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.
