Moodboard: This Month The Mood Is Extra-Ordinary

“The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra” …

When American football coach Jimmy Johnson said that, he may have been referring to an elite athlete’s cocktail of physical and mental skills. That same quote has also been attributed to virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz, in reference to what it takes, beyond talent, to achieve mastery in any field – consistent, dedicated effort – i.e. practice. Not everyone has what it takes to be a concert pianist or a tight end (wait, isn’t there a cream for that?) but choices shape our days. So, why choose ordinary when we can experience the extra-ordinary?

Though it’s six years since my biggest fan passed away, my late mother’s ambitions for me live on in my boudoir, where I’ve amassed a collection of extraordinary clothes and shoes worthy of the life she’d mapped out for me when she packed me off to a New York theatre school, a life filled with opening nights and awards ceremonies, parties and red carpets. Far from New York is where I live now; most evenings we stay in, transported from our bóithrín’s cosy cottage via some elaborate costume* drama: Victoria, The Empress, The Tudors, Marie Antoinette … even tedious Western The Abandons features Gillian Anderson in a covetable black leather waistcoat and strict shirting. (*Note to past-life self: hire a dresser – the buttons, the corsetry, the ironing!)

“We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.” Frederick Backman

There are days when it is more challenging than others to get my good husband to take care of actual business, days when the bird feeders need to be refilled, for example; he studied Birds of Ireland: A Field Guide to learn the names of birds that visit our garden. Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Chaffinch, Great Tit, Blue Tit, Bullfinch, Jackdaw, Magpie, Crow, Collared Dove, Wood Pigeon, Dunnock, Blackbird, Sparrow, Wren …“There’s a robin follows me around; he comes ever so close. I’ll be only inches away before he’d move. Maybe someday he’ll eat from my hand.”

My Saint Francis of the Irish Midlands takes as much pleasure in mowing the back field as he does in washing the dishes, drying, then putting them away, the drying a quotidian task I can’t understand – won’t the dishes dry themselves?

While himself seems content to journey back and forth between the kitchen, shed and workshop, I long to ruin my heels strolling along the cobbled streets of Rome, paved with sampietrini (cubes of black basalt), a “murder picture” for Manolos (a Belfast saying favoured by my wee mum-in-law to describe anything untenable). While I indulge in online browsing for what outfit I might wear to cocktails, if invited (a Tom Ford-era Gucci silk shirt in royal purple unbuttoned to the navel paired with skinny cigarette pants, vertiginous stilettos cuffed to slim ankles?) or doomscroll the news, obsessing over the murder picture that is American politics, my Ulsterman looks up instead of looking down: Song Thrush, Mute Swan, Goshawk, Grey Heron! Turns out I’m married to amazement.

Poet Mary (“May my prayers be made out of grass”) Oliver divined the extra-ordinary in the ordinary: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” In February, why not renew your vows to live an extra-ordinarily ordinary life, looking up instead of down? Just don’t forget to dress for the occasion. @susanzelouf