Sunday ramble

I have 45 minutes while the haggis boils.

I had planned to see a show today - Simon Callow reading Dickens. But I am staying home instead, sinking blissfully into my introversion like it was a warm bath. This morning I finished reading Lovely Bones. Some books you don’t want to end - you get a sense that the characters have more ahead of them that you need to be a part of. I feel that way about Tom Robbins’ novels. With other books it is a relief when you reach the end, because you are glad be experiencing some kind of closure. Lovely Bones was like this. I liked how Mr Harvey’s isolation keep the reader from despising him completely. In the end we don’t really care about him anymore - he is literally cast aside.

(You wouldn’t know, but this letter was interrupted by two wasps that flew in and swept through the living room and kitchen like fighter jets trying to stay below the radar of the enemy. My fear of bees and wasps has not diminished over the years. Up I leapt, almost tossing Stephen Fry (my laptop still goes by no other name) onto the coffee table while chanting “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I grabbed a green tea towel and stood hovering in the doorway of the hall, periodically venturing out to lunge at one of them. Eventually they both flew out the window, which I hastily closed. Once again, I am calm).

There is one week left for our show. I will be glad when it is finished. I work all day but I struggle with making myself go home and just STOP. I cannot make myself leave until I feel settled that certain things are in order. Not everything, because that is not possible. But my lists must be made and I have to know what might be looming for me the next day. My plans aren’t real ones - they are more like Jackson Pollock paintings - ideas and maybes splattered on sticky notes and plastered to my computer monitor. But the process relaxes me, which is what I need before I can peel off my manic state and close the door.

The season is changing and MY season is moving ever closer. The peaches are finished - buy them now and you will find them grainy and dry. Now is the time of the plum. They are heaped on the shelves, their skins tight around flesh that itself bulges away from the stone. So along with the haggis lasagne I am making as a form of payment for Graham’s computer wizardry, I am making for myself a plum, hazelnut and chocolate cake. Heady, sticky, moist and just a tingling bit of bitter…pleasure.

While walking to the Sainsbury’s (I spell out the name of the grocery store so that Craig can relive the experience of perusing the aisles) I noticed there is a new butchers down the street. Various African flags are painted over the freshly painted, blindingly white doorway. My chance to learn to make curried goat has now arrived.

That’s my news. I'm going to make a cup of tea.
Song in my head: Drive Like I Never Been Hurt - Ry Cooder