Sometimes

… often … I fantasise about living in a small house on an island somewhere, with a pig (company) a donkey (transport) and a dog (further company). Perhaps a goat – they’re hardy creatures and I could make cheese with its milk.

The house would look something like this:

I would own it, because someone would have left it to me in their will – an old woman, perhaps, who liked my pluck but never got the chance to tell me whilst she was alive. So I wouldn’t have to worry about mortgages or loans or repayments or rent or anything so horrible.

I would have hot water, a functioning toilet, a clean and comfortable living space, an adequate kitchen, a lovely bed and millions of books. And there I would stay, away from depressing headlines with their depressing doomsday predictions. Away from credit cards and insurance premiums. Away from people like Tamara Ecclestone and Kim Kardashian. Away from the fashionable sense of entitlement and its hangers-on. Away from Facebook statuses about fucking shoes and fucking fashion shows. Away from airbrushing and botox and fillers and implants and photoshop and extensions and everything else  that tries to remove us from the beauty of what is natural, that tries to encourage us to forget about everything else being human consists of. Emotion. Intellect. Being social. Creating. Away from this cultural sycophantism we indulge in, that only celebrates poreless skin and money. Away from the skewed, self important media, away from poorly expressed and thinly veiled, self-loving rhetoric on blogs. Away from shitty books written by people who can’t write, published by people who have forgotten what it’s like to love literature. Away from each and every cog in the machine who tells us what to buy, what we need, what we should have and why. And each and every cog in the machine that makes a fortune out of self loathing and unfulfilled character.

I’d probably lose all my teeth by 40, because maybe the island’s dentist isn’t so good, and  I might have a brush or two with the health care system. I might wonder, sometimes, about what tiny person is making waves in New York or London, sending the bloggers into a spin. Where the top travel destination you need to know about but will never be cool enough for, is this week. Who has managed to come up with the most enviable status update or instagram for the day ‘Just chilling in Cannes, wonder where banker-hubby will take us for dinner?’ But I think I’d be happy. And I’d be happy because I wouldn’t worry about the small things anymore. About jeans and Victoria’s Secret and being thin.  I’d be happy because I’d have the time to think about what really matters, if indeed, anything at all. I wouldn’t care about not having the latest, because there’d be no one telling me I need to have it. There’d be no one telling me anything.

Just my pig, my donkey, my dog and maybe my goat. And my books.

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