Eater drinker thinker
When a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life. The neon sign at the back of a bland café bar catches my attention…what about a woman? This quote from the prolific and influential eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson results in an eye roll accompanied by involuntary swearing as it’s not the first time I’ve had an issue with his out of context and overused quotes.[1]
Besides, I am tired, exhausted even. Tired body and mind and in a slightly soporific state after two delicious glasses of lunchtime wine. I wander aimlessly around the streets in the mizzle smiling at strangers with a slight squint against the rain. I say to the man beside me in the bar that it’s ‘real wetting rain’ and we laugh but I wonder does he get my humour, I’m not sure if he’s just being polite. I know the sea that separates us plays a role in our character defining and we are just a subtle smidge different, enough to notice.
The city is a dangling carrot and I really love carrots, so although I may be tired I’m not bored which is how a middle-class English academic of the 1700s and me differ (one of many ways). Surely it’s impossible to be bored here, if anything it’s the opposite. London is about as far removed as can be from my little haven of home on the north coast, it’s an assault on all the senses bordering on addictive. From the jasmine and fig in tiny front gardens to the delicious food in the markets to the gorgeous smelling people and that hot mechanical stuffiness that can only be the London Underground. The noises and my eyes are tired, tired from so much looking.
The city has possibilities, not in spades or bucketloads but in bottomless vats, there is everything, everybody, everywhere at any time. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. I start humming ‘and the streets are paved with cheese’ from An American Tail. I hold my bag tightly, aware of the strangers around me and all the warnings of danger in the city, the electric current of metropolitan energy running through me. As I wait patiently for the green man, I watch them with their easy savvy confidence take chances and cross the road, they weave through traffic on bikes with no helmets and they don’t seem bothered at all by sirens or horns and the loud constant noise of construction.
I feel a little alien; can they tell I’m not from here? I wonder is it obvious, I adjust my posture, stand tall, striding out and pretend I know I’m walking in the right direction, though of course I’m not. I can’t get a sense of where I am without a view, those tall buildings closing in. I walk past places I know that I’ve been to, eaten in drank in. I am lost but happy. I’m an hour out of the way but since I have time I go with it, arriving dizzy from constantly looking up. I thought I had mentally prepared myself for this smack in the face from the city, this strange power it has over me but it wasn’t until I headed home that I started to unpick it.
We grew up in the most beautiful house on the most beautiful stretch of coast you could imagine. There was a hawthorn lined cow lane across a stream up to the old quarry where you could watch the lighthouses beam on the island, a secret path took us over the dunes onto the beach and our garden was full of mature trees and blackthorn as well as the orchard, rockery and vegetable patch mum and dad had painstakingly planted after clearing the chest high field of thistles. It was heaven. But inevitably there came a time, those formative years when socialising was paramount, that our location suddenly became the worst.[2] We were detached. It was, as Kevin would say, so unfair.[3]
We lived for the weekend in a way that is hard to put into words. Myself and my older brother separated by 18 months were knitted together in the same group of friends which meant we both fell into a predictable and simplified way of throwing absolutely everything at a Saturday. We poured our socialising out all at once and used it all up, wrung out by Sunday until we would start thinking of the week after and saving our lunch money, secreted away. We hoped that we wouldn’t be forgotten when we got back to our retreat of the countryside but life went on without us, we would come into school to hear the drama that had unfolded out on the streets or down by the amusements, before FOMO existed, we genuinely felt we were missing out.*
And so naturally this sense of ‘must make the most of it’ continued and still does, an inability to reign it in. Exhilarating exploitation. A weird imprinted-on-my-soul kind of need, not teenage regression but maybe naive worry so I’ll say yes to everything I can. I want to feel like I live here, though I never will and I dive into the vat of possibility headfirst searching for time sensitive adventure. It’s mainly the food. I am used to staring at these plates of deliciousness on my screen, accessible to me only virtually and I wonder is it really so different, is it better? But there is no alchemy (though there can be more swagger and ego) and I see through my fading imposter syndrome eyes that it’s the same equation as it is at home;
Excellent produce + passion + skill = delicious
But of course, there was also magic, that courgette puff pie, the oat cookie, that tomato salad, the gnocchi, wow the risotto, the courgette fritters, a sardine tart, the most silky melty aubergine and the wine, that negroni, a pleasing pint of bitter. And the people of the city, old friends and new, adding glittery sparkle. Oh but I crave my coast, the wind, the rain, submerged in the Atlantic not immersed in this sea of people. A quiet afternoon with the children and hand in hand with my one true.
I step out into the garden in glorious warm mizzle, it’s come over the top of the mountain in a low mist and tops out with an arc of a rainbow. There’s blue sky beyond. I watch two willow warbler fighting over insects in the young hawthorn hedge, feeling my feet have metaphorically come back to earth. My masquerade of walking on air has been pulled back by the gravity of actual real life happening; a bouncy castle for the four year old turning five, two events for work and a weekend trying to get a few things off the summer list done. Maybe just as exhausting as the city but minus all the extra noise and I smile as I pick the green beans in the hope of recreating that plate of beauty in Bermondsey.
Waiting For My Life
Linda Pastan
I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.
Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.
Love x
As usual, whenever I read anything you have written, I find myself lost in your vivid imagery. Today's piece was an excellent 7-minute mind holiday!
I was also reminded of something else I read earlier today: "The more we practice stepping into the moment, the more we realize how precious it is."