Suzanne Harrington: BBC's Leonard and Hungry Paul is an ode to being yourself
Ronan Hession. Picture: Ger Holland
Watching the BBC adaptation of Ronan Hession’s 2019 debut novel, , almost makes me cry — in a good way.
It’s about quiet, kind men living quiet, kind lives, quietly revelling in everyday ordinariness: The joy of breakfast, of cups of tea, of board games, of quiet conversation, or of sitting in silence.
Of losing yourself in drawing or writing or thinking. No cut, no thrust. No fast cars, no vicious ambition. Just — as Ikea might put it — the wonderful everyday.
The pleasure taken in these tiny acts is not just underrated, but something we’ve been told to think of as being beyond the border of cool, far in to loser territory.
If doing a jigsaw or cutting up an orange or staring out the window makes you inordinately happy, you need to get a life, loser. That’s how we’ve been conditioned to think. That’s the messaging: Go big or go home.
The reality is that if these kinds of tiny things make you happy, then you already have a life, full and satisfying and emphatically your own.
This makes you impervious, like Hungry Paul, to the exhortations of others to DO something, to BE someone, because you are already being someone: Yourself.
And, crucially, when it comes to the blanket bombing of marketing, advertising, and consuming, it’s like having your own private bomb shelter. Stuff bounces off you.
You are not trying to fill a hole in your soul with endless stuff, to be productive and ‘successful’ and accumulative, because you’re too busy filling a bird-feeder, finishing a book, going for a walk.
Or you’re immersed in the slow ritual of coffee making, of cooking from scratch, of doing the crossword, and having conversations about big stuff and small.
You’re ‘slow travelling’, wandering through places, pleasurably clueless, instead of zipping from A to B with a tick list.
A week of immersive ‘bimbling’ appeals so much more than a week of ticking things off a been-there/done that list, yet the art of bimbling remains criminally underrated. It is bicycles, not jet skis.
ONE of my all-time favourite films is Wim Wenders’s , released in 2023, about a Tokyo toilet cleaner who lives a simple life.
A middle-aged man, played by Koji Yakusho, quietly celebrates the unseen magnificence of his days, as he goes about his tasks and pleasures. None are remarkable. There are no car chases or sex scenes. No dramatic reveals, no jeopardy. Not much happens.
Instead, the man takes quiet pride in his work — travelling from one space-age architectural-dream public loo to the next, efficiently keeping them shining and perfect, invisible to all around him.
After work, he goes to his small, minimalist apartment, tends to his plants, listens to (analogue) music, and reads old books.
The next day, he does it all again. The film is an ode to zen, to equilibrium, and an inner life rich in curiosity and wonder. (It also makes you want to visit Tokyo, if only to check out their spectacular public loos).
In a world gone insane, we need to cultivate and cherish these tiny moments of peace and beauty and wonder, to notice them, to carve them out for ourselves, to savour them.
Moments such as hanging laundry in the garden and watching it move in the wind, or walking through a city and taking notice of its quirks: The texture of things.
It may not be a glamorous or dramatic life, but a fictional character in a low-key film about toilets in Tokyo has become my inner role model.
