My Word | Big thanks for small mercies

A tardi what?

Tardigrades are tiny animals one millimetre across that can live in the vacuum of space. They move about eating stuff and create nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous, which attract microscopic plant and animal life and help build the food chain so life can exist. There, I bet you’re glad you started reading this column now. Your life is so much richer having learnt that. Rely on me — I’ll keep doing the hard work for you all.

Anyway, the smallest thing making the biggest difference in my life at the moment is a little gnawing machine called Desmond.

Without Desmond I would not be writing this at 5.30am wearing a hat, scarf and jacket in the dark on my verandah. I have seen the sun rise every morning for a month and I have learnt it is slow, noisy, pinky-purple and comforting. The world begins afresh every day. Despite the ugliness and stupidity of yesterday we get another chance to make things right.

Our little brown-white tardigrade has two names — he’s called Dezzy when he looks cute and lies squirming on his back asking for a tummy rub. Then he’s called Desmond when he starts chewing your phone charger cable, which is quite often.

Desmond has also made a difference to the way I eat. I now eat my TV dinner at a table not on my lap on the couch. It’s so much cleaner that way and I get more on my fork and into my mouth.

Desmond has also taught me to put my shoes and socks into the wardrobe and not leave them on the bedroom floor. I have also learned to put books back into the bookcase and place a large chew-proof plastic container packed with other heavy books in front of it.

Little things can produce big learning curves.

The biggest difference produced by a little thing I have ever witnessed was in North Wales during a visit to my nephew Rob last year. As a child, Rob was sullen and mostly silent. He enjoyed doing things outdoors on his own like climbing mountains and canoeing down wild rivers. He grew up to be a silent man who made his mother worry about his loneliness and mental health. I hadn’t seen him for 20 years until my visit last November. He now owned an outdoor adventure holiday park on the edge of Snowdonia. I was a little apprehensive about visiting this sullen fifty-something man in the wilds of Welsh-speaking Wales. We didn’t have much in common apart from his mother, my sister. What would we talk about?

I needn’t have worried. When I arrived with a troupe of children, grandchildren and the Chief Gardener he greeted us at his stone cottage with a lusty handshake, a beaming smile and he introduced us to Timmy.

Timmy was a wiry scrap on a string who came into Rob’s life about two years ago as a scrawny half-starved little thing who appeared one day from nowhere during a lonely morning walk around his property. Rob said he hadn’t been without him since. The little dog now has a harness and his own cage in the back of Rob’s old Land Rover, and he goes everywhere with his boss. Not only has Timmy’s life changed, so has Rob’s. I couldn’t stop him talking. He told us all about the history and geology of North Wales, about the suburban lives of his siblings and the state of the world, and about Timmy’s fussy eating habits.

On a walk to the top of a nearby hill, our family group trudged up a slippery mountain track a hundred metres or so behind Rob and Timmy as they powered ahead into the silvery late afternoon light.

When we caught up, we found them sitting on a stone bench overlooking a valley of fading green and gold as the sky dropped into an iron-dark lake about a kilometre below us.

Timmy sat at Rob’s feet, nose-twitching and alert. While the others chatted and took photos, I asked Rob if he thought Timmy knew how lucky he was.

“Oh, he knows. He thanks me every day,” Rob said, tickling Timmy’s ear.

I wondered if Rob, in all his remote mountain maleness, was doing some thanking for small mercies too.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.