Fiona Cullinan

GDPR when it came this day in May two years offered a fantastic declutter. I slowly unclogged my email and moved everything over to take-or-leave RSS feeds on Feedly. I kept only about five excellent email subscriptions. One is Roden from Craig Mod who lives and walks in Japan and writes beautifully and does lots of interesting creative stuff.

This month he wrote about the repetitious detail of our days at the moment. A snippet:

But it’s the singularity of the repeated details that has been a jolt — the way the knife feels coming out of its block each and every morning or the sound of the coffee hitting the grinder gears or the pot of hot water rising up to boil. Of the folding back of my sheets in a fixed way, even the detail of the weight of now — this surreal sense of our shared somnambulant living — as being precise, singular, and a detail that I thought would go away but hasn’t, is still here. There’s a tick-tock synchronicity between the days. And it’s the texture of these repeated hyper-specific particulars that has only heightened the sense of unreality. It’s amazing how so much of what we tend to assume to be recondite or miraculous is there, in minute detail, day after day after day..

Roden 039, April 2020

I really felt this. Without the whirlwind of the outside world, focus has switched to the small components on which our days are built, like a set of David Lynch normal-made-abnormal details running in slow motion in a dystopian world.

As people die in their tens of thousands (actually now over 101,000 worldwide as of today) in a global pandemic beyond the front door, inside there is the daily closing of the bedroom window when local kids start playing/screaming, a watering of seed crops for the allotment, a coffee and three biscuits from the jar mid-morning, a sliding off of the tarp to get the beanbag out in the garden, a sunset walk, an evening TV show over dinner, a book in the bath.

These details are now the fabric of our restricted world. Something we are all sharing. A weight. On dozy repeat.

What are the details of your routine that is keeping reality from entering your front door?

Thanks

Today I enjoying having at least the sense of a bank holiday – not setting the alarm, time out from the deadlines of work and guilt-free lounging in the sunshine. Today feels like a holiday.

I’m also thankful for the karmic delivery of a variety of squash plants from someone who was on my Rhubarb run yesterday. Thank you Anne.

Commission/hire me: fiona [at] fionacullinan.com