Douglas Ireland

Tag: personal-essay

  • Small Mercies

    Soundtrack to this post.

    There is a line in Pulp Fiction I keep coming back to, and it is not one of the famous ones. No royale with cheese, no foot massages, no Ezekiel 25:17. Mia Wallace sits back down at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, looks at the table, and says:

    “Don’t you love that? When you come back from the bathroom and find your food waiting for you.”

    Mia Wallace · Pulp Fiction, 1994

    That is it. She says it, and the scene carries on. Nobody really answers her. Within a few minutes of screen time she will be flat on a carpet with a needle going into her chest, and Vincent is already spending most of his energy on not doing something catastrophically stupid. The whole sequence is wound tight. And in the middle of it, she notices the food.

    I think that is why the line lodged in me hard enough to end up in my commonplace book. It is a completely undramatic observation, made by someone in a very dramatic film, and it happens to be true. You do love that. Everybody loves that. It costs nothing, it changes nothing, and it is a small, dependable pleasure available to more or less anyone who has ever got up from a table and come back to it.

    Noticing is a skill, not a mood

    The thing about small mercies is that they are not rare. They are just quiet. They do not announce themselves, they do not send a notification, and nothing in the world is set up to bring them to your attention. Which means whether you get them or not is almost entirely down to whether you happen to be paying attention at the time.

    The kettle already boiled when you walk into the kitchen. The bin already out. A green light at the bottom of the hill when you have never once had a green light at the bottom of that hill. Washing that came in dry, in Paisley, in July. An email you had been dreading answered before you had to chase it. The good parking space, right there, on a Saturday.

    None of that is luck exactly. Or rather, the luck is evenly distributed and the noticing is not. Mia is not lucky that her food arrived. Food arriving is what restaurants do. She is just the sort of person who registers it as a pleasure instead of as a logistics update.

    A few lines above her in my commonplace book, Epictetus says you become what you give your attention to. I do not think it is a coincidence that they ended up on the same page. If attention is the raw material, then the question of what you point it at stops being a personality quirk and starts being something closer to a practice. The days I have paid attention to the small good things have not been objectively better days. They have just been better days to have been inside of.

    What this is not

    I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this idea I have no time for at all.

    “Count your blessings” has done a lot of heavy lifting for people who would rather you did not ask difficult questions. Be grateful for what you have. Look on the bright side. Cheer up, it could be worse. Told to the right person at the wrong moment, it is not wisdom, it is a way of changing the subject. Noticing that the kettle is boiled does not fix a housing system, or a hospital waiting list, or a wage that has not moved in three years, and anyone who suggests otherwise is usually selling something.

    So this is not that. Small mercies are not compensation and they are not an argument for accepting things as they are. If anything, they run the other way. Nobody sustains a long argument with the world from a position of permanent grimness. You need somewhere to put your feet down. The people I know who have kept going the longest, on the things that matter and take decades, are almost all people who are still capable of being delighted by something small and stupid at half past seven on a Tuesday morning.

    Mia’s line works because it is not consolation. She is not saying the food makes up for anything. She is just, briefly, in a scene that is about to go very badly wrong, glad about her dinner.

    The commonplace book bit

    This is more or less what the commonplace book is for. Most of what is on that page is heavier: Le Guin on capitalism, Illich on tools, Sagan on a society that depends on science it does not understand. Big ideas that I keep near me because I want to keep arguing with them.

    And then Mia Wallace, on the pleasure of a table you left and came back to.

    She earns her place. Every so often you need reminding that the point of all the other quotes, the whole business of paying attention to power and who decides and who bears the cost, is a world with more small good things in it and more people with the spare capacity to notice them. That is what it is all in service of. Not a better argument. A boiled kettle, and someone glad to find it.

    Don’t you love that?

  • A Note on the Words at the Top

    Soundtrack to this post.

    The three quotes at the top of this blog aren’t decoration. They’re a kind of shorthand for how I look at the world, and for the pace at which I’ve learned to do so.

    Black and white portrait photograph of George Orwell, taken in 1943 for his National Union of Journalists membership card.
    George Orwell, 1943. NUJ membership card photograph. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

    George Orwell writes: “If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.” I’ve always liked how provisional that sentence is. It isn’t a slogan or a posture. It’s an admission that understanding changes you, and that many political positions only look unreasonable when viewed from a distance. Orwell isn’t pledging allegiance so much as acknowledging that power, when examined closely, often looks less legitimate the longer you stare at it.

    That line resonates with me because anarchism, as a philosophy, has always felt less like chaos and more like an ethical demand. It asks us to justify authority, to minimise coercion, and to trust people more than systems. The older I get, the more persuasive that feels, not as a fantasy of perfect freedom, but as a framework for asking difficult questions about who decides, who benefits, and who bears the cost.

    A ScotRail Class 380 train arrives at platform 12 of Glasgow Central station, framed by a Victorian stone arch and the station's ornate iron and glass roof.
    Glasgow Central station. Photo: Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    Ian Dury’s line, “It takes much longer to get up north, the slow way,” is personal in a different way. I grew up in the Manchester area and moved to Scotland at 36. Ten years ago now. It took me a long time to go up north, in every sense. Geography, money, inertia, and habit all have their own gravity. The slow way isn’t just about distance on a map. It’s about the routes that are available to you at a given point in your life.

    There’s no self‑pity in that lyric, just a recognition that movement is uneven. Some people get express trains. Others change twice and wait on cold platforms. I recognise that in my own story and in the wider world. Progress, whether personal or political, rarely arrives all at once. It comes in stages, through weather, detours, and delayed connections.

    A high-contrast black and white stencil-style portrait of Aaron Swartz with the words "BE FREE" beneath it, by artist Kris Newby.
    Aaron Swartz. Art: Kris Newby, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    Aaron Swartz puts the sharpest edge on it: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” Once you accept that, a lot of the modern world makes grim sense. Who gets to know things, to fix things, to question things, is never accidental. Control over information quietly shapes what feels possible.

    That’s one reason this site exists as it does. I built my first website in 1995, back when the internet was slower, stranger, and less certain of itself. Before dopamine loops and surveillance became the default business model. This blog is deliberately quiet. No metrics, no amplification economy, no pressure to perform. Just writing when it’s ready.

    Taken together, these three quotes point toward the same instinct. Scepticism of unquestioned authority, patience with complexity, and a belief that understanding, real understanding, takes time. They gesture toward anarchism not as an identity to wear, but as a lens. A way of asking better questions about power, community, and responsibility.

    That’s the ground this blog grows on. Reflections on digital rights, climate, social justice, and everyday life in the west of Scotland, mixed in with football, watches, and naps. An attempt to be a principled citizen without forgetting to be a regular human, and a reminder that taking the slow way isn’t a failure. Sometimes it’s the only way you actually learn where you are.