I’ve spent the last few weeks moving into a new home. It’s a lot like the old one, but bigger and more expensive and thus more difficult to keep clean and tidy, but there is a park over the road, which is a great place to meet single mums. Not that I can speak to them, obviously, because despite many failed schemes to leave her behind, my partner continues to accompany me. This might seem like a travesty, but I did get to marvel at her superior organisational ability. It only took her a week to realize that the furniture would need to be transferred from one property to another.

I’ve been doing a lot of marvelling, lately. I marvelled at how long it took my internet provider to transfer the service to my new address, and at how much they continued to charge me in the intervening period despite neither my old home nor my new one actually receiving the service I was paying for. I marvelled at the staggering ineptitude of the racist engineer who arrived to install my new phone line, and who left several hours later leaving a pile of amber brick dust on my new carpet and no working internet. As I had nothing better to do than read, I marvelled at the shoddy state of the contemporary novel. I marvelled at the cost of a new fridge-freezer, at the state of an old washing machine – which, naturally, managed two cycles before sputtering into uselessness – and at my phone’s mobile data usage, which I’d been using to conduct my various professional endeavours at a rate of charge that was almost twice my rate of income. What I wanted to be doing was Marvelling, with a capital-M. While I was busying myself with berating various lowly customer service personnel, Marvel and Netflix’s The Defenders, the long-awaited get-together of their street level superheroes, had been released in my absence.

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