In praise of gathering

The gift of a crowded table

Malachy had bought the mugs before we had a shared home in which to hold them. It was a spontaneous purchase, made between work events on a quick London trip and immediately stashed away, still in their bubble wrap. A few weeks later, sitting on the floor of the first home we would make together, we balanced our breakfast on stacked IKEA flatpacks, our life waiting to be assembled. “I think I have just the thing,” Malachy said, and went rifling through the boxes of his belongings.

He emerged with the two ceramic mugs. The seafoam-hued one would come to be mine; the blue one his. I still have a photo of that first morning in our new flat: Tesco’s finest croissants on paper plates, picked because they could go in the oven straight from frozen. The candle a friend had given me when I left Colombia a week earlier, now lit somewhat precariously on top of the boxes that contained what would become our bed. A single knife, a jar of jam. And the two ceramic mugs, new to me, having entered my life just in a moment that called for ritual.

Months before I met Malachy, I was wandering around a pottery workshop in Athens with one of my dearest friends. I have loved ceramic objects for as long as I can remember, but this was a love mostly nurtured from a distance. At the time, I worked in the humanitarian field, moving from one violence-affected area to the next, my books distributed among friends’ attics. Though I cherished the work, the lifestyle was not exactly conducive to accumulating breakable beautiful things. In a world in which I could not possess them, I was content to behold. Yet, for some reason I chose to ignore practicalities on the bright Athens afternoon I picked up two glazed cups with the word ‘φως’ emblazoned across them. Φως is Greek for light, and I was—and remain—powerless in its presence.

Wrapped in an extra layer of newspaper, the cups came with me first to Boston, then to Colombia, and now to Scotland. Those vessels of light marked a turning point, a wink in the direction of embracing fragility.

When Malachy and I moved in together, we brought with us very few items from our previous lives. Neither of us had dishes or roasting tins, no potato peelers or citrus squeezers. Until then, we had lived quite happily with the legacies of rented flats, each stirring spoon quietly connecting us to the chain of renters who had held it before us.

The two ceramic mugs Malachy had bought in a fit of spontaneity felt extravagant in a flat that boasted no dishes whatsoever. Financially and logistically, the task of populating a shared life with stuff was overwhelming enough that we were content to own only two of some things. We are not really champagne drinkers, we reasoned, even as we lowered the glasses carefully into our cart—an optimistic purchase, a nod towards a future of celebration. Just two flutes would do.

The φως cups, designed for Greek/Turkish/Arabic coffee (or, realistically, for tea lights). I was willing to overlook both the impracticality of hauling them across the world and the fact that the Greek word for light should not have an accent mark.

A few years later, a different home. The φως cups from Athens are sitting on the low bookcase, tea lights nested in them. The two flutes stand side-by-side in a cabinet under the sink, and I can just about hear them rattling when the dishwasher is having a vigorous night. The ceramic mugs from that first breakfast in our first flat have followed us here too, but not without accruing their own histories of loss. In May of last year, in a world reverberating with loss, we decided, rather uncharacteristically, to throw a party. It’s a small party, really, we told our friends. Casual, I kept repeating, low-key, barely a party at all.

A small party, it turns out, is still a party—and thank heavens for that. I filled every vase I had carried across the world with daffodils we have grown in this garden. We set out every bowl, every plate, every knife and fork, and when those were not enough, we took to the charity shop in search of more knives, more forks. We crawled into the storage space under the roof to haul out the extra planks that extend the dining table to accommodate more-than-two. The extended table did not actually fit in our kitchen, so we moved everything around, rearranging ourselves in service of celebration.

There was too much food and not enough pots in which to keep it warm, so friends showed up on our doorstep bearing saucepans. Every seat in the house was summoned to the task: the chair on which laundered clothes sit before being put away, the stool that props up potted plants, the garden bench that is home to the pelargoniums. We rush-ordered reusable flutes, and when we ran out of those, we poured Prosecco into coffee mugs. Our friend who carried the cake up the stairs pronounced it heavier than his two-year-old daughter.

