Imperfect Happiness

Cunning plans, a Big Tesco and a total lack of jam

In September, when it looked almost certain that our house purchase was going to fall through, I went to the garden of the new house and picked a jar of blackberries. Then I took them home and made a pot of glossy purple jam.

When we move into the house, we’ll eat this for breakfast, I said. A little wish, sent out into the universe. An intention set, if you believe in that sort of thing. A prayer, if you believe in that sort of thing.

I had grand visions of our first day in our house. Pancakes, perfect, as always (my one superpower), slathered in sweet, tart jam. Champagne sipped from the crystal glasses I found in a charity shop last week. The two of us, fuzzy with delight, curled up together at the start of a new chapter, watching the sun paint the sky gold from our huge windows.

The trouble with having a vivid imagination is that your brain often presents you with these full, detailed images, leaving very little space for actual reality. I’d love to think of myself as one of those adventurous, free-spirited people who just wakes up and embraces whatever the day has to offer them. But no. I plan, exhaustively. And when things don’t follow the plan, I struggle.

This seems to apply whether the thing currently happening is nice or not. I’m like a toddler, shoving away a plate of something delicious because it’s not what I wanted. It wasn’t the plan, I wail. Like a brat. I dread to think how much happiness I miss out on because I’m too busy bemoaning the things that haven’t happened.

The day starts with rain. Thin, grey rain that taps at the windows, runs its cold fingers around the collar of your coat, circling your wrists in its clammy grip. It’s raining, and we are staring miserably at a sofa, willing it to become small enough to fit in the boot of our car. We heave it in every direction, turn it on its head, yell creative abuse at it. The sofa doesn’t care. It stays exactly the size it is, two centimetres too big to fit in the boot, all of us growing soggy in the downpour. We don’t even look at each other, both feeling the fight bubbling under our skin, the desire to lash out at something that would care, something other than the massive, impassive sofa.

A Big Tesco at noon on a Saturday is never a good place to be, but it is especially not a good place to be if you are desperately trying not to have a fight about how you really thought the sofa would fit in your car, if your raincoat is clinging slickly to your back, if you’re trying not to lose the rag about the fact that your perfect day is in tatters and it’s not even twelve o’clock. We traipse around the Big Tesco, performing abject misery for each other and unexpectedly, we punch through a wall. The screaming toddlers in every aisle, the mop in our trolley clattering me in the back of the head every time he turns a corner, the fact that we fill a trolley twice over and have to stand in a theme-park-worthy queue twice, it suddenly becomes funny. Everything is so awful that we’re suddenly on the same team again. Us against the world, just two ragtag kids trying to survive the Big Tesco. As we loop around towards the checkout, I grab his arm.

Champagne, I yell. I run for the alcohol aisle at the opposite end of the shop. Do you want anything?

I’ll take some beers.

What beers?

Just beers.

I hate when he does this. I scoop a vaguely familiar-looking brand into my arms and move towards the wine. There isn’t any champagne. There isn’t even any nice prosecco. The brat rears up again and I forcibly shove it down. Kim, there are people that are dying, and all that. I grab a bottle at random and clink my way back towards the checkout, wincing at the laden conveyor belt, sure everyone else in the shop is furious at us. The cashier gives me a wink.

New house?

My gratitude nearly sweeps me off my feet. I laugh. Move in day today.

Very best of luck, she says.

And it makes me think of this poem by Danusha Laméris.

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

I pick up a bunch of purple tulips and add them to the belt. There’s a little flicker of joy burning in my chest as we cram our shopping into the car. We’ve bought more than I would have thought possible, rolling my seat forward so we can stuff a knife block behind it. Cat litter crunching under my feet, my knees up around my ears. Jars of spices and condiments rolling around the glove box. And we drive to our new home.

We dig a kettle out of our boxes and root around in the sea of groceries until we find teabags. I make sandwiches, stuffing ham and herbed cheese into soft baguettes, finely slicing a spring onion and sprinkling it in. We share a bar of chocolate, speckled with mini eggs. I’m dizzy with happiness.

The rain continues to hammer at the roof as we pull things from bags. I think this is where our plates should live, and our sponges here. I carefully oil the wooden worktop every salesman tried to talk me out of, joy fizzing in me as the colours of the oak reveal themselves under my cloth. I pour cheap prosecco into my beautiful crystal glass and arrange the purple tulips in my white vase, the first vase I’ve ever owned.

We don’t know how to work the boiler, so the house is cold, and then much, much too hot. I bestow an honorary Mechanical Engineering degree on myself as through a process of button mashing, I manage to coax hot water from the taps. We sit on the floor on the cushions of the sofa that wouldn’t fit in our car and I can’t stop looking at everything. I can’t believe that I live here. I can’t believe this is my life.

It doesn’t matter that the day wasn’t perfect. Because it was wonderful. And because we have so many more days, so many chances to try again, to aim for wonderful, rather than for perfect.

We wake early, sunshine streaming through our bedroom window. We don’t have curtains yet. I shuffle through to the kitchen and discover that the sun comes through one enormous window in the morning and the other in the evening. I plan to make cookies - the cookies that Ella Risbridger wrote about here, in a much more beautiful piece about a house move than I could ever hope to write. The realisation that I have forgotten my kitchen scales is quickly brushed over, muted by the thought of filling my kitchen with the smell of toasting sesame and melting white chocolate. I eyeball my measurements, and it works, and now my fridge is stacked with tiny cookies. I make pancakes, and they are perfect, as always. I tear through the box of kitchen stuff.

I have forgotten the jam.

The jam I had been saving for six months, ready for this very moment. Left in another box in my mother in law’s sitting room. Having sat quietly, listening to my increasingly frantic rummaging, he’s ready for the wail when it comes.

Fiona, he says, not even looking up from his book, it doesn’t matter.

I bite down on my lip. I look at my purple tulips on my shining wooden worktop. I look at the pancake winking up at me from the green cooker I’ve dreamed of owning forever. I look at the sun melting over the kitchen like butter on toast. And suddenly, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.