This is a blog and in the early 2000s when people used to have blogs these people would blog about their feelings and people who didn’t have blogs would laugh at people with blogs and if a blogger said irl they feel sad the non blogger would say something like ‘why don’t you write a blog post about it’ and they would mean this facetiously because they would not intend to read such a post because they don’t believe one should air their sadness out on the internet. Or maybe they would read it and that’s worse.
In a similar vein I’ve often wondered why, when you watch the news, the news is always bad? When they tell us about how someone we don’t know very far away lost their child or cat or house to a fire it’s because someone at the news decided that THIS would be what they tell us and because they are the news this becomes news.
As someone who started her blog in whatever you call the 2015s other than ‘late’ I too concentrate on the bad because I write about how I feel which is not to say always bad, though often enough, nor that good things don’t happen too, they do!, they’re just less easy to dramatise or in other words, less newsworthy. But today I thought I would try to write about how I feel (grateful) about something true that is good in order to balance out the overwhelming feeling (sad) that I can’t do this alone which is not even entirely true because I’m not really alone-alone, even if I'm writing that I feel I am, because as you may already know and will now read, there are so many good people who are good to me and who help me.
I’ve written before that no one makes wine alone and maybe I’ve talked about the note stuck to the wall of the toilet at rue des belles caves that says in French It’s crazy the number of people you need to do something on your own and while I’ve never been one for reading material in bathrooms I know few truer words. Next thing to say is that when I learned someone I knew was having a baby alone I thought isn’t it a bit selfish to take on something like this on your own when you know the people around you will take it on themselves to help and then I realised what I’m doing is exactly the same. My wines have my name on them but the truth is no label in the world would fit the names of everyone who has actually made them — and you thought abracadabra was long enough.
And by ‘made them’ I mean the people who had their hands and feet and back in them literally and painfully and enthusiastically even though they were as tired as me but also those who have supported me mentally, generally, in person and over voice messaging and when I call and say I'm sad and also those who have gifted me things from olive oil candles sardines posters coriander silk scarfs wineglasses to stroopwaffel and Dutch cheese and bien sûr things to drink and cooked for me and paid for hotels and meals and bottles I could never dream of affording and who have taken days off and booked holiday time out and given me encouragement and time time time and carried things with me and carried things for me and move my shit from cellar to cellar to cellar with me and actually found me a cellar in my time of need and another who helped me build one and those who came from far and from off the internet just to help me and lent me spare tanks their tireuse their gas tank their chambre air (someone at a fair in Montpellier this year literally gave me the shirt off his back) gifted me a fucking pressoir and — recently — brought me wood and built me a table because I didn’t have one, just because they’re good.
So you see, it’s not all bad.
Photo, P.S., is not current! This was me in harvest nineteen.
P.P.S thank you. I hope you can all find you in here.
(Still would like a partner though.)
