To be Taylor Swift … What must it be like? I haven’t got the first clue and even the thought of such a thing brings me out into a cold sweet. I’m sure those within their respective gilded cages would argue that the things they have given up are worth what they have gained. They could well be right. I am in no position to judge. Those inhabitants might as well be from another planet. I suspect quite a few might actually think that they are.

What has that random thought have to do with anything? I can provide no answer as it just surfaced whilst I was thinking about this post. The older I get the more these random thoughts seem to appear unannounced.

Life is messy. None of us neatly fit into the boxes we try to or forced to be in. Bits of us spill over. We are not what we seem.

As I sit here writing this increasingly insensible piece of nonsense, our local herring gulls are serenading me with their seaside calls. The only problem is that I am about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in Britain. I suspect the chances of any of these birds ever seeing a herring, let alone eating one, are vanishingly small. And yet their cry is still the sound of the coast in my memory.

See … life doesn’t fit into the box we wish it might. Our ordered world is some other person’s hell. Living with the dissonance is one of the skills we have to nurture. Some of us never really manage that.