A rainy-day return to the office. Low light, lowered expectations; today’s goal to survive. Grateful for a certain rainy-day coziness and the quiet required to work hard and long to meet deadlines.

Just coincidentally, I was reading a passage from  Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus as I disembarked in D.C. “Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed … They were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. … “

Ah, I’m feeling better already. I have a store-bought cotton nightgown. I have an electric tea kettle. I pay for gas by the month not the morning.

Hazzard continues: “It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun.”

Oh dear. Have I ever thought like this? Of course. Poor me, back from a lovely vacation to my comfortable office! Poor me, paid to write and edit!

Hazzard has put it in perspective: It could be worse, and it has been.

“Poor me” better get busy.