What was the last fortnight but the fug of misty rain and fag fumes and my stinky boy and biscuit crumbs and banana peels in unusual places and the mother-in-law’s cold shoulders and weird unprocessed feelings best left alone (all that rage and grief, like tides). I don’t think I’ve seen the moon in ages.

Perhaps things will change tomorrow. My friend wants us to go to Dublin, because she wants to meet Zapatistas who are apparently touring Europe. I’m not sure if I want to meet Zapatistas, as much as I sympathise with their struggle, but hopefully we’ll end up in the National Gallery of Ireland or the RHA. Anyways I said yes because it means something new, something different, even if it might be challenging (in this case, being among crowds), and it also means I suppose a desire for change, something I haven't felt in ages.

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I can’t seem to write these days. When writing has been my saviour at times. All those letters I used to write as a teenager, not allowed to visit friends or even have visitors, just making up things and embellishing reality until I really was living in a world that provoked wonder and awe; this was when I sensed the power of art, however naive and clumsy. Nowadays I can’t seem to start a letter without it devolving into tortured ruminations of the past or anxious predictions of the future. God!

Well, if I was start the letter I've been trying to start for the past week or so, I'd write this: I spent my last free weekend before we re-open the pub in my favourite manner: unambitiously. Thank goodness the mother-in-law was away for a niece’s Holy Communion in Dublin. The husband and I ate out every night, just so we didn’t have to do any washing up. I went on wood walks, wrote extensively in my diary and notebook, and read loads, usually in bed, with cake and coffee or wine.

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I read about women artists, painting self portraits at their easels, at work either devalued or misattributed to men, usually by men; I admired one artist’s wonderfully bold inscription on her self portrait: “I, Sofonisba Anguissola, unmarried, am the equal of the Muses and Apelles in playing my songs and handling my paints.” I read about David Hockney drawing his French countryside on an iPad throughout lockdown, looking out his kitchen window and really regarding—oh for that luxury of time, how many of us just scan (i.e. look quickly for information) rather than regard, which is to see with interest and hope and feeling? And I read essays by Zadie Smith; in one, she applies Schopenhauer to an analysis of a movie, and it is this that strikes me, the philosopher's idea that the twin poles of human life are want and boredom.

When satisfied, we become bored and start to desire something new, and so we are always moving between both poles. We're never satisfied, and always looking for completion through others and things, and often indulging in messy behavior while seeking completion. (But would you want a life without desire, as much as I sometimes think I do? Boredom will kill us, it deadens our senses, our sense of aliveness.) "That we believe ourselves to be separate from each other, and separate from the apparent objects of our desire, was, for Schopenhauer, the root of our suffering." Zadie Smith argues that it is compassion that will save us, a recognition that, in Schopenhauer's words, "[y]our individuality is not your essential and ultimate being, only a manifestation of it... Your being in itself ... knows neither time nor beginning or end... It exists in everyone everywhere."

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