I had spent the previous three years shielding from the world to varying degrees, as I tried to make sense of my newly clinically vulnerable body. The vulnerability itself has not changed, but the world has, and so have my desires: for health, yes, for as much safety as can be afforded to me, but also for my elbow bumping against a friend’s as we squeeze into seats of different heights around the table and try not to get our hair caught in the flame of a candle. I yearned, in other words, for gathering, for a constellation of flutes and for reasons to use them.

For a week after this party, we picked melted wax off the table and floors. Our WhatsApp filled with evidence of giggles. We shuffled chairs around the house and occasionally found an errant whisky glass tucked into the bookcase. There was cake for breakfast. The glow of gathering lingers, even when the household is back down to its rhythms of two mugs, two flutes.

It has been an odd start to the year, and I am not exactly suffused with a spirit of celebration. This is not because I think it is inappropriate to celebrate in These Times. Joy ought not require permission. I know in my bones that the aches and gifts of this world co-exist, and that it matters to honour them both in their alongside-ness. Next to that deeply held conviction lurks a newer to me kind of awareness: that it is the gathering I crave, not necessarily the merriment. It is gathering that I cherish, even in the absence of celebration.

So in January, we gathered. I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with a friend in my university office as we squinted at Track Changes in a document that mattered to her. Our desk chairs were awkward companions, rolling into each other and the edge of the desk and the filing cabinet too. They were not designed for this kind of togetherness. Sandwiched next to each other in front of my office window, we looked like schoolchildren facing forward on a bus before an excursion, mischief at the edge of their lips. We kept at it, rolling towards each other, carrying each other’s words along.

A different day, different friends, a different table, this time blessedly without office chairs. We belatedly celebrated birthdays and made plans to celebrate the launches of books. We asked each other what we were dreaming of. We ate potatoes and the softest pancakes and we drank the leftover Prosecco from last year’s celebrations. I caught the train home at the last possible moment, having run down Waverley Steps smelling of bubbles and sugar and cheese.

Many of these tables have held immense heartache, the daily kind, the heartache of living, of which we do not write in public, at least not in specifics, because the intimacy is the point. So many friends are hurting, and so many strangers too. Though it feels exceptional, I know it is not: I know the heartache, the loss, the violence of this world are always there, even when they are not as intimately felt. It so happens that, at a given moment, particular planets of pain are especially visible from this corner of the earth.

Sometimes at these tables, between the talk of aging parents and grief and precarity and break-ups, we talked of dancing. We really should dance more this year, we agreed, and, in the good moments, we made a start. We praised the chocolate mousse, the first snowdrops in the woods, the very good dog that did not knock over the wine, the children’s song. We sent each other home with the first bunch of £1 Tesco daffodils.

First Tesco daffs. Thanks to Malachy for the photo and to the latest storm for the state of the windows.

Early this morning, at a time one may describe as the arse crack of dawn, a blackbird started singing in our garden. The first singing blackbird of the season is important to me for reasons I do not quite understand, just like the first skein of geese every autumn and the first swifts in the late spring. I feel no need to interrogate my attachment to these seasonal milestones. I care, merely, to notice them, to let them anchor me in place, time, and in the community of living, singing things.

The first blackbird of the season is always hoarse, barely audible, a creature remembering how to sing. It invites the craning of a neck, the tilting of an ear to establish whether this really is our first singing blackbird, as opposed to a reliably chatty robin on a frosty morning. I thought I had heard it earlier in the week too while I was making porridge in my dressing gown, but I was the only human awake in a quiet house. There were no other witnesses. This morning, I decided the blackbird deserved a larger audience, a small gathering of its own. “Did you hear that? Our first blackbird of the season!” I told a very sleepy Malachy next to me, who was still deciding how happy he was to be woken.

This is why we gather, in twos and at crowded tables, in the presence of pain and among the evidence of life: not always to celebrate, but to listen, to witness, to honour and, when we can, to point each other in the direction of song.