family – tracey doxey

Making the, Dear Susan jumper.

AN EXTRACT FROM MY, ‘DEAR SUSAN,’ memoir from when I lived in Shetland

Shetland, Arrival August 2020

Dear Susan,

I begin with the outside, with what I have to hand; my reason, my eyes, my spatial understanding, and an openness tinged with the unknown.

On arriving, I need my first investigations of your croft house interior to be made alone. I want to inhale the house, listen to my internal feelings at first sight then recognise how my body responds to the old stones – I need to let body and stones talk to me. Thoughts and feelings need space. I need space. I haven’t yet found you. I do not know that you were born in this house 145 years ago.

It is a pale grey day, mist rolling over the hill behind the house as if a blind has been half pulled down a window. The sky is bleached out, the day is calm and windless, not particularly notable.

I open the front porch door, then, I try the house door with its mismatched glass panels. It opens. To the right in the tiny vestibule area, there is a third old, board-door, painted white with a hand-hewn square wooden knob which I turn to the right. The simple mechanism lifts a wooden latch inside. That sharp click sound of the latch lifting and hitting its wooden casing is the sound that I will forever remember of this place. It is my first sound here and it will probably be my last when I leave. It is a click of old wood against old wood, heard by every man, woman and child that has ever entered this house before me, for the last 180 years. Human touch leaves tangible traces of every hand that has opened it before me. The patina of years lies dirty on the paint’s surface.

Simultaneously, within the sound, my heart is given over to the first sight of the flag floor and fire place in the sitting room. In an instant, I am sold on sound and sight. I know I will not pull out of this crazy unseen deal to buy a house and change my life entirely.

Heart over head, I move in three weeks later, with two cats and a bag, the furniture and belongings on a lorry, to arrive a week later.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Anais Nin

Dear Susan,

I am finding you.

I have been sent an image of your Brother – John Halcrow, in his Naval Uniform. I begin to look at censuses and the local history ancestry website then I ask around to find out about the previous inhabitants of this house. I called in at John’s to ask about you because I know nothing of the woman I had heard lived in the house for many years. He said to speak to Jim, so I went over the road to Jim’s and Martin was there too. They were off to Anne Mouat’s funeral but Jim was gracious with his time with me. He told me of you – Susanna (Susan, Cissie) who lived in the house that I now live in and that he was sent as a child, nearly 80 years ago, to collect the milk from you at your house. He told me that you had one cow on the croft, you sold milk, and you rowed the little hand-written paper milk bills up on a shelf in the porch – the same porch that I have. He was a young boy then but he clearly remembers you.

At the funeral, Martin spoke with Raymond whose Aunt lived in the house after you. You knew her, her name was Alice. Raymond came to see me the next day with a mesmerising handful of photographs of you. He introduced me to Susanna Halcrow (Susan, Cissie, or even Zizzie) The photographs, he told me, had been left in the house after his Aunt Alice had died some 30 years after you.

For the first time I could put a face to the name of a woman who lived in my old house for 83 years. Your face, your name. I sank to sit on the floor to look at your serene face in the images dating back to early 1900. Your candid expression caught by the lens of a camera, looking openly right back at me opened something inside me to find you more deeply.

You were born in this house on the 6^th February 1876 and Died on 4^th January 1960.

In the archives at the museum, I found that your Halcrow family had lived here through the 1800’s – 1960. They were listed in the 1888 valuation roll of the Symbister Estate, Whalsay, partly owned by the Laird, William Arthur Bruce (In 1888, John Halcrow, your Father) tenant, paid a yearly rent of £4, 10 Shillings for croft number 7. You would have been twelve years old (registered as knitter). The whole family are on the census of 1881 and ‘Susanna’ is listed as being five years old – there were seven people living in this small house at that time – Thomas Halcrow aged 86, Barbara Halcrow aged 83 (your grandparents), John Halcrow aged 40 and Ann Halcrow aged 41 (your parents) John aged nine, you aged five and a boy named John Brown aged 13, but you will already know this. Seven people living in this small two bedroomed house. Afterwards, I looked at records from 1838 and found your family, here, in Upperton.

In the grave yard at Levenwick cemetery, you lie on your own next to your parents and brothers. Your head is against the sea and in May, you rest above a bank carpeted in pale lemon primroses. I wonder if you are lonely, or if you are free.

