I smiled, sort of.

That strained type of smile that lacks warmth and serves mostly as a barebone acknowledgment of one’s existence. The kind reluctantly – dutifully – offered to a colleague as you pass them in a hallway, or to an inattentive waiter as they present you with the card terminal.

Shit, man. It’s only Tuesday and I’m already strung out with a acute case of existential dread. “This comically large shot of caffeine will probably ease my anxiety”, suggested no sane person ever.

So it goes.

It was one of those voidful days where interactions were suddenly heavy, more consequential than reality should sensibly permit. I rolled out of bed, groggy and more serious than is typical, drenched to my neck with an intense sense of longing for something I couldn’t quite pin down.

My memory of the day is that a barista, totally neglecting the intended meaning of the phrase, uttered “swings and roundabouts”. On hearing this, I was inexplicably portaled back many years prior to a time when I helped build an epic rope swing.

For, as a young buck, I lavished an unreasonable amount of time playing in the woods uphill from my childhood home. Of primary concern was building. Dens, treehouses, forts, pathways through shrubbery, traps, intricate systems of string telephones, you name it. Nothing was off limits.

My neighbour – partner in crime – and I smuggled saws, hammers, and nails from the bountiful coffers of our parents’ sheds, never to be returned. We sourced all manner of wood from nearby pastures, much to the dismay of local farmers enraged by the inexplicable plight of the fences holding in their sheep.

One lazy, sunkissed day in midsummer, my pa generously handed over a £5 note for my elder brothers and I to buy ice cream. En route to the store, the gears turned and an industrious idea formed: we could instead buy a length of rope.

“Just think of the possibilities”, my brother pitched. “A swing, a wrestling ring, or a bungee jump… There’s no way this isn’t a good idea”. We purchased a 10m stretch of bright yellow rope that we would later unsuccessfully claim to have found at the end of the garden.

The bungee jump idea did actually materialise, causing mild injury after my eldest brother jumped several meters from a treehouse we built with the rope tied around his midsection.

The hedge that cushioned his fall was all that stood between him and a broken back. Unaware of how stupid an idea this was, he laughed it off. We all did.

Kids are risk tolerant. Certainly my siblings were. They hadn’t yet formed that crippling sense of mortality that comes with “growing up”. The same adult fear that quashes the confidence of every aspiring climber considering to trust the lone, sketchy nipple of a foothold standing between them and immortality sending a totally mid climb.

We briefly mourned our botched attempt at a bungee jump device and got back to the drawing board, constructing an idea for a truly ambitious rope swing after stumbling across “the perfect tree”. The branch that would host the swing knot was perched some 6 meters above weedless dirt, with the trunk standing atop a gradual slope so that when you projectiled yourself off, you surfed ever higher, feeling a wicked sense of flight and freedom (fear to the uninitiated) at the peak.

Intimidated by heights but eager to impress, I volunteered to climb the tree and tie the rope. Seconds later, and not half way up, my limbs were wrapped vice tight around the tree with floods of tears in my eyes, utterly petrified by the prospect of climbing any higher. After much ado about nothing, my brother stepped up to the plate, flowing delicately up the tree and tying a sturdy knot that survives to this day, twenty something years later.

In the years that followed, collective weeks were spent clinging onto that cheap ass rope as we swung and flew and flew and swung. In the same way the crushing weight of reality is swept aside during a hard climb, that swing managed the same effect. Pure, unadulterated flow-state.

All this to say. That swing being yeeted from my disk store to cache, triggered by a simple phrase said out loud, pulled me out of a would-be rut. The memory of that swing, symbolic of a time so utterly carefree, was oddly and welcomely therapeutic.

I now reside in a part of East London best characterised as a semi-leafy, residential area with low-rise, Victorian era terraces spread across a patchwork of quiet roads. There aren’t any swings to speak of. But as always, and unlike that pesky roundabout, there’s potential.