Staying at home 9: Is everybody happy?

These have been, still are, slightly strange times.
There has been much talk of mental health or lack thereof.
How to lessen the stress and anxiety and stay positive? Turn the news off.
Don’t worry, be happy.
I did that, I stopped watching the news, last year, it was all so – depressing.
Infection rates, death rates, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and goings…
But I’m a curious kinda guy and after a while I started watching the news again, nothing much had changed.

Happiness in a time of pandemia.
What makes me happy, keeps me happy?
When I come to think of it, it doesn’t take much.

Of course, we no longer have to ‘stay at home’ although we are urged to ‘stay local’ and in a small way, that makes me happy.

Walking around the house and seeing that the many and varied clocks are all displaying some sort of agreement in the times that they are showing. Some are clockwork, some are quartz and I know that they’re never all going to say exactly the same time, but as long as they’re within a couple of minutes of each other, I’m happy.

Sitting out on summer evenings as the light fades and catching a sight of one of the locally resident bats. That makes me happy.

This morning, 22 April, 2021, sitting in the back garden at 04:47 with my head tilted up towards the bright star Vega, trying to catch a sight of a Lyrid meteor for 21/22 April is the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower.
One; I saw one.
That made me happy.

I always think that using the phrase ‘meteor shower’ is a tad misleading, for a shower in any readily understood and acceptable sense of the word, it is not, but meteors are there to be seen if you keep your gaze up.

It was cold though, there was a frost on the shed roofs, but it was wonderful, sitting there in the pre-dawn twilight, and in the quite I could hear the restrained sonance of the dawn chorus; as Neil Diamond once sang; it’s a beautiful noise. That too made me happy.

Since the last time it snowed back at the start of the month the weather has been steadily on the road to warmer days and, as I alluded to in an earlier post, I’ve been sitting in the sunshine and reading, that makes me happy.

To supplement by model railway habit – I could stop it any time, honest – I have been buying small, second hand locomotives in need of a bit of TLC (Tender Locomotive Care) and restoring them to running order. For the latest one I also bought a coach.
Nerd alert: the loco was a BR liveried 14xx – late emblem – and the coach was an auto-trailer in plain maroon.

The loco was a runner but both loco and coach needed minor repairs, which I effected. That made me happy.

Talking of clocks, wasn’t I? Some years ago, whilst mooching around a Bric-a-brac shop in Berkhamsted, it’s not there any more, the shop, not Berkhamsted, but it was a rather splendid emporium with a number of sheds in the garden behind the building stuffed full of all manner of goodies.
It was in one of those sheds that I came across a box of clocks; small, mantle clocks, all very reasonably priced, well I thought so, but there was a note saying that none of the clocks had pendulums.
One particular clock caught my eye, it just looked… ‘nice’ and I knew I couldn’t walk out without taking that clock with me, so I bought it, took it home and fashioned a new pendulum for it. That made me happy.

So, I guess it doesn’t take a whole lot to make me happy, really.

How are you, what makes you happy?