I remember a time I met an old friend from IRC in person for lunch at a Japanese place in London near the “humble objects made of clay” gallery in the Autumn. After we’d left and we were walking home I was surprised to learn he used a Mac now; Kat and I had started using Macs towards the end of the channel’s life and this man was quite strongly opposed to the whole idea. I asked if he was still using Emacs and he laughed like I’d reminded him of something we did at school, like I’d asked if he still plays hopscotch. “Sick of my config breaking,” he’d said.
Last week I recall I reported to you from my first bed in Tuscany. Some hundred thousand steps ago, all uphill. I neglected to report my experience on the aeroplane. “Is there no end to the indignities I must face?” I’d asked my reflection. “Now I see that I am to contend with nasal hairs. The blotchy red skin around my nose and forehead, and the deep caverns around the eyes that stare back at me from this aeroplane bathroom mirror…” Moments before I’d been scolded by the man in blue and tartan for merely holding a vape.
“What is that in your hand, sir?”
The “sir” always unexpected, cutting like a knife. I looked so pretty in a patterned jumpsuit and my makeup was perfect by aeroplane standards. And only minutes had passed since I’d valiantly stepped into an occupied aisle so that this gentleman could pass to the front of the plane and he had said “thank you so much” and i’d thought that we were on good terms.
“Oh! I’m just holding it.”
“You can’t use that on the plane, sir”
So many “sir”s. Rapid fire from some people. South Asian men in cafes are the most fond of it, a sort of machine-gunning tactic they take with a “sir,” at the start of every sentence and a “sir?” at the end, wrapping every question or statement in a kind of sir-shaped parenthesis. Why this is the case has its own unnatural weight that seems to compound the stress of it.
Sometimes the best moment of my day is a rotund Turkish man in a grocery shop risking a “ma’am” following a long moment of hesitation between the greeting and the honorific. Yet I’m always “sir” when I’m in trouble. And these tired red eyes are locked on themselves, with the peripheral focus on this black hair protuding from the olfactorial. Do I need a tool for this now? I tried pinching at it with my fingernails but I can’t seem to get it pinced. I’ll have to conduct the act with tweezers when we land.
At least they have Worcestershire Sauce for spicy tomato juice on board. That really puts the “British” in “British Airways”.
The week in Italy was wonderful, though steppy. So sad when we fight, everything would be okay if we could talk to each other but we can’t reach each other. At those times having holes in your personality the shape of the prongs in the other’s is not the usual comfort, in fact it is deeply sickly. But it seems to get easier over time, as we learn that we’re still there afterwards. As in all things, over time, the depths are not so deep and the time there not so long.
Shisha, taglietelle, creamy sauce, coffee, bad beds, good walks, some of the coldest days and warmest memories of my life. We went to see pulp fiction at a beautiful cinema with a stained glass ceiling and a bookshop in the middle of it. We scared ourselves silly in Lucca. Please put curtains on the windows, otherwise they become the kind that faces look in and haunt poor little animals like me. i read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message during the trip, and recommend it fervently to any readers or writers reading. We’re sober now. I’d been looking forward to enjoying a nice Tuscan red but instead we decided to give up drinking alcohol for the rest of our lives.
I remember that time I was minding my own business working in my mother’s shop, and then the boy beside me said “look at this” and showed me a video on his phone of someone chainsawing a live pig in half. I think it was a Sony Ericsson W910i.
She had a return flight to Florence, but was going over to the coast during the trip. Her flight ended up dropping her in Pisa and BA gave her a taxi to Fiorenze. I had two one ways. I drop in Florence, but I fly home from Pisa. It turned out in such a way that I brought her to LCY with all my bags in tow, then went off to Stanstead for my own flight. She dropped in Pisa, me in Florence, then we met on the Arno near the hotel. Then in Pisa she brought me to the airport, all her bags in tow and rushed back off to Fiorenze. I landed in Heathrow, then zipped off down to Gatwick to meet her as she landed.
In Pisa we stopped on the river and “it’s so nice to see Arno again. haven’t seen him since Fiorenze. he spent the morning with us, when i first got in from the plane station” and off we walked to a restaurant that turned out to be closed.
Everything in Tuscany is closed most of the time. If something appears to be open, you’d best check Apple Maps and Google Maps. If they both say “open now” then there is a 75% chance it really will be, unless it’s a Wednesday or Monday in which case the chances go down to around 10%.
It’s hard to find a restaurant that isn’t selling tagliatelle ragu but when you do and you’re confronted with powdered speck and pig’s blood and cow’s guts and chicken gizzards and do you know what carbonara is just delicious actually isn’t it or let’s go to a tratoria.
My feet. My legs. No wonder these people have never won a war. But I had a wonderful time in Italy and I’d love to go again.
The rest of my life is fine. We had dinner at Imad’s tonight. It’s bed time now, and it’s Christmas time too. Almost time to head to the butcher to pick up some sausage meat and the grocer will have parsley and rice crumb, enough for grandfather’s stuffing.