Less obvious

I was late out of the front door this morning. The bed was a little bit too cosy, the snooze button a little bit too easy to hit when half-conscious and the song on the radio just a little bit too good to leave halfway through. As a result, when I eventually made my way down the hill towards the station I took a slightly different route to the bus stop, cutting through the heart of town. It meant walking closer to the mall that was nowhere near opening yet, passing a different set of fellow sufferers drifting in the opposite direction – more students, less office workers, a younger, more vibrant disappointment but the same old Monday morning.

At one point, walking over the steep bridge and making my way up the alleyway running along the back of one of the arcades, I looked up and saw a gorgeous window, just off in the distance, that I had never noticed before. It was beautiful, and yet like countless beautiful windows it was probably just the way light got in to shine on few abandoned lever arch files nobody would open, red and navy spines side by side, in a drab featureless room that nobody would ever enter. Fair enough, I suppose, I’ve known plenty of people like that.

The world is full of things, and sides to things, that we almost always fail to see. The backs of houses and shops are a classic example. I thought about this so much on the rest of my walk that I almost missed my bus. Suddenly, everywhere was full of beautiful peripheral details that I had ignored for years. A random panel of stained glass above a shop front, there for seemingly no sensible reason, only safe from vandalism because nobody else had seen it either, or had seen it and considered it a mirage. The date “AD 1891” carved into a shield, gracefully curling at the edges, in the brickwork at the apex of one of the buildings, surrounded by deep red carved roses, higher up even than the streetlights. The streetlights themselves for that matter, which resembled flying saucers if you looked at them with just the right frame of mind.

I got on my bus and the winter sun struggled to pierce the windows, gently washing people out until brown hair was tinged grey and ambition was muted into resignation. And, as so often, I found myself thinking of her, the exception that proves the rule as she always is. Because I can remember all the minor details about her, the things she doesn’t know she’s doing and the things she thinks that I don’t see. I could write a book, but if I did I would jinx it; she might become self-conscious and then she wouldn’t do them any more, they would be replaced by tics more awkward and nowhere near as loveable.

Funny how I noticed them where she was concerned but not with everything else: frame of mind, indeed. Why did I waste so much time thinking that paying attention to the minor details would be a waste of time? Even the phrasing was wrong: "minor details" rather than "less obvious details". In fact, nobody appears to use the word “detail” any more without qualifying it, as if they were never that important in the first place. Chugging down the motorway on my daily trip to a parallel universe where information is thought to have no intrinsic value unless it can be chewed up, partly pre-digested and regurgitated into the electronic sick bag of a single Powerpoint slide, this seemed to be the most important detail that a lot of people had missed.

In another, better world, maybe all these things would be the major details.