Nine thoughts

Six of them private

(The Wolf of Gubbio from San Sepolcro)

ONE

He messages me with some pointless emoji to attract my attention. The passive-aggressive waving hand, perhaps.

“Weird,” I say, “I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh?”

“There was a call,” I say, “asking to speak to the ugliest person in the house.”

“And naturally, because I have such a good and artistic eye, you wanted me to help you choose between you and the dog,” he types back, in full sentences.

TWO

It’s like in the film Moonstruck when - ok, spoiler alert but it has been out for 35 years - when Nicolas Cage’s character, Ronny, turns out to be an angry man because he lost the life he was supposed to have.

When Ronny was engaged to be married, his brother had come into his bakery asking him for some bread. Ronny went to slice the loaf with the machine, got distracted by his brother, accidentally cut his own hand off. And then the woman he was going to marry, on learning that he was now maimed and had lost a hand, called off the wedding and left him. And so five years had passed and he was an angry solitary man with this tale of woe to fight anyone with, still running his bakery but estranged from his brother, hard to be around.

Cher’s character meets him for the first time, learns all of this for the first time. And after only a few hours in his company she just looks at him - she is an Italian New Yorker who’s also had some seriously bad luck and become a bit superstitious herself, but with an ability to see through the bullshit of a situation to the core of it - she looks at him and says, “You’re a wolf.”

“I’m a wolf?” he asks.

“The big part of you has no words and it’s a wolf. That woman was a trap for you. She caught you and you couldn’t get away so you chewed off your own foot. That was the price you paid for your freedom.”

He is startled. We are startled. The moment is startling but suddenly, it is also true. He lost his hand in an accident with the bread slicer. He is also a wolf who gnawed off his own hand.

(Reader, he carries her to bed, with his two arms, one hand, pretty damn quickly.)

THREE

In church on Christmas Eve, the vicar said, as his opening gambit to midnight mass, “The Bible makes no attempt to hide the fact that the world is a terrible, cruel place.”

People are always surprised when I say I’m a Christian. What have we done to this rugged faith, this earthly rebel choir, this rain-sodden, blood-soaked hallelujah, to make it sound so naff?

FOUR

A woman I know, three kids, a job she has worked long and hard towards, a good salary from it, a husband who hit a point in midlife where he wanted to find himself, find something lost or something found in himself, something that was soft, something that looked like a mirror, something that told him he was beautiful, that his mind was young and fresh as a daisy, soft and new as a mushroom, soft and new as a butterfly, something to wake up the parts of him that were pickling.