Well,

I sure haven’t blogged in six thousand years. There was just...stuff. And...things. I don’t know! Time runs away from me! It’s like when you’re holding a piece of paper on a windy day, and the wind grabs it out of your hands, and you chase it down the street, and every time the piece of paper comes to rest, you think you have it, you take a large step and try to jump on it, but by the time you’ve landed the wind’s gone and blown it that few extra centimetres out of reach. Meanwhile the people sitting under the awning at the pavement café are watching you and snorting into their lattes.

Something lah, something. I understand I am supposedly unemployed and should be sitting around shaking my legs and blogging all day, but time is doing that funny elastic thing it does, where the less you have to do, the less time you have to do it. Nights, I am surprised tomorrow is nigh. “It’s Friday night!” I said to Sahil yesterday, and he said, “It’s Friday today?” “Oh – wait – what? – well, Thursday, whatever,” I said, and he said: “It’s always Friday to you freelancers.”

In lieu of a day job, I have been baking.



The tea party called for it, a couple of Sundays ago, with a sweet-sour plum tart and a mound of lemon slices, a raspberry pavlova with chocolate shavings raining down upon it, and a tin, because she is nice and knows things, of Emily’s chocolate-caramel slices. “I thought I might make a pavlova,” I’d said to CC during the week. “What will you do with the yolks?” she said, inquiring-like. “I –” I said, and she said, “Make lemon curd!!” “See,” I said, “I thought I might make a strawberry shortcake,” and she said: “Make lemon curd!!” There was lemon curd, hence, that Sunday morning, cooled on the windowsill, and sequestered in the fridge in a Le Parfait glass jar Sunday afternoon.

The sugar hit, fast, and we were curled up on the sofa or cross-legged on the carpet, me and Emily and Suz, Elaine and Nai and Marc and Olive, the gang re-ganged, and Gerry in on a surprise visit from Hong Kong. “Guess who’s in town?” I’d said to Suz, “aiyah, you will never guess lah.” “It is Gerry!” I’d announced, with exclamation points, then precised, with the name from those days when we wore the blue pinafores, and Gerry had the porcelain skin and the delicate fingers: “Little Gerry!” “That,” Marc said, after Gerry’d left, “is the smallest person I have ever seen.”

I was saying.

The sugar hit, fast, and we sprawled and shouted. Everything was funny, and we laughed till we were weak.



Other weekends, there were other things, like a lao jua Chinatown dinner Friday night to ring in my thirtieth, followed by a surprise shower of foil and glitter in the street. “What’s that?” I’d said, when I saw the sparkle fall from Olive’s palm. “C’est trop tard, les gars !” he shouted, and they gathered around, Nai and Emily and Marc and Dan, and flung celebration in the air.

We trooped upstairs to mooncakes and the moon, and champagne cold from the vegetable drawer. “I have to give you this before the mooncakes,” Nora said, and the bubble-wrap package was in the shape of a cake stand. “Ooh,” we said, and “aah”, for it was robin’s egg blue and curvy-edged, and we were girls in from the nippy air to the promise of cake.

So many presents upstairs!, including the full week’s haul from Japan and Singapore and Sydney, and Dan gave me a card with a drawing of dessert rats on it. The dessert rats, one of them was called Chérie Trifle. One of them was called Barbara Split. One of them, no, listen – listen – one of them was called Graham Brulée. “Sherene gave me a tea-scented candle, and a test tube of fancy chocolates, ya, a test tube, dunno lah, and eight White Rabbits,” I said, when I was on the phone with CC later. “Eight?” she said, and she was indignant. “Did she eat the rest of the bag?”

So the birthday party, and the mooncakes, and the moon bright and shiny, and champagne on our lips. And everything was good, and I went to bed, and in the morning Suz, before she ran out the door to volunteer to build houses for moorhen at the Natural History Museum, raised her arms and waggled her hands in the air and yelled “Happy Birthday!!” “Happy Birthday!!” I yelled back, and popped into the shower. Olive was sitting on the stairs when I came out, with the big weekend paper on his lap. “You are nice!” I said, and I probably had a towel on my head, and I was bustling, because I like a bustle, and – and looking back now, I know it was because he panicked and realised the bustle could bustle for hours – here Olive folded back the front section of the paper to reveal the bonanza of weekend supplements that come with. And here, well, here my eyes widened with confusion and questions, and a prickle of wondering tickled its way up my arms, for the first weekend supplement in the paper, it appeared, was a full-colour sheet titled, in pink, “The Stellou”, and which came with a photo of me, all “Lost in Translation” glamo-blurry, above the fold. “Olive !” I said, for sentences were no longer possible, and I said: “Comment ! Mais ! Olive !” before I collapsed: “C’est niiiice !!”

