoon doing something that achieves absolutely nothing. Going to a bookshop. Sitting somewhere with a coffee. Walking without needing to get anywhere. Listening to music…
When I was at school, my music teacher organised small concerts for the parents twice a year. I played The Swan at one of them. It remains my favourite cello piece. When you play it, its beauty is not simply there. It depends on restraint, control and the ability to sustain a long musical line…
Some songs arrive before we have the life to understand them. We may first notice a voice, a melody or one particular change in the music. The words are there, but they have not yet become ours. Years later, we hear the same song differently. Nothing in the recording has changed. We have. Before the…
Some objects remain because they carry a person, a place or an act of care. Today, look again at one thing you have chosen to keep.
I was sitting under a parasol, looking at the sea, when I realised that nothing was missing from that moment. We usually know exactly what has exhausted us. Perhaps we should be equally precise about what has done us good. A place. A song. A conversation. An hour in which we felt entirely ourselves. By…
A room tells us something before anyone in it begins to speak. Not necessarily how much money was spent, or whether everything belongs to the same period. The more interesting rooms rarely do. They reveal what someone notices: the books they kept, the art they chose, the flowers they brought home, the objects that have…
Sometimes home is not an address. It is the ease of being with someone who already knows the story.
Taste becomes interesting when it stops being performance. There are things I have liked for a very long time. Certain voices. Certain rooms. Certain flowers. A particular way of sitting in a café. Books I return to even though there are hundreds I have not read. Music I recognise within a few bars and immediately…
A cultivated life leaves room to be surprised. We decide quickly. Whether we like a place.What kind of person someone is.Whether a book is for us.Whether we already know how a conversation will go. Sometimes we are right. But certainty can become a habit. Curiosity asks for very little. It does not require us to…
What remains when we meet again after decades Yesterday evening I sat around a table with people I went to school with. There are decades between the people we were then and the people sitting there now. Whole lives have happened in between: work, families, relationships, different cities, good decisions and bad ones, things we…