Over the months after arriving, I became obsessed with you and wrote thoughts that occurred to me about you, on scraps of paper. These papers began to litter the house. I connected with you through a field of built environment in the house, photographs, your old pottery, the view from the sitting room window and eight sessions in the Shetland Museum archive which revealed the legal documents relating to some of the most notable social changes in Shetland between the 1880’s and mid 1950’s. The *Register of the Sasines, recorded the sale of the house from Laird to local in 1923, valuation rolls of rent paid for three generations of the Halcrow family for over 100 years are traceable, the Napier Commission registered the croft and detailed their calculated rental value and reduction of rents for Shetland crofters and the legal rights for tenants, the Small Holding Act, and I found the registered wills of your brother and finally your own, which gave me an insight into over one hundred years of three generations of Halcrow life within this old house. To the very end, with your serene looking gaze of steady calm and with a glint in your eyes, you put everything in order to the very last moment – crossing every t and dotting ever i. All of your wishes are written clearly in the directions of your will.

But, how am I to find out about you – what you thought and felt and how you lived? The neighbours reveal little.

So, I turn to the physical things to look at our lives carried out in the same place – the same stone walls of a house built so long ago – with no record of its beginning, how the breeze moves through the house through its open doors, the sound of the wooden doors and their opening and closing then there is the view – a view that has changed every single day of every single year but it is the same frame from which you looked and I now look out of at the changing world.

Your artifacts have been returned to the house – some pitchers, jugs, vases, plates, bowls. Before mixing them on the shelves with my own plates and jugs, I turn them around and around to connect with a life before and then there is the biggest connection of all – that you were and I am single women, living a life and paying the bills on our own in an old stone house facing the sea. Did you talk to Ralph, the dog, as I talk with Tiggy and Alfie?

I wonder about the touch upon things, the patina laid down by years of paint, of opening and closing the door, of turning door knobs, of opening and closing windows.

Finding you is like the moment I removed a damp layer of wallpaper in one gentle pull upwards, in an old abandoned derelict Shetland croft house, to reveal a perfect hand printed layer of pre 1950’s paper with wildflowers printed up it. Then, in one more pull that strip of hand printed wallpaper also came off the wall completely intact. I folded the paper and placed it under my jumper, its dampness pressed against the skin of my belly. I thought that if I were to paste the top layer of wall paper back over the void, then no one would know what had been before. No one would know what had been removed from underneath the top layer. It was as if it had never existed.

Finding you IS like finding old beautiful handprinted wallpaper lying beneath layers of less attractive paper. Then peeling it off in sections and placing it under my jumper for safety. Susan, you are under my jumper, next to my skin.

I lift the pewter lid of your old Victorian salt ware jug to look inside. Revealing, peeling, pasting, painting, lifting, closing, opening things in the house, as generations have done so before me. I paint over what has been on the walls and doors. I sit quietly to look at the layers of layers, like the quiet man who mediates first thing in the morning, stripping away layers of noise to his core, before all else happens in the day.

I spoke to Marylyn, who, as a 10-year-old child, moved in to this house with her family. It was the year you died. She told me of a wash stand in each bedroom and jugs and bowls, a sink at the bottom of the stairs and a radio on a dresser in the front room. These were your things left behind. I can picture them now. She told me that her and her brother slid down the green linoleum on the stairs and they telephoned their cousins in the house behind by joining two cans with a long piece of string and shouting out the back window in the north bedroom. I can hear their laughter now. Children in the house for the first time in over 60 years.

But, I wonder, who cares for our loved things?

The above words are from the beginning of my memoir which was never published. I did have an agent but she couldn’t get a publisher interested

While I lived in Shetland, I designed many hats and then branched out to my first jumper – The Dear Susan, which was supported by a VACMA award – Visual Arts, Creative Makers from Creative Scotland. The award bought me time to create and the Dear Susan jumper came out of that creation.

The Dear Susan Jumper, was released in July 2021 and had a 13 page story included about the woman that the jumper was named after

Susan Halcrow would have been one exemplary woman – crofter, single, attractive. She was alive through so many huge social changes in Shetland and she knew her rights. She lived in the houses I bought for 83 years.

After I designed the Dear Susan jumper in 2ply and in many sizes – I knitted a very quick, easy Aran, Dear Susan. which was finally published in December 2021. It was designed with love and enriched with the winds and rains of Shetland.

