Caroline O'Donoghue: Five sources of utter delight I experienced today

Caroline O'Donoghue.

Last night I started reading a book that had been on my shelf for a year, but I hadn’t felt the urge to actually read it until now. 

Books are like that sometimes. You buy them and they sit in your house like a bag of potatoes, sprouting roots and taking on strange greenish hues, until finally it’s time to read them. In this case, it was the perfect time for the perfect book. 

It was JB Priestley’s ‘Delight’. The book was written in 1949, and was Priestely’s response to the relentless miserabilism of the post-war British climate: the continued rationing, the bombed out houses, the relentless hand-wringing by public officials. Not enough was being done, he argued, to stimulate delight. He begins with fountains. Fountains, he writes, are delightful.

What is the use of living in a democracy if we want fountains and we have no fountains? Expensive? The cost is trifling compared to that of so many idiotic things we are given and do not want. By all means let us have a policy of full employment, increased production, no gap between exports and imports, social security, a balanced This and a planned That – but let us also have fountains.

Really, I can’t recommend a book more for this current moment, when everyone’s heart is hungry for joy, when everyone wants to just say ‘I saw my friend’’ without the suffix of ‘....distanced of course!’.

But back to Priestley. He was born in 1894 and died in 1984 – which, while a decent life span, is a particularly bad wedge of human history. That means he fought in the First World War, raised a family in the depression, and then had to deal with World War II. Then - rationing! For ages and ages! He’s an old man by the time everyone’s enjoying the sixties.

The past year, I’ve felt myself sympathising a lot with the late Victorians: those who were born too late to be the great explorers and scientists and colonisers of this dazzling bygone era, but who nevertheless have to hear about it. All they got was war and a rapidly confusing century that refused to stay still. But that’s not how Priestley felt. Priestley, on the contrary, felt sorry for anyone born after him. He felt sorry for anyone who didn’t get to attend the literary parties of the 1920s. He felt sorry for anyone who didn’t get to enjoy smoking a pipe when good tobacconists, ones who would mix you up an interesting blend of something deadly and perfumed, were in plentiful supply. He felt sorry for young writers, who felt like they had to make some big gesture towards Marxism in order to be taken seriously. So really, I have no business feeling sorry for Priestley’s bad wedge at all. He liked his wedge.

On the contrary, he feels sorry for my wedge.

Which is a lesson, isn’t it. We have the curse of living, as Priestley did, in ‘interesting times’.

And while there are plenty of reasons to declare joy dead for this year, I strongly urge you take his advice. Insist on delight. Grab it where you can. Seize this little wedge of time and refuse to let some old Victorian feel sorry for you. And to save this whole column being simply a book review, here is my list of delightful things I’ve experienced today.

1. The weather is perfect. After two days of rain, there’s a cool, bright sun and glistening grass underfoot. It is the kind of weather where you need a scarf and sunglasses, a long coat over a shirt. The kind of outfit where you feel a bit like a 1970s heroine in a film about New York.

2. At the park, I threw a tennis ball for my dog, and completely by accident, I hit a man with it. He turned around, and he was startlingly handsome. Dimples, cheekbones, the works. I apologised profusely, and we smiled and went on with our days. Even though I am happily spoken for, and so, probably is he – those cheekbones! – it was a lovely little moment, in the dappled autumn sunlight, of feeling like we may be at the beginning of a great romance.

3. In the cafe where I am writing this right now, there is a little girl, three years old. She is wearing my favourite kind of outfit to see on little girls: the Disney princess costume with a thick, long-sleeved cotton vest underneath and thick tights to match. I love seeing these little girls. The ones who have successfully worn their parents down and managed to make the dressing-up box part of their outdoor wardrobe. Can you imagine the fights, the foot-stamping, the hot tears that went into this outfit? I respect this little girl. I respect her commitment to delight.

4. On the stereo, the cafe is playing the Best of Paul Simon. Graceland! Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover! Obvious Child! God, how can there be sadness in a world that also has Paul Simon?

5. The realisation that, even if Covid goes on forever, even if the next time music festivals are legal I have teenage children who are old enough to attend, I still had a very good thirty year wedge of spontaneity, there. Dancing in clubs, kissing strangers, going to Paris on the train. Booking a trip to Romania on a whim. That time I screamed at Little Mix, the actual members of Little Mix, to keep their music down because I was trying to work in the next room. To miss joy is a privilege: it means you know what it’s like. Make sure you don’t let yourself forget.