There’d been an international task force behind it all, I was to learn, but not before I read the notes in the Stellou – from CC in Sydney and Maud in Paris and Jazon in New York and Tom in Beirut and Panda not quite yet in Wellington, New Zealand – and not before I realised the horoscope from Emily Starwoman was about to lead me on a hearty traipse around town. “The cosmic stars have aligned to take you on a journey,” the horoscope read, “but you must look for the clues around you and follow them if you want to fulfil your true destiny.” Further down the page an ad for Bar Italia winked and beckoned.

I had on a polka-dot button-down and a pink silk skirt, I had on purple heels and I was running to the corner yelling “Come on!!” at Olive.

From one spot to another, then, from clue to hidden clue in the city sunny like it was part of the plan: Titiana outside on the pavement and Luca behind the big red Gaggia at Bar Italia; the grinning desk clerks in the cookbook section at Foyles – “I have to whisper a clue to you,” I said to the girl with the biggest grin, and she said “Okay!” so I leaned in and said, quietly, me and my voice both on the tips of our toes: “Stellou!” “Yes,” she said, and the grin widened, and she slid me a clue across the desktop; a smiley bespectacled stranger appearing out of nowhere at the Jazz Café; Hens on the phone from Singapore while the pelicans went on a Saturday swim in Saint James’s Park. The clues were everywhere, and I wanted them all.

Well, the clues were everywhere except behind the counter at the café at Foyles, for, misunderstanding a clue, I’d rushed up to the counterboy and said, almost shoutily, wild with the excitement of the chase: “Do you have any green eggs?” He was a student from a non-English-speaking country, and he said, “Do we have – ?” “Green eggs?” I said, and here my voice may have lowered itself just a notch. “I don’t – ” he said, while thick brows furrowed, and he turned to his foreign student colleague behind him. “Do we have any – ” he said, and turned back to me to allow me to dig my own hole. “Green,” I said to the other aproned counterboy, and my eyes may have darted aside, and I think I understood it was too late to back away slowly, and much more calmly I finished what I had begun: “eggs?” “No,” he said, and it was not followed by “Ha ha!” For “No,” he said, and nowhere behind him was a birthday dancing.

Oh! But I tell you! It was like everyone knew, the concrete on the city pavements came alive encouragingly behind my heels and pushed me on. There were four old folks stuffed on a park bench in Saint James’s, a man and a woman and a man and a woman in white hair and sensible coats, and it was as if they smiled and nodded in silent blessing as their heads followed us walking past left to right.

“I think this is the end,” Olive said when we sat down at Yauatcha, and the waitresses brought us a chocolate-tea cake and a blackberry cake. “What do you mean, you think?” I said, and I was happy to be sitting. “There were a thousand changes to the plan,” he said, “and I forget.” “Hm,” I said, and within the hour a text message came in from an unknown number. I might have screamed, a very small scream, when my phone vibrated on the tabletop. “Victor Bravo Come in!” the text read. “Await further instructions at 20.00 hrs. Over and out.”

Home was for lie-downs and a pasta dinner, and there was a tingle in my stomach at two minutes to eight. And then the baby in a text message, and I squinted at the screen on my phone, and I said to Olive, “I can’t make it out.” “Soho,” I said, reading, “circle?” “It’s not a circle,” he said, “it’s filled in.” “Some circles are filled in,” I said, “that doesn’t stop them being a circle.” But I tried again anyway: “Soho,” I said, to give myself a headstart, “doughnut?” “It’s not a doughnut,” he said, “doughnuts have holes.” “Some doughnuts don’t have holes,” I said, “some doughnuts are filled with strawberry jam, or chocolate, or – ” “Whatever,” he said, and he stirred the pasta sauce in the pan, “it’s not a doughnut.” It took a while, and some very precise prodding – “It’s a what-colour circle on a what-colour background?” Olive said – before I crowed: “Soho Japan!”

“Oh,” I said, “I would never have gotten it.” “That,” Olive said, because he is my boyfriend and not the baby’s boyfriend, “is because the baby drew a shitty circle.”

I put on my cowboy boots and we clumped up Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street till we got lost in the wilds of Fitzrovia. “We’re lost,” Olive said on the phone to HQ, “and it’s because I let the lady drive.” Marc read us the A to Z and we got there, finally, left on Riding House, left on Wells, and down the steps to the secret basement with the shiso mojitos.



Oh! I like you! Emily and Marc and Dan and Nai and Elaine; Suz, who built no houses for moorhen; Olive, who held my hand; and Nora, who was in the loo when I arrived because the glowering Japanese bartender had poured a drink on her head.

There was the retelling, of course, and the re-retelling, and more opening of more presents, and then it was very clear we were not underground enough to stay in the underground.

Outside, the night was young, and so were we.