About the joy of small things

I'm on holiday, languidly making my way through Saturday's Guardian, including their new-look magazine. I've also brought last week's - mostly unread - so I've been interspersing valedictory columns with new material; the anticipation of what new features will bring with the sadness of seeing some favourites depart. I'm pleased to see that Sirin Kale will be 'making nice things happen to nice people': a just reward, I'm sure, for having written so positively and enthusiastically about 'religious Twitter', and in the process describing one of the hashtags I created - #BruvsOfTwitter - as phenomenal. 

But... but... there will be no more Hannah Jane Parkinson reminding us, in a few positive, beautifully crafted paragraphs, about the joy of small things. Even when I have only skimmed the column (or not chimed in with her chosen joy) I have appreciated a corner devoted, as Hannah Jane herself writes in her farewell column, to bringing us back to all of the things that we often take for granted, the things that remind us that, as trite as it sounds, we are lucky to be alive in the world, and that, even if the macro seems to be a desolate wasteland – the rise of authoritarian governments, the frothing “culture wars”, the tiresome social-media baiting – there can be soothing and beauty and motivation in the quotidian.

There can be rainbows and reunions, unexpected beauties, heart-lifting moments, borrowed books, petrichor and simple food filled with memories. Some of these can be found in my In praise of... label, which I started when I noticed The Guardian had stopped its own little column with that name. I have also, at times, written about 'little things', be they physically small - like bulbs and infant plants, or crocheted hearts - or the many small kindnesses and joys which are most definitely soothing and beauty and motivation in the quotidian. (And the crocheted hearts, arriving as unexpected gifts in the post, were all of this and more). Maybe I'll need to write about these little things - which in truth are not so little - more often now.

So, I read Hannah Jane's farewell with an ache for all the columns I had skimmed and forgotten; then enjoyed the postscripts, delighting in Philip Pullman's delight in the wood he buys and Tracey Thorn's quiet bliss in the plants she grows from seeds... And then, oh joy, oh small, but bounteous joy... Right at the end, home of the 'small print', an announcement that the columns have now been published in a very affordable book, simply called The Joy of Small Things...