Looking back, I am proud of these two designs and the story behind them.

If you would like to knit either of these jumpers, you do get a 13 page story about my life in Shetland, with it.

Tracey Doxey Kofi

A careless rapture

A first careless rapture

Today, is the 26^th May, a UK bank holiday.
I left home at 6:50am to walk the three miles to Sheffield station and buy the tickets to catch a train to Leeds then on to Saltaire for the annual BH Arts trail open up of the houses and I wanted to see the work in Salts mill by Ann Hamilton.

In Leeds, on platform 4b, I waited for the Skipton train to be unlocked, when a young woman asked me if it was the train to Keithly. I showed her that beside the train is a platform sign which shows all the stations that the train will stop at because I didn’t know if she was familiar with how our trains run as she was from China or Japan. We entered the train together – she said that she was going to Keithly for the Haworth train to go see the Bronte house. We got on immediately with an open, relaxed flowing conversation. I asked her if she lived in Leeds but she said she was on teacher training – she asked where I thought that she was from by looking at her face, which she circled with her forefinger. It wasn’t her face that I was entirely reading. Her English pronunciation was absolutely perfect without any hint of any accent and my experience of Chinese English teachers from living three years in China, is that their pronunciation is recognisable. In China, I was never called Tracey – but Tlacey. When she said she was from China, I couldn’t help saying that I used to live in China, in Suzhou – and honestly, we are talking of a dot of a Chinese city famous for its classical gardens, with a population of 8.5 million in the huge China with so many cities that I couldn’t believe that we both had a connection to the same place thousands of miles away for a brief collision of place and timing on platform 4b in Leeds. She said that she was going back to Suzhou in 3 days so I couldn’t help but mention the special people in my Suzhou life. I told her of my Chinese Jie Jie – (Older sister) who was my landlady and her husband Shu Shu and my Buddhist friend Cai Gen Lin –these three people changed my life deeply when I lived in the old hutong lanes in Pingjiang and I still love them very much to this day, but have not seen them since 2013. I lived in Suzhou from 2008 – 2010 as an English teacher and felt very grateful for the job because I learned so much about daily life from my adult students. In excitement, on the train, I found in my purse, a business card of Jie Jie’s property rental business that I have carried since 2008 and only last week, I was wondering how I could get in touch with them as none of them speak English nor have email. My new train platform friend is called Zhang Yu, I remembered her name after she only said it once and I began to speak with her in Mandarin, something I haven’t done for years. I was catapulted back to a time and place so loved that I could hear it and feel it. We parted after only 10 minutes on the same train. I gave her my email and she gave me a silk bookmark from Suzhou. I have tried to email her this evening but it bounced back. I am hoping that she will keep in touch and if she has time, will seek out my Jie Jie and hand her the card that I have carried for 17 years. On the back, I wrote, Jie Jie, Wo ai ni. Which means, Sister, I love you.

On the top floor of the magnificent, gargantuan Salts Mill in Saltaire, is the multi-faceted Bradford supported exhibition by Ann Hamilton which responds to the space, its heritage and the future. Three different spaced out horns rotate slowly in the huge roof space unhurriedly moving towards my face, playing repetitive singing then whistling. The mechanism to turn each horn is visible on the floor. I’m here early and have the huge space to myself – I don’t know what it is all about yet but I cannot turn away, intoxicated by the layering of sound. At the end of the room, great swathes of locally-woven blue fabric hangs in great lengths held down by rocks, like a loom. In another room, huge images of faces on woollen cloth hang like banners whilst a woman in a, kind of manager’s-box reads letters written by hundreds of unknown and unnamed people as part of the exhibition to their ‘Dear Future’ this is the part of the exhibition that most interested me before I came to see it. The woman reads letters while singing can still be heard from the horns in the vast room next door. News broad sheet papers hang on rails behind each large printed doll (which are blown up images of Feve’s – tiny ceramic dolls / a small trinket or charm which used to be baked and hidden inside French cakes for luck) I have walked around the gallery and collected every news print sheet, some I have duplicated, some I may have missed – there are many sheets. I’m in love with this space. It’s a space that needs a commanding artwork within its huge vaulted roof space. Every time I come, I am in love with the immediate old wooden, oiled smell and openness and light in this huge mill which once wove wool. I’m also in love with this work which I am not quite understanding but want to, so much so, that I sit on a bench near the woman reader, to eat my sandwich and to just listen and give it all time. It is so multi layered that it really needs more than one sitting. Normally, I look at art and leave quickly. Here, I am engaged, writing with enthusiasm and speed, trying capture what this work is making me feel. And here it is.

