Day 25: simple pleasures.

Saturday morning is pretty much my favourite time to be a non-drinker. It feels good to get up at 7am (a sleep in after my weekday 5.30 get-ups) and go to yoga or go for a jog. The world at that time of day is a fresh, calm, happy place. Birds twitter and the sun feels young. It is also particularly satisfying to finish what is quite a lengthy and strenuous yoga class, and to realise you still have two and a half hours of morning at your disposal. For a former booze hound, this is a novelty. Breakfast (basically my favourite meal of the day) is a pleasure too. After a yoga class, you only want to put good stuff in your body and it’s nice to know you’ve really earned what you’re eating: this morning gigantic strawberries, blueberries, yoghurt, oats and cinnamon with a particularly good coffee from The Shop, my favourite café a few doors down from my house. Yumness is goodness. What’s more, on a Saturday I get to write this out here on my balcony with my laptop, sitting in the breeze and morning sunshine. It’s frickin idyllic. My balcony is big and characterful (with its iron lace), and it looks out over my street, which is leafy and has the exact right balance of relaxed activity and nice-vibe quiet. It would certainly be a pity to be missing all this pleasantness. Back in the bad old days I wouldn’t have thought twice about sleeping in until two. Today at two incidentally, I will be enjoying another simple and irresistible pleasure, the pure cuteness that is my four-year-old niece Georgia performing in her end of year ballet recital. To see such tiny dancers doing their level best, and actually doing extremely well, is an experience that owns a unique part of happy. There’s no substitute. And to me, that’s really one of the coolest things about being human and being alive. Contained within the normal constructs of regular living, things like getting up early, being healthy, sitting in the sunshine and being with family and friends, are highs more pure than any drug or drink can manufacture. Let’s not forget though, that simple pleasures like these are not everyone’s experience of regular life. I am well aware that to be a healthy person, in a happy family, living in a beautiful, peaceful, prosperous part of the world is in many ways a rare and luxurious existence. All the more reason not to piss it all away.