Some people wake up to birdsong.
Others wake up to silence.
I wake up to Margaret’s voice saying,
“Henry, don’t even think about it.”
That is usually how the morning begins.
Margaret and I have been married longer than either of us likes to calculate, and certainly longer than either of us is prepared to discuss before coffee. Somewhere along the way, we developed a routine: I make an observation, Margaret corrects it, and Brutus, our chocolate Labrador, watches the whole thing with the patient expression of someone who has seen civilisation make the same mistake far too many times.
The coffee is rarely finished while it is still hot. There is always something to discuss. A bill on the table. A headline in the newspaper. A new piece of technology that has apparently been invented to make life easier and has already required three passwords. The neighbours. The children. Politics. Ageing. The weather. Or a missing biscuit that Margaret insists was not missing until I entered the room.
None of this amounts to very much.
And perhaps that is the point.
There are no grand adventures here. Life tends to arrive quietly — in slippers, beside a half-read newspaper, with yesterday’s spectacles still lying where I distinctly remember not leaving them. The questions we somehow end up taking seriously have an unfortunate habit of appearing between breakfast and the second cup of coffee, usually just as Margaret is trying to butter some toast.
We do not solve them.
Mostly, we argue about them.
Sometimes Margaret wins. Occasionally I am allowed to believe that I have. Brutus knows better and keeps his opinions to himself.
These are our mornings: small conversations about marriage, growing older, modern life, and the strange world that keeps changing around us without first asking whether we have managed to understand the previous version.
If you have ever looked across the breakfast table at someone you have loved for years and wondered, How exactly did we get this far? — you may feel at home here.
Pour yourself a cup.
The coffee may go cold.
The conversation rarely does.