The first afternoon in Amsterdam –

and I know it sounds like I am never in London anymore, but first of all, I am, I am working, and no one wants to hear about working, and second of all, you try dealing with this summer in London, meltingly hot one day and then frigid and grey all over like doom the next, and see if you don’t run away to the continent as soon as you can –

The first afternoon in Amsterdam, we walked up Zeedijk, me and Olive, past the Chinese bakeries and Japanese restaurants, to the window that said Rock ’n Roll. It was lovely in there, all vintage wallpaper and laminate tables, and music that sounded like the sun coming through the leaves. A sign tied to the wall with baker’s string read Pompoen soep, but it was warm out, and I wasn’t really feeling like soup, pumpkin or otherwise. Behind the counter (and behind the cute counter girl), the menu was white letters pressed into black display boards. Sandwiches, it read, and then below that, Dutch farm cheese, Dutch goat cheese, Peanut butter, Jam. Soup of the day, it read, is veggie and homemade. There was more. Apple pie was in letters twice as big as the other sweets. I went for an unpronounceable. “What,” I said, “is the thing that looks like it is pronounced ooits-my-ter?” A furrow wrinkled the brow of the cute counter girl behind the counter. “The?” she said. “Um, there,” I said, “above the omelette.” She turned. “Uitsmijter,” she said, then added: “It is eggs, um, boiled?” “I’ll take it!” I said, and then turned to Olive and said, as if my saying it would make it so, “Can’t be bad, right?”

We sat upstairs, up the narrow wooden staircase, with the vintage breadboxes and old-timey milk jugs for sale. I could smell cheese on the grill. We were very hungry.



We’d arrived at Schiphol just an hour or so before, and taken the train to Centraal. “When we get out of the train station,” Olive had said, “all sorts of people are going to come up to you and offer to sell you drugs.” “Just so you know,” he’d said. “Just so you know,” I’d said, “there is something about me, I don’t know what it is, but there is something about me that makes no one, ever, in any country, offer me any kind of drug.” I may have drawn a square in the air around my head. It is true: Henny used to say, about Washington Square Park in New York, that she couldn’t walk through it without someone trying to sell her a dime bag of weed. “They will come up to you,” she had said, “and they’ll be like, ‘Hash? Hash?’” In Washington Square Park they did not come up to me, not once in six years, and at Centraal station in Amsterdam, we walked free and clear through the station and to the street without being approached by a single dealer. Were it that dealers were calories!

We’d taken Zeedijk to the hotel, our rolly bags clattering on the small, uneven street, and I am sure I was open-mouthed and wide-eyed in wonder. The names of the cafés were painted on their windows in rapturous, curling letters. The buildings were narrow, and a comic shop keeled so far to the right that I wondered how the door still opened in its frame. A hidden garden revealed an outdoor café. The buildings parted to reveal a canal, and bridges beyond it, and the city even farther beyond.



Amsterdam after the uitsmijter – it turned out these were three fried eggs, over easy, slumping languidly upon thick slices of dark, grainy bread – was made for walks in the sun. We went south into the Grachtengordel neighbourhood and strolled clockwise around the city’s spider’s web of canals. Here, the streets are lined with handsome façades of quiet, gabled houses, each stone stoop inviting a sit-down. Through the thick glass windowpanes, I saw: a sailboat. A buddha. A set of painted accordion screens. We crossed gentle arcs of bridges curving over Herengracht and Keizersgracht and, further on, Prinsengracht (the Gentlemen’s, Emperor’s and Princes’ canals, though where the ladies gathered and preened remains unclear); we wandered in the cobblestone streets, skipping out of the way when the bicycle bells rang behind us.



We would see, later, mothers and fathers cycling through the city on their bakfietsen – so-called box bikes that include a wheelbarrow-like wooden crate attached to the front of the bicycle, just right for carrying a small child or two, bags of groceries, a dog with its tongue out. “I want,” I would say later, and I knew this was an inachievable goal, “to raise a Dutch child.” I think, now, that it may perhaps just be easier to get a bakfiets.



Later, too, swept up in the crowds along Prinsengracht the day of the Gay Pride parade, we would discover Foodware, a poky and charming deli with a spread of takeaway treats. We would have eaten in, ordered from the open kitchen in the back and sat at the small tables covered in green-ginghamed oilcloth, but outside the sun would be sparkling off the water, and we would hear the parties on the boats already beginning. We would get a small container of gorgonzola and artichoke pasta to go, and then I would see, before turning away, out of the corner of my eye, a chocolatey square of chocolate brownie sprinkled with chopped pistachios. “Is that brownie nice,” I would say, “or is it amazing?” and the storeboy would look me in the eye and say, “It is amazing.” “One, please!” I would say, hearing the cha-ching! echo in my mind, and he would slide it into a white box with a knowing smile.



So much would happen later. Later, Saturday later, we would wake up in our giant bed and open the windows at our sweet hotel to the garden below, where the cat would be exploring the dirt and the flowers. We would go downstairs to breakfast, where Rachel laughed ha-ha-ha and Pepijn was a quiet man who made the most amazing scrambled eggs. I would help myself to a spoon of Pepijn’s homemade orange marmalade, then another, then, giving in, a great, uncompromising glob next to a croissant hot out of the oven. “This marmalade is just great,” I would say, and Rachel would tell me that it was a Delia Smith recipe. “You can make it at home yourself,” she would say, “but be ready for a very sticky kitchen afterwards!” “Ha-ha-ha,” she would say, and we would fall a little bit in love with her hotel, and her breakfast, and her good life running a small hotel and sitting outside in the middle of the day to read on a small bench by the Kloveniersburgwal.

Later even, Sunday breakfast later, Rachel would say, as I tipped the box of Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate sprinkles on a slice of cornbread toast, “Aha, you have discovered the hagelslag.” The guttural gs would make the chocolate rice even more delectable, more succulent and wonderful, than it already was. “Yup,” I would say, then, and I would smile with my lips together because I would feel the chocolate rice stuck in my teeth.



There are stories in later. Later, we would sit at the bar at ’t Smalle, while the bartender man explained with his hands that smalle was small like this – his palms facing together to measure a narrow space – and that klein was small like this – his palm facing down to measure something short. Later, as well, in the Jordaan, we would meander through the market stalls at the Sunday Boerenmarkt, where there would be bread and oils and honeys on cloth-covered tables, where there would be great wooden crates of pumpkins and greeny-red apples, where there would be clear-glassed bottles of freshly squeezed juices in shades from orange to strawberry pink to deep, beety crimson. Later, always later, we would enter the white-walled space of the Foam museum, where Malick Sidibé’s serious-faced Malians, proud and young and expectant, would look into posterity from 1960s and ’70s Bamako. Downstairs in the foam café, we would sit down to espressos and, impulsively, on a blue-and-white plate, a slice of dark chocolate tart, its dark chocolate heart melting in our mouths.



Later, as the boys and girls rode by, one perched effortlessly on the back of another’s bicycle, so perfectly postured, so damn bilingual, we would explore De Negen Straatjes, the Nine Streets, with their cafés and pancake restaurants and little thing shops full of little things. We would head, later, for the Bloemenmarkt – “a floating flower market”, the guides would read, and our faces would fall at the sight of a line of samey shops selling tulip bulbs and flower pots on the bank of the Singel. “What is this?” I would say, and I would turn to Olive, frowning. “This is not floating,” I would say, as we fought our way through the tourists, and Olive would point out that the backs of the flower shops hung over the canal. “If a dog hovered his ass over the water to poo in the canal,” I would say, “would he be floating?” “No,” I would say, “he would not,” and we would exit stage left down Leidsestraat.



One rainy night, later, we would cross another bridge, in another part of town, to dine at De Kas. The dining room would be a light-filled space, a wide conservatory with white-clothed tables and clinking glasses of wine. We would order champagne, because, come on, and we would have to fight ourselves to not devour the crusty bread and the plump olives before the meal was served. We would eat soft scallops and flower petals and a small stuffed squash; we would eat fried courgette flowers and a sweet focaccia topped with bitey rocket and slivers of salty Parma ham. There would be a berry ice cream for dessert, and the macchiatos would come with little madeleines. The night would darken around us, in this elegant greenhouse southeast of the city centre, and before we left we would take a quick tour among the basil plants, the baby courgettes, the heritage tomatoes sleeping.



Quite some time later, before we packed our bags and jiggered and rattled them back up the cobblestones of Zeedijk to Centraal station, we would walk up seedy Warmoesstraat in the red-light district, where the neon flashed on either side of the rain-slicked street and the shops displayed pleather and videos. We would turn in through the high doorway at De Bakkerswinkel and breathe in deep, for the smell of freshly baked bread would be a comfort on a wet day. We would not have time to stay for lunch with the chattering crowds, but we would come away from the take-away counter with a jar of blackberry jam, a thick slice of cinnamony apple tart and half a heavy loaf of multigrain bread, still warm from the oven.



Truly this was all to come, but for now we had uitsmijter and omelettes in our bellies, and the city was unfurling, canal by shimmering canal, bridge by arcing bridge, in front of us. We would eventually return, that first day, our feet tingling, for a late-afternoon nap in our crisp-sheeted bed up the narrow, vertiginous stairway, but that would be, you know – later.

We were up by half past eight, the light streaming in through Maud’s floor-to-ceiling glass-paned doors, and the figs in the fig tree out back dangling off the top branches like fat little packets of promise.



Sunday in the Seventh arrondissement sounded of stone buildings and silent, slate-grey eaves. We hung a left out the building and a right down the block, then followed the train tracks to the market at La Motte-Picquet Grenelle. Here, the steam rose off wide paella pans bubbling and delicious and the cheese men stood proud behind their displays. We bought a chocolate croissant and a raisin snail from a little old lady, then stood back to consider our strategy over second breakfast. How do you approach an unknown market? Do you shop from the stall with the longest queue? Do you patronise the one where the housewives gather? “Look,” Laureen said, “all the old people are shopping at that stall.” Wrinkled hands sorted through the tumbling mountain of deep-red cherries, placed blushing apricots one by one in brown paper bags. “Old people,” she said, “are thrifty.” There is a phrase I have learnt from the English, and it is this: Fair enough. I cradled a melon in the crook of my arm while Laureen scooped cherries into a thin paper bag. We reached for a bunch of radishes smart like a huddle of pink-clad choirboys.



Sunday, and Paris was ours for the taking. We took the métro to the Marais, to its tightly packed buildings leaning into medieval streets. “I am keeping an eye out for David Sedaris,” Laureen said, while we sat over coffees outside at La Perle, so I kept an eye out, too, but in the back of my mind I was nervous we would see him and I would have nothing to say. “Hello, David Sedaris,” we would say – and this would’ve been after we’d pointed and silently screamed – but then where would we go from there? “Nice job, David Sedaris”? “Nashville loves you, David Sedaris”? If I were Maeve, I suppose I could have said, as she did to Olive, when she was but three and a bit, “You are the funniest man in all of funny town.” Then, like Maeve, I could have poked him. “Poke.”

I sipped my espresso and we kept our eyes out. We saw a man dressed as if he were headed for a jungle safari, and we saw a woman carrying a small dog on top of her handbag, but we did not see David Sedaris. We went into Mariage Frères instead, to sniff in giant canisters of tea. “Do you speak English?” Laureen asked the store assistant behind the handsome wood counter. He was dressed in a linen suit and a smile. “Bien sûr,” he said, and when we told Marc this the next day, at lunch in Place Sainte-Marthe, he said, “Instead of saying ‘Of course’ he said ‘Bien sûr‘?” Mais oui.

On rue des Rosiers the crowd swelled around the service windows of the falafel joints as if there’d been a run on chickpeas while we’d had our noses buried in Darjeeling. A fast-speaking man with a notepad in his palm strode up and down through the masses in front of L’As du Fallafel, and he didn’t ask if we wanted a falafel sandwich so much as assumed it. “Falafel. Falafel.” he said. “Five euro. Falafel.” “I have never seen this place this mad before,” I said to Laureen, “and I don’t know who this man is,” but we handed over our five euros each all the same and hoped for the best. The man did not bolt with our ten euros; the best, not ten minutes later despite the length of the queue, tasted of hot, crumbly falafel, of soft, smoky eggplant, of hummous and harissa. We sat in the playground down the street, half in the shade and half out of it. It was Sunday. We were in Paris. I had on a skirt designed for summer.



Like a certain kind of girls gone wild, then, we took off through the city, crossing the sparkling river and heading for the Sixth. In Ladurée, we shrieked and gasped in the tiny chocolate boutique tucked away in the back. Pastel-coloured chocolate mice lined up next to chocolate-dipped langues de chat. The glass-topped display cases by the side held bottles of almond-scented bath gel topped with macaron-shaped tops. A small black umbrella with a curved wooden handle, an elegant thing, hung from a shelf; the shop boy obligingly opened it to reveal a gay macaron print. “Oh my god,” we said, and “Oh my god,” and “Look, oh my god.” “If Olive were here,” Laureen said, “he would walk out right now.” “It is true,” I said. “He would walk out and stand right there, just there, in front of the display window, and smoke a cigarette, so we could see his contempt through the glass.”

We did not have all day to pal it up with the Ladurée staff, however: we have places to be! People to see! A party for tea! We quick-stepped across boulevard Saint-Germain to bathe in the butter- and sugar-scented air at Gérard Mulot. Is this what butter- and sugar-scented air does to one?, I ask, for we were to walk away with a kilo of peach and almond tart in a pink paper bag. “S’il vous plaît,” I had said to the po-faced shopgirl, and I will pause here to say that except for the beaming man who once gave me a free macaron when I stopped in for a baguette, the store assistants at Mulot have consistently proven themselves a reluctant lot. This is even though they work in butter and sugar, and in front of the shiny-, almost mirror-surfaced chocolate delight called the Coeur Frivole.

“S’il vous plaît,” I had said, “could you show us what a kilo of tart looks like?” I had said this in French, because we were in France, and it was only polite. She had responded with limp karate-chop gestures over the glossy-peached pay-by-weight sheet of tart. “From there all the way to there?” I had said, then, because, even to one who will admit she is no good with the perception of dimensions, the girl’s estimate seemed surprisingly large. “Oui,” she had said, and had begun to turn away, already having lost interest in us. “Then we will take just half a kilo,” I had said, and this is when she slid the tart out from the display case and called to her colleague. “Jérome,” she said, or “Loïc,” I forget, “if I want to cut half a kilo – ?” as if she had not just indicated to us the implications of a full kilo, as if the hand motions she had made before had been but robot dancing moves to accompany the Daft Punk music in her head. Jérome-Loïc adjusted her knife so that it was poised on the edge of a sliver. “Wait,” I said, “wait, wait,” for a sliver does not a tea party make, plus I remembered the expanse she had marked out before, as if it had been parcels of verdant land I had flown over in a single-engine Cessna. “We’d like more,” I said, “like,” – and here with my hand I pushed the air so that she would move her knife over. “A bit more,” I said, my hand helplessly pushing at the air, then, finally, “OK.” She put the portion on the scale and handed me the receipt showing that we were purchasing, almost to the gram, a proud kilo of tart.

“So,” I said to Laureen later, as we carried the pink paper bag out of the store, “So,” I said, because what else was there to say, “this is what a kilo of tart looks like.”



It was all for the best, really, for after we got it back to Maud’s;

after we jiggled the key in the lock and realised, us on the outside and Maud on the inside, that the lock wouldn’t budge;

after Jeanne came by with her lemon biscuits on a tray under a kitchen towel, with her smiling eyes and her funny hair, and jiggled the key in the lock some more;

after we whammed the door and cajoled it, after Maud slid us oil-smeared keys under the door to try again and again, after she called the locksmith, then, upon Jeanne’s suggestion, made some tea;

after the locksmith showed up and put a hole in the door and let us – hot, thirsty, thumbs sore – in;

after we got back to Maud’s, you see, it was very nice to have a hearty slab of peach tart in the garden, on a round table hidden under bowls of apricots and cherries, under jams and sweet pastes, under a large teapot, under plates of Maud’s home-made fruitcake and cheese loaves, under the tray of Jeanne’s lemon biscuits, a motley heap of irregular shapes ranging in shades from beige to dark brown –

“What flavour are these?” I’d asked, pointing to the light-coloured ones, and she’d said, “Lemon.” “And these?” I’d asked, pointing to the others. “Lemon.” “Ah,” I said. “Yes,” she said. Later, she offered one to the locksmith. “Did you make this biscuit?” he said, having taken a bite. “Yes,” she said, “do you like it?” “No,” he said, and then he said, “I think it is best I am honest with you.”

– under all this, and a small dish of shortbread biscuits infused with tea and hibiscus flowers. The Cantal held court.

Hector came, and Bastien, and Michelle and Gab and Schmio, and we nattered and chortled till the neighbours shushed us, till dusk fell, and till the sky was dark and the lights came on in the flats upstairs. We drank tea till ten, maybe, or eleven, I remember only that it was quiet by then, and Schmio and I spoke softly so as not to wake the trees. It was too dark to see the figs by then, but they were there, still, and would be revealed in the morning light.

We drank mojitos downstairs at Freud, at the one table that always clears in time. “Let’s be young,” Henny had said, and we had whooped and sauntered over to Freud. So slouchy a bar, Freud, so scruffy, and with such sweet, sweet mojitos. We nursed our drinks as long as we could, and then we went up the stairs and out into the night, chilly now, and turned to go our separate ways.



The next morning I was on the train to Paris with Laureen. “We need something for these coffees,” she said – we had paper cups of coffee on the pull-down tables in front of us, and a couple of back issues of Gourmet – and reached into her silver tote for a bag of Tunnock’s caramel wafer biscuits. Like magpies, we’d been drawn to the shiny red-and-gold foil wrapper when we saw it on the shelf in the store. “Still original size,” the packet read on its front, and, on the side, with some pride, “More than 4,000,000 of these biscuits are made and sold each week.” “Well,” Laureen said, unwrapping with little ceremony, “four million people can’t be wrong.”

Truly, they cannot. Inside the red and gold foil wrapper – I smoothed it out on the table afterwards, of course, and tucked it away for safekeeping – was a biscuit crisp and chewy, just this side of sweet, and infused, if you are me, with the slightest memory of those red-foil-wrapped, air-filled chocolate wafer biscuits you found at every child’s birthday party in 1980s Singapore.

(Wafers in the tropics, eh? They inevitably came to their sad and flaccid end: Sometimes you’d bite into a biscuit and, instead of crunching through the wafer layers, discover a consistency rather like sinking your teeth into chocolate-covered cotton wool. “Chao hong,” we’d say – an untranslatable Hokkien phrase meaning, essentially, that the humidity'd won again – but we’d just as likely go on to eat the whole thing, it was strangely addictive that way.)



We unwrapped the red-and-gold foil wrappers, Laureen and me, and we popped our ears when the train went so fast our bodies couldn’t keep up, and, almost two o’clock at Gare du Nord, when we saw Maud in the crowd at the end of the platform, it was like unwrapping the best red-and-gold foil wrapper of all. “Ouais!” I said, because I couldn’t help it, and the woman in front of me turned to look. Maud had on a vintage seersucker suit the colour of candy; a baguette, we were to find, was perched on the dashboard in her little Peugeot. We tumbled into the car and whizzed through the city: we jerked the wrong way down a one-way street and hung a wide left, then vroomed along the quais of the Seine behind a Roman Holiday girl in a pink helmet and billowing sky-blue skirt riding pillion on a scooter.

Paris in the summer is a party with iced cakes and cream desserts. The sun catches, twinkles in shiny confetti.



We bought a lot of cheese that first day, from the nice ladies at Quatrehommes, including a stinky Livarot circled in rush leaves for me and a sultry double-cream Brie for Laureen. The tray marked “Fontainebleau” was empty – there was but a doily on the silver tray – but Maud got the lady to make us some for the road. “It is like eating clouds!” Maud said, by way of introduction, and we watched the cheesewoman carefully pipe molehills of cream into small Styrofoam cups and wrap them up in gauze. These we carried home – well, Maud carried them home, wearing her candy-coloured seersucker suit, for I was carrying a couple of kilos of cheese – to eat in the garden out back. We dribbled redcurrant jam onto white, we scooped up teaspoonfuls of cream to eat with thick bitter-orange jelly. I don’t know if it was like eating clouds, but it sure was like – exactly like – eating cream. Lots of cream. We made tea in an Aladdin teapot. We ate – there is no way around it – cream by the spoonful. (Where is the book titled French Women Eat Cream, I ask you.) In an hour and a half dinner would be on the table.



We met Hector at Le Pré Verre, later, where we scored seats on the banquette. The doors were open to the evening. “Maud is looking for a parking space,” we said. “She was going to park in a loading zone,” we reported, nibbling on olives, “but we told her her car might not still be there when we came out.” Hector gave us a look in which disdain mingled openly – flirted, even – with pity. “It is Saturday night,” he said. “I have parked straddling a loading zone and a pedestrian crossing.” “Well,” I said, and I stabbed another olive with a toothpick while Maud circled the neighbourhood outside, “that will teach her to listen to the non-Parisians.”

It was nearing midnight by the time we headed home, Maud having pulled out of her loading-zone parking spot and trying, now, not to run the yellow lights. I was in shotgun and Laureen was in the back; the chocolate truffade in our bellies was settling in for the night. Traditionally an Auvergnat speciality of potatoes and cheese, the truffade had been reinvented, this night, in dense slabs of dark chocolate. We’d eaten it dipped in a pool of sesame-tinged milk. We’d eaten it with a molasses ice cream the taste of the exotic. It was sweet and rich and lickable all at once, the kind of thing served on small, gold-edged plates at an outdoor table under a chandelier of diamonds and lit candles hung from the trees. We’d alternated with spoons of a sweet-tart rhubarb compote, and then we’d returned, inexorably drawn, to the truffade. My brain was turning into truffade. Left brain, right brain: truffade, truffade.



It was nearing midnight, and we were driving westward through the city, to the Eiffel Tower blue against the night. We went by it once, then twice, and when, at midnight exactly, it began to twinkle, we yelled (“Oh my god!”) and then fell silent before the wonder. “This,” I said, unsilent, “is just great.” The Eiffel Tower was steel made delicate like lace, I traced the curve of its arch in my mind, it – the tower – was sparkle blue on deep blue. This was the first day.

We have these ideas, Olive and me, and these ideas sometimes mean we find ourselves at the big table one evening, with one boiled artichoke each – globe artichokes almost as big as a small child’s head – easing the greygreen flesh out of the base of each leaf. Leaf by leaf by layered leaf. Scrape, scrape, nudge.

We’d taken the bus to Borough Market over the weekend, me in red sandals and a blue bag for pies. No one really shops at Borough Market, of course, except Nigel Slater and the celebrity food writers for the Observer – organic local produce is a nice idea but sort of laughable, after rent, the gas bill, the water bill, the phone bill and, well, red sandals from Spain, for anyone earning a regular wage. We graze at Borough Market, certainly, and we buy guilty slivers of expensive cheese. We point admiringly at the produce, smug in their baskets, and we linger at the stall with the French butter, hoping for samples. But shopping for groceries is not something we do at Borough Market – that’s what the Sainsbury’s down the street, past the off-licences and kebab shops, is for.

Well, hold on to your hat and call me Nige, then, for no sooner had we rounded Southwark Cathedral and come up to the first market stands than we noticed the new stall over on the right, with the signs in black marker reading “Raspberries £1 a box” and “Artichokes 2 for £3”. Faster than you can say “Bobo in paradise”, I had a basket on my arm and was reaching for raspberries here and a bowl of tomatoes there, was weighing giant artichokes in my palm. Olive, in a frenzy, almost, was filling a brown paper bag with fistfuls of fresh peas in their pods. Afterwards, there was – and this is something that has never happened to me – barely space in the tote for pie.

This is where ideas start: in the palm of a hand, in the weight of an artichoke in the palm of the hand.

Some days later, the pies already eaten – there is always space somewhere for pie – the artichokes were on the boil. Households all over England were ensconced in dinnertime, but we were snacking on slices of cheese, still, the artichokes – and the idea – on the boil. Then the leaf-by-single-purple-tipped-leaf nudging-out of artichoke flesh, the cutting into the choke, then the idea for chicken. At 8 the chicken fillets came out of the freezer and I tried to defrost them with my eyes. At 9 I was wondering if stir-frying half-frozen chicken fillets would kill us. At 9:03 I was laughing maniacally in the face of salmonella; the onions went in the pan. Browned. Softened. The garlic. The chicken. A glug of wine. The artichoke. It was maybe ten to 10 by the time we were stirring it all together in a large pot, wholewheat pasta over chopped tomatoes over chicken over artichoke bits. It snowed gruyère.

And you know what? It was really just fine. Curl-in-the-lip fine, not Ooh-girl-you-fine. Who knows what went wrong – too many tomatoes, maybe, or not enough salt. Maybe we should have avoided muddling the flavours, just made a vinaigrette and eaten the artichoke straight up, a fork under one end of the plate so the vinaigrette could collect in a handy puddle down on the other end. I don’t know. What I do know is, the peas are wrapped in a newspaper package on the bottom shelf of the fridge. I am good at shelling peas, though Olive believes he is better. This is where ideas start: in a newspaper package of peas held shut with a red rubberband, in a pea-shelling contest, in the green, ultimately, of a summer market basket.

Sunday the sun was out and it seemed the people living on their canal boats, sitting and nattering and sailing on their canal boats while the coots paddled by, these were the luckiest in the world. Maria was in town from Saint Joe, Michigan – “I want to do what the Londoners do on Sunday,” she’d said, and my mind had drawn a blank, for I know a Londoner who goes to church in a theatre that says “We Will Rock You”, I know a Londoner who sits downstairs at Maggie’s with a neverending pint, I know a Londoner who studies, who picnics, who watches the game, who heads for the sales, who takes the train to Cambridge, who makes waffles, who goes to the market, who pats small dogs, who does nothing at all, just lets Sunday lap at her feet – Maria was in town, and we strolled along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal, its water rippled and green. Down the street at the Charles Lamb, they’d spread out the sand for petanque games. There was a table in the sun for us, and the Sunday paper, and Mascha the pub dog lay down to let her tummy be scratched. And when the summer fruits trifle arrived with three small spoons, well – what with the cream oozing white down into the red fruit compote, we knew who the luckiest people in the world were.

The blue skies have been good to us these last few days – though last night I read that the weather forecasters are reporting that summer’s officially going to be “rubbish” – and yesterday we walked, me and Olive, across the Waterloo Bridge to Dr Zhivago at the BFI. You have heard the name, I know, but have you seen the film? No, have you really seen the film? In wide chairs that lean back, and on a large screen once the grand red velvet curtains part? We did not know what we were in for until the man with a microphone stepped out, up front, at 7:30 and said, “Just to tell you the format of tonight’s performance–” “There is a format?” I whispered to Olive, and he clicked his phone open to look at the clock. “There will be no food available by the time this is over,” he said. But, after grumbling our way through the overture, so swiftly we were caught up in Russia, our hunger sated, so quickly we were swept up in Omar Sharif’s Zhivago, and the wide-eyed blond – Lara – every man kept falling in love with, in poetry and revolution, unending landscapes and unforgiving winters, in thick furs and in candlelight through frozen windows, in the ice palace in the Urals, in the horses whose bells jangled when they galloped.

Truly there was no food for ready money by the time it was over. We whizzed by Burger King on the 243 bus and came home, ravenous, for a rummage-around standing-up picnic in the kitchen: slices of saucisson, an eighth of reblochon, the last bit of stinky vacherin, and teaspoonfuls of sweet banana jam straight from the fridge. It was past midnight by then and we had the windows open, like the jammiest people in the world.

The weather report yesterday predicted a 34 per cent chance of rain – what’s a girl to do with this information? Suz and I skirted the city – me on the Overground going anticlockwise round the top, and she on the National Rail clockwise round the bottom – and found each other at Richmond, with a sugar-sprinkled Eccles cake for sustenance.

Through the turning streets of the sweet town centre, as if a bright red tinplate toy bus were being steered by a child’s pudgy fingers through the most picturesque of wooden toy villages, our double-decker lurched and shifted, then headed south along the Thames, south along the cows in the fields, down Petersham Road lined on both sides with lush green. “We have to get off at the stop past the nurseries,” I said, “then walk back towards it, so we have to keep a look out.” Suz jabbed at the window with a finger – “There! There!” – and in a flurry we were ringing the bell, flying down the stairs, stepping off the bus into a light drizzle growing ever more insistent. So. This is a 34 per cent chance of rain.



“We are going to Petersham Nurseries,” I’d e-mailed Mowmy in the morning. “There will be flowers and lunch.” And how! Past the smiling, dark-haired German baker lady selling biscuit men and bars of Milka chocolate and plump loaves of seeded bread in her green-and-white minivan – “Hallo!” she said, and “Hallo!” we said back – and past the succulent-sounding Ham Polo Club, past the ruddy-cheeked children outside the country-house-looking German School and down a dirt road punctuated with puddles of rain from earlier in the week, the sunflowers were in bloom, the zinnias, the pansies, the giant, glamorous dahlias in pinky-red and orangey-red, in crimson and cerise, the reds of mythical amaranths, the reds, surely, of the silk daybeds, behind carved wooden shutters, of Mughal emperors.

Here – and by now the drizzle had stopped just as it had started – late strawberries hung from suspended baskets dangling bits of moss and earth, and lavender stalks exploded from stone planters. Roses nodded and peeked out from wooden crates. We buried our noses in large clumps of sweet, seductive jasmine, we rubbed soft, furry sage leaves between thumb and forefinger. Fat lemons hung, heavy, at the entrance to the teahouse, and magnolias in crisp whites nestled among waxy, deep-green leaves. “Oh!” I said, as I bent down to sniff, “they smell just like a magnolia candle!”



We wove our way through the greenhouse-bazaar and its higgledy-piggledy just-so mix of wrought-iron chairs and weathered wooden cabinets. Blushing cactii sat on shelves with antique linens and fine stemmed glasses; high rubber boots and shiny new spades lined up by the seed packets; scented candles rested under large bell jars, each identified by a paper label written in a swirling hand. “What’s that?” I said, and I pointed toward a huge sieve-like implement, some 40 centimetres across. Its round cane frame held a wire grid. “For sorting through earth lah,” Suz said, “there are all these bits in the dirt.” “Or,” she said, then, considering, “for panning for gold.” From the back of the room, a modest hubbub and a muted symphony of chinks-tinks-clinks from the lunchtime crowd.



Oh! To lunch here everyday!, under carpets draped, tent-like, from the ceiling, and with flowers at each table, each blooming dahlia like the fat lady at the opera. So this is where the ladies of Richmond go when they want to go to India while the kids are at school.

We drank homemade Amalfi lemonade from wine glasses, the gentle fizz tickling our tongues. We ordered fried courgette flowers, a wild lump of buffalo mozzarella, and borlotti beans like pampered babies. We ordered a thick, black-edged bruschetta topped with sautéed girolles and a swath of parma ham, its length just right for dangling above an eager cat at the dinner table. “Come,” we said, and we chin-chinned with our wine glasses of lemonade, and dessert was but a hint in the air.



We sat at the long table in the tea hut of a teahouse later, with a tray of tea and cakes – a crumbly lemon polenta for one and an almond-studded lemon poppyseed for the other. It is likely we talked about our lives, it is likely we laughed long and hard. What I remember most, though, is the light coming up the three steps and in the door. It was that quality of light – thick, you know, and hushed, for floating in – at the very edges of a dream.

It has been raining steadily, single-mindedly, since this morning, at least since I slowly blinked awake in the damp light, to the sounds of the cars going by on the wet street outside. It is a sound like small waves gently coming to the sand and folding into foam.

It rained all afternoon yesterday, too, and I had to send Dan a note about the picnic he’d planned. “May I gently express my concern,” I wrote, aiming for insouciance. “Chin up,” he wrote back, playing insouciance to its hilt, “forecast is for a sunny evening.” He is a madman, I thought, but, you know, I am game. Still, when I got Laureen on the phone later, I let out the thought that had been bouncing around in my mind. “He is a madman,” I said, and I peered out the window at the noncommittal sky. “Are these people you’re meeting English?” she said. “Because then the picnic’s definitely on no matter what.”

The 73 bus downtown drove under a grey cloud, but the rain had stopped falling, at least. By the time I hit the Kowloon Bakery for picnic treats – char siu buns, still warm, and a box of curry puffs – the sun was out and the breeze had blown all the clouds away. Half-past six and the sky was blue as a bluebird perched on a smurf’s bare shoulder. England never ceases to amaze.

We were three, then four, then five and six on the green in Green Park; we laid out the picnic mat – an Ikea tablecloth in disguise – and emptied our bags: sausage rolls and grapes and slim carrots and strawberries bursting with sweet, chocolate-covered chocolate cake and more sausage rolls, a bag of Jelly Babies and sausage rolls, still, and a chardonnay called Le Froglet. If we are not a generation raised on Enid Blyton, I don’t know what is. We sat and watched the long-haired daschunds running by on legs trying to catch up with dog; we lounged while Laura recited an admirable amount from The Sound of Music – “Verbatim,” she precised, and I could almost hear Captain Von Trapp blowing his whistle down the hall. We lolled about – the sun was out, the rain forgotten – till the light deepened into dusk. I had to go to the toilet, anyway, and the only building I could see through the trees was Buckingham Palace.

In Amy Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife, the protagonist’s mother has a penchant for starting conversations by picking up where she left off – even if she left off some two months before. “Pearl, ah...” she begins, and launches straight in with a distinct lack of peremptory dialogue. “Pearl, ah, have to go, no choice,” she says when Pearl picks up the phone one day. The explanations come later.

Amy Tan gave voice to Chinese people, but the voice she bestowed upon them was inevitably an exoticised one for the ears of a Western audience. I guess that’s why I never got into her books the way America seemed to. The Asian American experience, evidently, is vastly different from that of an Asian in America. I can’t say, exactly, that I felt a kinship with Amy Tan’s characters, but insofar as there was a shred of shared experience, much of it was concentrated in Pearl, ah. In Pearl, ah, Amy Tan and I arrived at an understanding.

Pearl, ah, months disappear down rabbit hole, how to blog?



Here is what disappearing down a rabbit hole sounds like.

Days, I settled into a job that required much sitting in a quiet office, with a red pen, a yellow highlighter, and many pages of colourful page layouts. It was a temporary thing, one that was meant to last a week, then two, then six, then another, then. There was a free-flow of sustainably harvested and traded coffee in the kitchenette (the buttons on the machine read “Cappuccino” and “Espresso” but also “Cremichoc” and “Espresschoc”).



Weekends, we ran away, me and Olive, into the wide world. So many bars we ate at, standing up, in Barcelona, with cavas and cervezas ready at the asking, and so often we returned to the Mercat Santa Caterina, with its undulating multicoloured mosaic roof like a wave of joy. Our hotel was between two churches; mornings I lay half-asleep in bed and counted the chimes of the churchbells while the seagulls flew and squawked, awake already. One evening we fell into the kitschy chic of the bar at the Camper hotel, for beers and freshly squeezed orange juices, and guessing at dim sums in the Spanish menu. It is a small space, the bar at Casa Camper, with seating enough for maybe eight? ten? and standing room for another, I don’t know, twelve – and we all cheered when the Spanish guy came on Eurovision. We walked all day, in Barcelona, under the city’s many balconies, before collapsing in bed for siestas come late afternoon. Nights, once the human statues had packed up and washed off their face paint, Pakistani immigrants sold beer by the can on La Rambla.



Another weekend, with Jazon in tow fresh from New York, we packed an mp3 player full of tunes and drove down south to Brighton, and the boardwalk, and the naked cyclists coming down King’s Road with the sea just beyond. We unfolded our legs getting out the car, and I said, because it was true and the smell of the sea was on the breeze, “This is great!” The sun was strong on our shoulders and our arms. The wind flirted with my skirt. We stopped for fish and chips hot and salty at the stand reading “Lovely Jubbly”, and then we took to the pier with its sticks of stripy Brighton Rock reading “Man U” and “Arsenal” and “Lazy Lout”, with its rides spiraling up and around and upside down, its fairground music tinny and insistent through the Tannoy. The rides were called Crazy Mouse and Helter Skelter and Turbo, and the girls screamed when the roller-coaster car rattled and sped round the bend. The carnie at the Dolphin Derby was a young man with hair down to his shoulders. “Welcome to the Brighton Pier,” he said, “where the fish are cheaper than the chips!” The giant stuffed-toy prizes hung huge and googly-eyed from the rafters.



Another weekend yet, in the New Forest, some three hours southwest of London, we breathed deeply at the banks of the Beaulieu River. Ponies and shaggy-haired donkeys and slow, insouciant cows meandered in the village streets, while the horses, undisturbed, breakfasted on the Whitefield Moor. “So,” I said, and the heath was green and flat and vast around us, “this is a moor.” Mr Darby did not come wandering round in the mist. One night, down a long and windy route deep in the forest, we ate – very well, and with glasses of pink champagne – till we were alone in the small dining room, with the footsteps of our French waiter unaccompanied on the wooden floor. It was dark and silent outside, very dark, and very silent, and the trees were dark and silent, too. Our feet crunched on the gravel path to the car. We rolled down the windows, put on Francis Cabrel, and sat on the bonnet. We propped our feet up on the timber fence, above the beam from the headlights. This is the world.



When summer finally came round, I celebrated with berries. A raspberry Victoria sponge, first, at a teatime for girls, then, on a cool Saturday night, a summer berry pavlova on which red berries tumbled onto clouds of whipped cream. Sunday Olive and I spread out the picnic blanket in the rose garden in Clissold Park. The roses were pregnant with summer. We had the weekend paper and a box of strawberries. I fell asleep under my white, wide-brimmed hat, with June in my limbs.

Small, the thoughts that come to mind as you drizzle olive oil over a motley row of blanched asparagus, over the poached egg and the crushed walnuts. “You know what would make this better?” I said, to no one in particular. The mice were dozing behind the fridge. The white ranunculus were curling round to see the sun. “You know what would make this better?” I said, and where I have found that Pancetta is normally the fail-safe response to this question, today I thought of walnut oil.

So small, these thoughts that show up, well scrubbed and neatly combed, toothy in the grin, when the sky is blue and the bus ticket is charged and ready to go. Not half an hour after the last bit of asparagus had mopped up the last bit of yolk, I was getting off the 393 opposite Waitrose.

I put the bottle of walnut oil in my cart. Then four conference pears at 99 p, and some strawberries on special. Handsome boxes of cereal, two for the price of one. Rainbow trout fillets, reduced, and half a leg of lamb at 25 per cent off. Fresh ravioli, in mushroom and in spicy salami. And some flat-leaf parsley for good measure.

As for the one-kilogram Lindt gold bunny beckoning from the gilt and flash of the Easter display, well, I thought I should let sleeping bunnies lie.

I slept for two days, and then it was time to wake up. Olive had made a strawberry brownie.

I am easing into London again, with Rilo Kiley on Volume High. There is laundry to be done, and work to hustle. But first, there is lunch. Yesterday the wind blew me and Hens into Hi Sushi for large, steaming bowls of sukiyaki ramen and salmon dons topped with plump, squishy roe. We hadn’t seen each other in three months and some, and our hair has grown.

We have hare-brained schemes, Hens and me, on, well, let’s call it hiatus, while our husbands are at work. For one, we are going to strong-arm our friend Marcello into coughing up a contact at the BBC so we can have our own travel show on the telly. “Do you want to go to Eastern Europe?” Hens had said, innocently, so innocently. “Come!” I said. “Croatia?” I was picking corn out of my soup kernel by kernel. “Yes,” she said, “and Istanbul? And then Morocco?” “I want to go to all these places,” I said. “You know,” she said, and delicately she bit into her sashimi, “I am choosing these destinations based only on the Easyjet flight routes.” The TV show was clear in my mind, like the water that sparkles off the Adriatic Coast. “We will travel along the Easyjet routes only,” I said, “and the show will be called” – and we were egging each other on now, though my mother (Hello, Mowmy!) will be proud to hear I did not wave my chopsticks around – “Easygirls.”