An evening back in May chez Joe & Laina

I had the evening to shop and cook. This was a useful and enjoyable prospect. At the weekend we were travelling to France. We wanted to save money by having a picnic on the ferry, and this was the slot I’d set aside to prepare it in. The rest of the week I was out; and so yes, I was taking pleasure in domesticity this evening.

I brought the shopping in and put it away, listing to Zane Lowe, chopping the potato into thinnish slices for Spanish omelette. Joe got home around 8.15. He’d been to the gym. I was frying the potato and onion. They were swimming in oil.

I walked to my room and saw that the door to Joe’s room, was open but the light was off: he’d gone out again.

He returned after half nine. He’d been for a jog.

‘Where do the days go, Dez?’ he asked me, coming back into the kitchen.

‘You jog them away,’ I said.

‘You cook them away,’ he replied.

I couldn’t argue with that. Although I wanted to.

slow morning

The late spring morning warming the back garden was too much to resist. But I was very conscious of time to the second as I settled onto the wooden chair.
‘It’s Slow Down London week,’ Al told me, just as I popped the last morsel of toast into my mouth.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, and regretted it immediately.
‘Well…’
I could tell that this was the opening to a potentially lengthy explanation that I just didn’t have time for at that moment. Highly aware of the irony, I said: ‘Talking of slow…’, and rose from the table to hasten off to the next part of my day, away from the garden, and slowness.

vegetable veneer

We were drawn together by an urge to grow vegetables. We organised a ‘kale-off’: kale picked because we read it was ‘an easy vegetable to grow’ and ‘reputed to improve and sweeten with frost’. However, at the garden centre our eyes were diverted elsewhere, to onion, garlic and peas – from the ‘can be sown now’ section (it was October). We planted in a hurry, wanting results straight away. Our ultimate result blossomed before our shoots sprouted. Little had we known that in sowing such seeds we were guaranteeing the end of our gardening careers.

Waste

I was at the Almeida Theatre with Kirstie watching the Sam West-directed Waste. I looked down on the couple on stage knowing full well they were not right together, that they had no spark; and yet wondering why not: they should be good together; they share the same cynicism.

They reminded me of so many couples: they should work but they don’t. She was accepting of the affair he had, resigned and wanting to show herself to be above such concerns. And yet a typically feminine desire for his affection was evident on her part. As it had been too in the other woman, the one he got pregnant. He had lusted after her. He shouldn’t be attractive and yet she longed after him while he shunned. He loses his political career, yes. But she loses her life.

autumn leaves

I walked quickly through central London feeling smug that I no longer need a map. I managed to miss Trafalgar Square and ended up on Pall Mall. I saw Queen’s guards guarding a brick-walled building which I couldn’t identify. I asked a couple of men in suits if I carried on walking I’d come to Trafalgar Square. They sent me back in the opposite direction asking if I seen a certain Italian restaurant on my travels. I hadn’t. I walked off. Then I spotted a way through to what must be The Mall, where I wanted to be. I hesitated. “Straight down to Trafalgar Square!” The men in suits called after me. I started to run back towards them to ask them about getting to the Mall. They turned their backs.
I walked through autumn leaves on The Mall. They gave me a high that reminded me of being about five.

Appropriating conversations

Adele and I sat outside a Soho bar sipping mixers and watching Wednesday night go by. We tried to define our surroundings: “It’s fun…” I began. “It’s just, everybody kind of doesn’t really seem as if they come here all the time…”.

“Like they don’t belong here,” suggested Adele.

“Yeah that’s it,” I agreed.

Well of course not. You get a few Soho stalwarts hanging on corners, running gay video stores, ignoring tourists. But apart from that, the crowd could be that of any old provincial British beered-up town. Just with a slightly funkier backdrop.

“Have you seen the film Chopper?” a guy on the table next to us was asking his companions.

“Have you?” I asked Adele.

Then I told her about how I’d been in these parts recently with Amy, who’s an appropriation artist, and about how she’d applied her artistic technique to both her food ordering (ordering what the next table ordered) and her conversation. She listened to the next table’s dinner-table anecdotes and copied the theme, which was hypnotherapy. She’d recently been hypnotised so it worked quite well.

Adele hadn’t seen Chopper and nor had I. So that didn’t work so well for me. But she enjoyed hearing about Amy and her appropriation.

spinning haikus

The sun shone on our plentiful spiders’ webs. One sliver thread joined a bush to the towel I’d hung on the washing line 20 minutes earlier. “Quick work,” said Fin.

I ducked under the line, avoiding the webs, and walked over to Alec and Briony sitting at the garden table.

“We’re writing haikus,” they told me. Of course they were.

They read me what they had so far. They’d been almost as productive as the spiders.

I remembered a thought that had been bounced around at Annekoos’s party the night before. Briony had put forward conkers fading as the epitome of disappointment. Somebody else thought snow getting messed up and melting just as sad. Briony maintained that a faded conker beats sludge in the poignancy stakes.

On the sunny spidery morning I suggested we write a haiku about these disappointments.

“A perfect snow! Melts,” said Briony.

“Sunday afternoon. Dwindles,” said Alec.

“Shiny conkers! Fade,” I added.

“Quick work,” said Fin.