Which song comes to mind when you are genuinely joyful? I mean, carefree, energy flowing, dancing, moving, kind of happy?

Dear Marianne,

This morning, I got up at five, I couldn’t sleep, I’d fretted about this and I’d fretted about that. The night had played its cruel trick of turning all the good things in my life into bad things, and it was all what-ifs, and yeah-buts, and what-abouts swirling around in my mind. I crept out of the house so as not to wake Susie, putting on a winter coat because the temperature had dropped and it was sleeting outside.

I walked to the park through the woods and across the lawns. All the ducks were quacking, the Egyptian geese were honking, and the swans flapped about, the leaves were falling from the trees, and the sky looked like my mind – sleety, unsettled and rumbling. Down at the lake, I could tell the water temperature had dropped significantly because some early morning swimmers were standing around, shivering and slapping themselves, their skin reddened by the cold. I stripped off my clothes and leapt in, swimming across the lake in my usual dithering way, allowing the icy water to do its work – rearranging the blood, cleansing the temple, expelling the morning demons. I got out, dressed, shivering so much I could barely tie my shoelaces, then grabbed a coffee from the café and walked back across the park. I put my earphones in and played Geese’s new album, Getting Killed. The first song starts with Cameron Winter singing, in his lovely, plaintive way –

“I try/ I try/ I try so hard”

– and I feel those simple words down to my soul, because we all try, because we all try so hard, and when the band kicks into the chorus – I mean, my God, those drums – and Cameron Winter screams, again and again –

“There’s a bomb in my car! There’s a bomb in my car!”

– all worry is laid to waste. The endorphins rushing wild from the freezing water, the music pounding through my body, the caffeine, the fucking ducks and the God-roiling sky – no what-ifs, no yeah-buts, no what-abouts, no caveats, at all. I am made happy, and that happiness is entire and incontestable. And all the way home, I go—to my beautiful waking wife – on this, the best day ever.

Love, Nick

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