Life's a beach, curated.

Under Devon blue skies and the too-hot sun we have had a happy and busy week marking our first anniversary here and the launch of my new business venture.  A year ago we were in the Midlands and a long way from the sea.  Now that has all changed.  One late afternoon we went to the beach for a walk just because we could, and I walked in the breaking surf where it meets the exposed sand.

There have been conversations about how we present curated lives to the world on Facebook, Insta, Twitter and the rest.  Mostly perfect moments with a few carefully selected honesties thrown in, that may show vulnerability but rarely show us at our truly black and awful worst.  But we've always done it.  Handprints and hunting scenes drawn with ochre and spit in sacred caves.  Fearsome deeds and heady frolics in ritual dance on pots and urns.  Philosophies on parchment and diary entries on pages that fade.  Photographs taken with care so as not to waste the film.  Home movie memories with voice-overs recorded in telephone tones.  I am talking, of course, about when we take the time to capture our images, not the unguarded moments when we leak the bleakest sides of ourselves.  That is a whole other conversation.

I've collected stories since I was a child.  Even as I leafed through my paternal grandmother's black and white photographs of dogs and big houses and sunny Cornish days, I pieced together from other sources dark tales of a beloved brother lost at war, a baby sister spoilt to passivity, an arranged marriage, glorious eccentricities and petty spites, a life that ended alone in alcoholism and tears.  

So please, enjoy this perfect moment with me.  I hope it makes you smile.  But do not envy it me.  My life is exactly like yours.  There are moments like these that melt my insides to sugared liquid sunshine.  And there are moments when I just get it all wrong.  There are vicious spiked moments of self-loathing that raise my fists against me and spit nasty at those trying to care.  And there are moments when I can lift another person simply with my smile, and notice their new hair, new coat, new shoes and remember to thank them for a passing kindness.  In the midst of such inconsistency and the power of all that is dark and bad, these moments of nobility and joy and truth and compassion keep us moving on, and it is good that we pin them down.  Because from out of the bottom of the casket of evil things rises Hope triumphant, and she unfurls her vast and shining wings and is bigger and higher than all dark swarms below.  The dark cannot put out a light.  But the light will always lift the dark, however small.