The pan on the hob

You get home at half past six. You've been thinking about the evening in the car, and the thought was mostly about what still needs doing. You open the front door, walk into the kitchen, and see the pan on the hob. The one from breakfast, with the porridge dried onto it. Your partner has been home for an hour.

You say something. Not much. "The pan's still there." Or you don't say anything and pick it up with a sound that says it for you. Your partner says, "Yes, I was going to do it." There's a pause, and then they say, to nobody, "You're welcome for the table." You look at the table. It's been cleared, wiped, and laid for two. The post has been opened and sorted. The school bag is by the door with tomorrow's kit in it. You hadn't seen any of that. You'd seen the pan.

This is an invented household, but I think the shape of it will be familiar. It doesn't only happen at home. At work you read the quarterly report your colleague spent three days on, and your first sentence is that the total on page four doesn't match page nine. You're right. It doesn't. The other forty pages are good and you haven't mentioned them, because there was nothing to mention. Your daughter shows you her maths homework, twenty questions, and your eye goes to the two with a cross. You point at them. She puts the book away.

None of these are outbursts. You're not shouting and you're not unkind. You'd say, if asked, that you're paying attention, and you are. It's just that the attention only produces a remark in one direction. When something's wrong you notice it, and often you say it. When something's fine you don't notice it, or you notice it as an absence, and there's nothing to say about an absence. Over a day, the people around you hear the remarks that got made. They don't hear the ones that didn't, because there weren't any.

Some words, so we can talk about this without going round the houses. I'll call the running check for what's wrong the scan. It runs on its own, it's fast, and it's usually accurate. What it produces I'll call the fault list. The things that are working, which is most things, I'll call the fine, or what's fine. The difference between the two is that a fault sends a signal and the fine doesn't. The pan announces itself. The cleared table doesn't. What the people around you hear, which is the fault list read aloud, I'll call the commentary. And what this book is asking you to add I'll call the thanks, meaning something said to the person, at the time, about the specific thing that's fine.

Before you go on, try one thing. Pick a day, tomorrow if you can, and count. Every time you remark on something that's wrong, out loud or by a look, add one to the first column. Every time you remark on something that's fine, add one to the second. Don't try to change anything. Just count. Most people who do this are surprised by the first column and can't remember the second, and that gap is what the rest of the book is about.