I feel alive. A first careless rapture of something so completely new to me, that I am besotted.

I feel engaged fully. I’m not off in a rush, not thinking of some other place but I am here, in this roof space in Salts Mill thinking of my own ‘Dear Future’ Something that I have been thinking of for some time but not had a thread of where to exactly, precisely put my energy to reach a goal / aim because I am, for the first time in decades, not sure. My future aim is staying just out of reach – not unattainable but latent as if I am once again standing at a crossroads. My choice is not yet clear enough to run headlong towards it or even to quietly walk or even stumble towards it – my time future is precious as I am getting older. I am hoping that I can make the right choice. The reader in the box, reads on while pulling strings to ring a bell above the large artworks, she’s opening letters from unknown people who have written to their Dear Futures, mostly thinking of the future world,

But what is my Dear Future self? A dream or hope is forming involving heading back towards the east and meeting Zhang Yu on the platform in Leeds, seems to be a sign that heading back towards the old lanes in Suzhou and onwards to the base of a mountain in Japan is maybe the path I should take.

Dear Future, this is my dream….

What is yours?

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Alfie cat

Alfie was a quiet cat, who did everything on his own terms.

I adopted him from the RSPCA in Sheffield on 16^th December 2012. He chose me. When I visited the RSPCA, I applied for a cat but I didn’t know what kind of cat. When I walked round, I saw all the little animals in different stages of loss and worry. Alfie was standing on his hind legs, scratching at the glass to get out. I loved his spirit, his little fight. Every time I passed his cage, he scratched at the glass – so that was it, he chose me and he was already called Alfie and he was about 4 years old but there was no other information except he had been mistreated.

In the spring of 2013, a feral, handsome, tabby started to come into the house and steal any food left behind. He was terrified of me and ran across and through anything to get away from any human or any sound. When I was out, he would also fight with poor Alfie, who was a much smaller cat. Finally, the tabby let me ghost stroke him when he was gulping food – in other words, I couldn’t touch him but I could stroke the air above him so that he might realise that I would not hurt him. Until, one day, I caught him in the cat basket and took him to the vets to be castrated so that he would stop peeing all over the house. After that, Tiggy loved me and tolerated Alfie and Alfie was carful around Tiggy but that was it, we were a small family and we shuffled along. Tiggy was top cat and he was needy for my love and ate first and Alfie, was Alfie, he went about his day, choosing where to sleep and he ate as much as he could.

Four years later, I moved from that lovely little house on a steep hill, to a small ground floor flat in Sheffield so that I might be mortgage free and I could pay for myself to do an MA in Knitting at NTU. The flat opened onto a large manicured green garden and both cats settled. Tiggy ate as many mice as he could and Alfie slept on the soft grass. During my MA, I fell in love with Shetland until finally, in 2020, I moved, lock, stock and two cats a thousand miles from the city to live in a croft house that faced the sea in Levenwick. I transported the cats in a double cat pram which they fought hard and cried and whined the whole 12 hours up the country to Aberdeen to be released in our pet friendly cabin for the 14 hour journey to Lerwick. On the ferry, they settled in my cabin, at Orkney, we were all woken by the great clanking of chains as the ferry docked in Kirkwall – both cats frightened by new sounds and when we docked in Lerwick, they had become little celebrities in their pram.

We lived in a beautiful, untouched, 200-year-old croft house that faced the sea. Tiggy loved the stone walls surrounding the place – them being full of tiny creatures to catch. He wasn’t afraid of the winds or rains. Alfie loved the fireside; he warmed his face and didn’t leave his little spot. He was scared of the stormy weather and when he ran out to the toilet, he hid under the bushes in the abandoned walled garden opposite to the house. Who was I kidding? I was also scared of the storms. The harsh winds made Alfie squint and flatten his ears to his head, something I didn’t know that he could do, he sat out on the wall – looking out to sea, he followed me to the byre behind the house and watched me dig soil, he sat in the deep window sills looking out at the skies and waited for me to return home his vantage point in the bedroom window, sometimes he would follow me to the end of the lane and nose up to the neighbour’s horses and he still loved his food. By then, he had learned to purr and he was always there, just there for me.

