Another wee update for you… I was writing to a friend recently about how I spend my days and it occurred to me that some other people might be interested in this too…

The basic philosophy that I’ve adopted here is to go through each day choosing things to do that ‘spark joy’. Since I’m in the unusual position of having no responsibilities or deadlines, I figure this is as good a philosophy as any…

So… I start each day with a shower in one of the cubicles at the end of the hall… and a 30 minute call on the payphone. My phone call always sparks a lot of joy. Then, when my door’s locked I lay out all the things that I might like to do during the day. First things first though: I make a bowl of cereal and chopped fruit. (I’ve always got a good supply of apples and oranges coz I still swap all my jail biscuits for fruit. My Celine-singing neighbour is good for that!)

I munch my breakfast sitting cross-legged up on my top bunk, while I do some cryptic crossword clues and read a few articles from m y weekly paper. Then, for the rest of the day I just pick and choose from the pile, changing from one thing to another every couple of hours, sparking joy as I go.

Yesterday I read about how to harvest autumn heather honey. Then I painted a butterfly. In the afternoon (after the hour out on the Astroturf) my mail arrived, so I smiled lots as I read the latest tales from my bother and a friend. Then I switched to researching electric vans, with a  view to potentially using one in a future gardening business. (My dad had posted me a load of print-offs about the subject). Late afternoon I usually start feeling more creative, so yesterday I spent a couple of hours compiling and painting collections of flowering plants to use in my garden designs, with the TV on in the background (Star Trek and Garden Rescue).

9pm, and as usual, my co-pilot woke up for the start of his “day”. Aside from two half-hour periods of meal-time consciousness (which prevent starvation), his day runs from 9pm ’til 2am. When he wakes up I usually put my studies away, so yesterday we watched Dragon’s Den together. Then at around 10pm I hand the metaphorical remote control over to him. We haven’t got a real one, but that’s not a problem coz the room’s only 3m wide so the telly’s easy to reach 🙂

That’s the moment when joy-sparking comes to an abrupt halt as he switches over to his favourite TV genre: reality crime. By 10 or 12pm I can bare this no longer, so the earplugs go in and I read a novel. Recently I’ve also taken to looking through a stack of photos that a friend took for me -pictures of a house that is for sale not far from my parents. It’s nice to imagine a possible fantasy future there: a stone house, a beautiful wild garden with beehives… maybe chickens… me working away designing gardens and websites, with my electric van parked out the front.

And there we have it, a day in the life of me, in a concrete box for 22 and 1/4 hours.