Well, here it is the end of August, and I have to constantly remind my brain that technically it is still summer and Christmas is not right around the corner. Nuts to this. We moved all the way out here to a fucking rural idyll and what do we get? We get to stay inside all summer and look at drizzle. I could have done that in London, from inside a pub.
BUT, we did have a properly nice and sunny August bank holiday. Two of the Kilburn Contingent came up to celebrate it with us, and we had a lovely barbeque and some nice wine and only a modest amount of cocaine. (Coke from Kilburn is generally comprised mostly of Drano and ground-up laxatives, so it hardly counts anyway.) It was all relatively civilised, and our guests even got up before us the next morning and tidied up the party detritus, bless them. Big love all around.
Otherwise I’ve been reading a lot of Iris Murdoch and eating a lot of noodles. Iris Murdoch is so weirdly wonderful. I’ve read most of her novels, and despite the sameness of a lot of them (the strange loner/mystic character, themes of transcendence and salvation, recurring water imagery, and everyone always rushing around in great inexplicable paroxysms of emotion delivering impassioned speeches) they never get boring. I especially love how she describes in meticulous detail what every character is wearing in every scene, like some sort of surreal fictitious society page.
Noodles, however, do get boring. SiC’s approach to shopping is to figure out what we like to eat and then buy that every time we shop, whether or not we’ve actually eaten what we bought the last time. (I don’t have an approach to shopping because I don’t like shopping.) This leads to a lot of me standing in front of the fridge and shouting “You are NOT to buy any more frozen prawns until further notice!” while trying to cram yet another bag of them into the bulging freezer. Our latest stockpile is stir-fry noodles. We have enough stir-fry noodles to feed a small Asian army. Now don’t get me wrong: I love me some noodles. I would even go so far as to say I love noodles more than the average person. I am fully on the side of a high-school classmate of mine who once said, “I would hike to the top of Mount Fuji if there was a noodle hut at the top.” I can’t immediately recall the context of this quote, but I agree with the sentiment. However, at this point I am noodled out. If I have to eat another combination of lemongrass, chilli, ginger, garlic and noodles I will expire. Death by noodles.
May your weekends be sunny and noodle-free if that is what you so wish, and if you’re looking for a book recommendation, try The Nice and the Good by Dame Murdoch.