In October 2021, I returned to the city. A single Island life alone was too much for me, too isolated and too much alone in every way and I was a strong independent woman. When we returned, I had no home or job and I continued to drag the cats around, I couldn’t find rented accommodation because of them and no one would take us in for short stay either. I had them fostered out for a week or a little more 3 times and twice, I nearly had to give them up – the Rspca’s law is that they will take back any animal that came from there so they would take Alfie but not Tiggy. I cried and dragged them from pillar to post until a friend took me and the boys in and finally, ironically, I bought a flat in the same place as the one that I sold to go to live in Shetland. But the new flat I bought was a wreck and broken and ugly. We made do. We had a home and the boys went straight out into an area they already knew.

We have been here for three years. Alfie watched the birds, sat with the badgers without fear, sent dogs running from his path on the pavement when he stood his ground, He only had two teeth but he was NO pushover and he still loved his food but over the last year, he had been renamed Alfie thin thin because he was getting thinner and thinner. In January, his breathing had bouts of what seemed like he couldn’t stop a rattling noise and I took him to the vet. They said, that he would be a different boy in a month. I took him home, he rolled in the sunshine, waited by the window at 3:30pm every day for me to return from work, and he met me in the car park when he heard me parking the car. He still ate everything and wanted more and sat beside me purring more and more.

I didn’t realise how much of our lives were together and how much we quietly meant to each other.

On Saturday 15^th March, he woke at 6am and sat beside my face on the pillow, looking at me and purring. I told him how much I loved him and how grateful I had been for his friendship. On that day, he stopped eating, drinking and moving – except to find his comfort somewhere. He sat on my knee for 2 hours and I knew that he was dying. We went to bed and he crawled under the bed into the back corner – something he has never done before. I placed him a cat litter tray under the bed and wondered if he would be there in the morning. When I woke in the night, he was sleeping at the end of the bed. At 5am, he walked up the bed and got into the window sill above my head behind the bed. He lay and spread himself in a long thin line, in the coolness of the window sill, his chin resting on his right paw, his face turned towards me in the bedroom. His breathing was gentle and silent. I put the pillows up the wall and sat beside him, telling him how loved he was, how special he had been and how he had been the best friend ever and I thanked him again.

The pigeons cooed outside, the dawn chorus started at 5:30am for an hour and still he lay there with me silently crying beside him. I didn’t want him to know I was sad, so I kept gently stroking him from his nose to his top of his head and he just looked and listened. I told him that he was, ok. Below the pale sunrise of Sunday 16^th March, and a dawn chorus to wake anyone, Alfie began to slip away in a place of calm serenity, a place he knew and felt safe. His once yellow eyes were all darkening. I opened the window a tiny crack and he wanted to get out, so, at 7:20, I gently lifted him up to take him outside where, he rose, dropped, arched his back and stretched out long and took his last breath. I sobbed a river holding him.

It is the first time that I have ever sat beside the approach and final act of death. I sobbed tears I didn’t even know were in me. I recognised that his soul had left him and he became heavier. I placed him in his favourite cardboard box where he stayed.

It has been interesting to note his absence this week – he isn’t looking out of the window, or waiting to meet me, his nails aren’t hitting the wooden floor as he walks and he doesn’t peer into my face first thing in the morning. I have greatly missed him, but today, Thursday, is the first day that I have felt a little energy again. The sun brought a new gentle energy and oh, how Alfie loved the sunshine. xx

Happiness Diary

I had begun to think that I am not happy, that I have little happiness in my life, so I decided to note any moments of happiness in a diary – so that I might recognise all the small moments that make me happy during. The happiness is fleeting, brief but those moments add up to make the days with happiness inside. By reading the logs in the diary, I regained that small moment and it made me happy again. here are my logs from the last 5 days.

Happiness Diary 2024

23^rd June. 8am

The early sun warms my face and arms whilst I knit quietly on the bench out front and Tig preens himself gently purring by my side – not quite touching me but connected, non the less. He allows me to hold his paws, moving through each one individually. I admire the splaying of his toes and claws in his comfort and watch his flicking tip of his striped tail. My favourite thing is when he crosses my lap and his hair arms brush over the skin of my forearms; I never move, I wait for the brief touch, whilst quietly knitting on the bench out front.

