It is easy to resign yourself to hopelessness at the best of times, I have realised of late. Yesterday was one of those days -I had graciously swapped a shift with someone at work & thus split my weekend, finding myself thoroughly confused at my 7:25 alarm sounding on Saturday morning. That sense of disorientation & ineptness that started my day turned out to have set the tone as I was dealt a particularly generous handful of rude customers & had a hectic afternoon that was very much at odds with the otherwise blissful tone of my lunch hours amongst sun worshippers on Hampstead Heath. Luckily, it was home to a mug of green tea with honey & 'The Thick of It' reruns with Andrew that managed to rescue me from the despair that threatened.
Making the best of a bad situation is a valuable lesson & one that has been reinforced today as the two of us had decided to stay home so my conscientious student could get on with essay writing. Instead of lamenting our limited appreciation of the sunny skies outside, we propped ourselves up by our bedroom windows & read until three o'clock - I finished reading the latest 'Granta' issue all about Japan cover to cover (I've never bought it before but now suspect that I've been missing out!) & particularly enjoyed the contributions from Rebecca Solnit & Hiromi Kawakami, the latter of which also has a novel out from Portobello Books, 'Strange Weather in Tokyo', that I am really very excited to read soon.
At three o'clock I set about making lunch for the two of us, an asparagus tart from a recipe I found on the 'Cellardoor Magazine' blog, chopping vegetables, rolling out pastry & grating (a lot of) Gruyere cheese. Reading some more of the biography of Hemingway & Fitzgerald I'm 150 pages through while the tart was in the oven, the two of us eventually tucked in with some rocket & balsamic vinegar on the side, both feeling very full & satisfied afterward.
As it happens, perhaps we are both sated from our day off on Friday when we picnicked by the Serpentine in Hyde Park for the afternoon, my having a fair few (frighteningly swollen) insect bites to the remember the meadow-y expanse of Kensington Park Gardens by. We were both certainly grateful for a more restful couple of days this weekend after two consecutive dinners out the previous weekend, the latter with my Dad in Archway, the former at mine & Andrew's friend Jonathan's house down the road from us in Hackney. I always enjoy going round to Jonathan's house as it reminds me of home back with my Mum - a house full of books & pictures with wooden shutters on the windows, rugs strewn over armchairs, back issues of 'The New Yorker' precariously stacked atop wicker tables. Oh & his noisy British Blue cat, Marco, whom I can ordinarily coax into affection within half an hour of arrival. The gentleman himself is a wonderful host as well as vegetarian cook - dishing up asparagus in butter with walnut bread to start followed by a lovely fennel bake, finished with cheese & biscuits. We stayed until two o'clock drinking wine & talking.
I have been trying to write of late but it has not been easy -I figure that I am tired or surrounded by too stuffy an atmosphere in which to feel creative, manifested in the pretty pink & white carnations that I had to bin this morning, exposed to too much sunshine & dried out to the point of being percussive. I have been dreaming a lot of Cornwall lately where Andrew & I spent a blissful week last summer, but a moment standing in the sunshine in bare feet on the boards of our little garden, surrounded by sodden armchairs, will have to suffice for now. Andrew bought me the latest issue of 'Oh Comely' yesterday by way of inspiration & I hope that it will be enough to get me through the week that starts all over again tomorrow along with the memory of the sound of the sea washing to shore.
Have you been able to enjoy the sunshine lately?
Speak soon - O.
No comments:
Post a Comment