Hospitality

Last Thursday, in the middle of the worst flu I’ve ever had, I had no alternative than accepting that I was about to fail my new year’s resolution. When I planned this daily blog, my self-absorption couldn’t consider the possibility of getting ill. Or someone nearby getting ill. Or an elderly relative passing. I, who meditates daily and reads and does yoga and has a healthy diet, how am I going to fall to something as mundane as the flu?

So, I’ve completely failed, I told myself on the sofa, under two duvets and with temperature and watching people in bikinis on the telly. This blog won’t have three hundred and sixty-six entries, but, so far, three hundred and fifty-eight. And while I don’t share that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ I do believe that our noblest and wisest attributes are revealed in the way we react to things. One of the very few fulfilling experiences of the last days has been reading The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy. A beautifully illustrated and poignant story that can be quickly dismissed as too twee for aphorisms like ‘One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things’ coming out of the mouth of a mole. 

When John Berger died in 2018, The Guardian published an article with the memories of other fellow writers. Olivia Laing and Ali Smith wrote about his last public appearance in 2015 at the British Library. Written separately I assumed, both focused on the same: to Berger, storytellers have the responsibility to be hospitable. 

I look up ‘hospitable’ in a Thesaurus: friendly, warm, open, generous, kind, cordial and sociable. All of these, qualities that I demand in any relationship, are suddenly absent in the way I deal with myself, the person who I’m more cruelly dissatisfied with. 

‘We often wait for kindness… but being kind to yourself can start now,’ said the mole.’