I Like Lists

I like chocolate.

I really like chocolate.

I like, and I think I’ve said this before, letting a square of good chocolate melt on my tongue so it liquefies and then there’s warm chocolate oozing down my throat and it’s like I’m drinking it really, but if I said ‘I’m going to drink a bar of chocolate’ people would look at me a bit strange like.

I like the shape of trees.

I like it when I get a package and I don’t know what it is and it turns out it’s a book I supported with Unbound a while ago and had forgotten about and now it’s just sitting there waiting to be read like a block of paper temptation.

I like books. I like the obstacle course they make when they’re piled up on the floor in the bedroom. I like knowing that no matter how many I’ve read there will still be more in the house because I buy books like I have absolutely no conception of the basic maths of human lifespans.

I like the thing Strauss does here:

I like the colours of autumn, and I know it’s corny and easy but they really are spectacular and you’ll miss them when they’re gone and the trees are bare and spiky like spillikins reaching for the sky.

I like the little girl at the family concert yesterday whose arm reached for the sky when I asked ‘What’s your favourite bird?’ (it was an animal-themed concert, and I gave a little talk before each piece. My introduction to Respighi’s The Birds threatened at one point to become quite the lecture, because as you may know it’s a subject I’m fond of. I need to watch out for that.) ANYWAY, this little girl. She was so earnest and really wanted me to know, so I asked her what her favourite bird was and she said ‘birds’, to which there really was no answer. As a sidebar to this little story, I became really quite depressed when I realised that none of the children in the audience will ever have heard, or are likely to hear, a cuckoo.

I like walking home from a rehearsal late at night at this time of year and hearing the shrill tseep of a redwing overhead and knowing that it’s just a small part of a miraculous world of migration most of which we neither see nor hear.

I like having introduced Oliver to Tom Lehrer so now we can sing ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ and ‘New Math’ and ‘Pollution’ together and he’ll correct me when I get the words wrong and Tessa will roll her eyes a bit but secretly she’ll be enjoying it, I hope.

I like walking to the woods on Streatham Common and standing there on a crisp autumn day with the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees and pretending that I’m not in London but in a remote forest, far from the traffic and the noise and the smell and the sheer relentlessness of the city and it gives a slice of peace to my week.

I like picking up the mail from the hallway floor and seeing a handwritten envelope.

I like it when a plan comes off.

I like the way the cat sees a box that is too small for it as a challenge not an obstacle.

I like the way Shirley Ballas just walks on at the beginning of Strictly, rather than feeling she has to camp it up in some awful parody of dancing that makes you wonder how qualified the ones who do it (the camping it up thing) actually are to be judging a dance competition, not that I’m saying anything against Craig or Bruno but seriously what was that marking about last night I mean honestly.

I like it when I’m conducting an amateur orchestra that really has no right to be as good and assured as they are, what with their all having proper jobs and so on, and knowing that they’re on top of it and that if I twitch they’ll respond, and that it really sounds pretty good.

I like our great spotted woodpecker, who has recently made it to the feeders nearest the house, having previously restricted himself to the ones at the bottom of the garden. He has a sort of frenetic nobility that lifts the heart.

I like that while I was writing that last paragraph a wren flitted onto the fence no more than two yards from the house and nurgled in amongst the jasmine and then stood upright on top of the fence like a miniature birdy meerkat for an instant before flying away.

I like the shape of trees, yes I know I did that one near the top but I reckon if you’re anything like me you’ll have just skimmed over some of the intervening stuff so this sentence is here just to catch you out now go back and read it properly thanks.

I like when I sit down to write a list of the good things in life as an antidote to all the utterly overwhelming bellendery of, it seems, nearly everyone, and it turns into a blog post, even if it’s a bit of a lazy ‘weekend Guardian’ kind of thing. Sorry about that.

I like chocolate.

---

Like this? Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter.