We were talking on the phone, me and Emily, and it was maybe twenty minutes gone, and she said, “You know what we should do?” and I said, “Talk in person?” so then we were meeting at Tottenham Court Road and walking to the fair on Marylebone High Street. We had to pinky swear to not let each other go into Topshop or Urban Outfitters, and I knew trouble was nigh when Emily said, “I just want to show you the cushion I got yesterday.” “Just want to show, hey?” I said. “I have been brought down by much less than that.” But truly, because we had pinky sworn, and because we had only a Certain Amount of Money in our wallets, and because we knew we needed to have money left for Cake, we just hovered about outside the great glass display windows while Emily pointed: “And see that dress? And behind it? Those. Not the one with the purple flowers, but the other.”

We stopped only for mango and passionfruit juices, and lemon and lime juices, and then it was all systems go for the fair, because everyone likes a fair, and everyone likes a fair on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There were belly dancers and men smoking hookahs, and this seems about the right time to say that every time I see a hookah I think of the caterpillar in the Alice in Wonderland cartoon movie, the one who blows smoke signals out of his pipe, who says, haughty as a hookah-smoking caterpillar: “Who. are. you.”

There were belly dancers and hookah smokers, there were pearly kings and queens, there was a farmer with a milk stand and cups of milk with cream rising to the top. There were a lot of balloons, and the sky was blue as a backdrop to balloons. There were peonies in bloom everywhere, and then there was a flower stand selling only roses, and when I leaned in to smell it went straight to my head, the exhilarating rose smell, like I was reclining in rose-scented bathwater with roses floating on top. Emily bought a box of exotic mushrooms and I bought an exotic mushroom sandwich, partly because of the mushrooms and mostly because I saw the mushroom guy pan frying them in butter. There were enough mushrooms for up to me and the woman behind me, but no more mushrooms that that, and they had to turn people away, and I remembered when my little fambly was visiting in April and we went to Borough Market and there were just enough chorizo and rocket sandwiches for everyone in line up to the person just ahead of us. My cousin Mae Shan says that at Bee Cheng Hiang in Singapore, sometimes the queue for bah kwa is so long that the Bee Cheng Hiang man will come out and count how many people they have bah kwa for. The last lucky person in line gets to wear a plaque around his neck that says everyone might as well go home now. This sounds like the kind of thing that is accompanied by someone striking a great brass gong.

There were couples swing dancing, and there was a very portly, very sweaty man with the hips of a Lothario. He caressed his partner’s arm and she beamed and tossed her hair. There was no cheese juggler, as they said there was going to be, but there was a stilt walker in stripey pants who was spinning around a lamppost, who said, “Wheee!” at each revolution. The ends of his stilts were shod in a pair of toddlers’ wellies, which seemed grotesque somehow, and made me shudder. I looked away, but I could still hear him saying “Wheee!” in a dancing, high-pitched voice.

There were girls with drums, and then there were boys playing songs at the acoustic stage, and really they were boys, they can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, the ones sitting on the ground with the kettle drums, and the one in the pork pie hat who played bass, and the other one who played the clarinet, stopping only for a chocolate strawberry when the Rococo girl came by in orange batik like a hippie chocolate girl. One of the kettle drum boys was wearing a T-shirt that said Make Music Every Day and he said, “The next song is sort of about going down a river at four miles per hour,” and it was. The breeze kissed our shoulders, and the small girl sitting cross-legged in the front, she had had her face painted to look like a pink cat, and her hair was very long and curly.

“I’m wilting,” I said, “I need tea and cake,” so we walked down and left and down and left to the fine porcelain in the window at Yauatcha. It’s been two months Emily’s been talking about the Shanghai Lily—

and the other day she’d said, “What is Shanghai Lil?”, because you know how sometimes things get stuck in your head, and I said, “I dunno.” “The fastest gun in the East?” I’d said, but this morning she showed me the error of my ways—

It’s been two months Emily’s been talking about the Shanghai Lily, which is raspberries and lychees, and may I just say that this sounds like it might rival the Ispahan at Ladurée, which is raspberries and lychees and ROSE, the Ispahan tastes like dreams, I tell you, dreams like you are holding hands with a boy and it is summer and you are going to a picnic, so of course today we sat and looked at our menus, and there was no need to look at all. We closed our menus, and the waitress came, and she said, “There is no Shanghai Lily.” “There is no Shanghai Lily,” she said again, because I think we might have said, “The what-what?” and we were so surprised we said we needed some time alone.

We had a yuzu kura, then, which was dark chocolate with sweet and bitter, and strawberry thing that was white with pink stripes, and we balanced on our fingertips hot cups of orchid tea. “My fingers are burning and there is no Shanghai Lily,” I said. “This is exactly how I had not envisioned this.” And it sounds like I was complaining but really I was quite pleased to be there, because of Emily and because of tea for two, but also because this means we will have to go back another time.

I took a bath tonight, and I am reading a book I judged by its cover. It is How I Live Now, there is a daisy and a boy, I read till the bathwater was cold and still I was reading. I smell of mimosas.