23^rd June

The pleasure of a working, functional, above adequate shower for the first time in my tiny bathroom.

23^rd June

Talking with my neighbour, J, about cyanotype and giving her a small print that I made at the workshop yesterday, of a daisy cluster – it’s not so good yet but I like it enough to give it.

23^rd June

Came home at 2:30 to Jess’s birthday present on the doorstep. It’s a fit bit watch and scales – it took me 2:5 hours to set it up from watching youtube videos, having to launch a new gmail email and linking app to watch to scales to me. I had a real sense of achievement and perseverance and problem solving and after it was all working, I biked to the gym and swam for half an hour then biked back. What the watch can do, lifted my spirits. It is a very generous gift and what makes me happy is the love of a son to buy it, my ability to finally get it all working and that it lifts my energy because it is watching me.

24^th June

The first cut of my sweet peas, placed with tiny stems of scented mock orange blossom in a green glass vase – makes me deeply satisfied.

25^th June

Laughing lightly, connecting briefly at work with a work colleague over something that seems ridiculous.

26^th June 6:30am

Cycling, through the mist, on my way through endcliffe park, I see a great young heron fly overhead coming to land in the pond, only to lift again and gracefully flap its wings to lift high. Such beauty.

26^th June 10:00am

It is my birthday, I am 61 years old. On passing the place where Mr Beddoes rests at Edensor, Chatsworth church yard, I move away the weeds and say to him, 24 years without him in my life. I rise to walk into the church, and there it is – a patchwork quilt that I made in 1991, stitching over the signatures of 250 people including Dukes, Duchesses, Earls, local estate workers, Vicars, mothers, sisters, daughters, sons, brothers and fathers. All there, I charged £2 per square and donated over £500 to a charity that I no longer remember. But the quilt survives, on the back wall of the great church designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, such memories flooding back from 33 years ago, many people now long gone.

26^th June noon.

I went to meet my beautiful sister and immediately, she talked over her sorrows. It makes me love her even more.

26^th June, 4:30pm

Arriving at Verity’s house on my birthday, to a banner of bunting spelling out Happy Birthday, and beautiful ice cubes in the shape of flowers with strawberries inside and a plate of beautiful cakes, the table set in the garden with cloth and napkins made me very happy. Such care and love and attention just for me. I greatly appreciate Verity who has been a friend since 1998. And, I love her too.

26^th June – 8:30pm

Talking with Patti, on the phone about happiness. How the briefness of fleeting moments of love or beauty or learning new exciting experiences and creativity makes me happy. She told me about her solstice morning at 4:30am and that made me happy that she had experienced a magical moment.

I began to look back at the few logs I had started in my happiness and realised that they are fleeting, maybe 2 or 3 minutes each but that every day, I am happy when I thought that I had not been. We also talked about the analysis of the moments that had made me happy and I realised that they fell into 3 categories, Love, beauty, and learning/or new experiences. We cannot create happiness moments but to understand what makes us happy can surely help.

Such a lovely birthday, filled with simple, happy moments of joy and surprise and beauty.

27^th June,

Sitting outside Park Hill flats at The Pearl, with a cherry bakewell and soda split between my work colleague Jane and I. sitting in the sunshine, feeling free, talking and laughing with such iconic architecture in the background, made me happy.

28^th June.

Lying on the bed, beside my old cat, him curled tightly in a circle. I touch his head and he uncurls his body, shifting it into the negative space between my chin and chest. He purrs, his little old paws unfurl, he kneads the bed sheet in satisfaction. He is old, he is safe, he is happy. This makes me happy.

28^th June

Picking the 2^nd cut of my sweet peas and any individual pretty flowers from my tiny border of flowers, to place in a glass, on the doorstep mat of my neighbour. 😊

28^th June

I was walking from the gym in the gentle breeze and faint sunshine, I realised that I was singing to myself. I felt it, that brief but discernible hint of happiness – just sitting above calm and content.

I write the moment into my diary and think of how much happiness I can fill inside this small book. That makes me happy. So, can thinking about happy moments, make me happy? Can I lift myself by reading past happiness?

28^th June

Seeing two young student girls bending down, talking to Alfie on the pavement outside my flat. So cute, so caring – when Alfie normally avoids people.

Heart warming.