My body has been hovering between sickness and health over the last couple of weeks, while I waited to see which side of the line he’d decide to come down on. I woke this morning, heavy of head and thick of throat, and figured a choice had been made. It’s FINE: I don’t have a job, plus outside it’s drippy like my nose, so it’s not like I have anywhere I need to be.

I am self-medicating with hot honey and lemon drinks, Dinah Washington from the kitchen, and Saturday’s Guardian Weekend magazine. I’d normally have the Sunday Observer, too, except that I was so enamoured of my new Internet connection that I forgot to leave the house yesterday, ha-ha!

No, no, I did leave the house—for an evening walk towards Mayfair, in the direction of the setting sun. Closing in on six o’clock, the clouds were creamy streaks in a peach sky while the light bulbs at the Ritz lit up like the smile of a Darlie man in a top hat.



Minamoto Kitchoan is next to La Maison du Chocolat on Piccadilly, which makes it hard for a girl to choose. I went for the Japanese, eventually, because the packaging is the perfect amount of delicate and fancy for a gift to a visiting aunt. Also, I wanted a persimmon jelly. And a chestnut sweet.

And then the newspaper, well, I wasn’t thinking about the newspaper.

Raise your hands and yell “hallelujah!” because the girl, she has Internet. Oh yeah oh yeah. I have an Internet connection, I have a phone, I even have cable TV. The TV, I was not so interested in, but it came with the telecoms package. Turned it on for the first time yesterday, two days after the installation, and there was a shopping show, a dance competition show, six thousand news channels, and “Friends”. Oh, RIGHT. Now I remember why I hadn’t watched television in the last so many years. This officially confirms that I have paid the hundred-and-twenty-six-pound television license fee to watch “Little Britain”. Do me proud, boys.



Schmio came to town for the briefest of international visits, count ’em—in, out. The in involved the handing over of a bag of treats from Ladurée: a box of macarons, a dark chocolate hazelnut bar, and a jar of delicate rose confiture. We broke into the macarons late Thursday night, home from a rowdy dinner squished in the back at The Cow. “Try this one.” “Hazelnut, mmm.” “Vanilla.” “Mmm.” “Try this, I think it’s the rose.” “Oh. It’s the rose.” “Oh. Mmm.” “Mmm.”

And I am getting distracted by the macarons, (they are plenty worthy of distraction), because I see I have not yet mentioned that dinner at The Cow involved the sighting of one Orlando Bloom, exactly as pretty as you think he’d be. But you know what?, also: short. Yes! It’s true! When I told my mother this the next day (on the phone, my new phone, from which I can call ANYONE, O joy), she said: “How short?” “Well,” I said, “he’s not a midget.” “I dunno,” I said, “I didn’t stand next to him or anything, but he seemed short.” “He’s short?” “He’s short!” “But they never talk about Orlando Bloom being short, it’s always Tom Cruise.” “Yes.”

Orlando Bloom and we were there till they turned the lights on bright and started putting the stools legs-up on the short wooden tables, and then Orlando Bloom and we were there still. He was hanging out with his guys on the pavement, and we were hoping against hope for a taxi to come rumbling down the empty street. Times like this, all a girl wants is a catbus. “I can’t believe Orlando Bloom didn’t offer us a ride home in his Mercedes,” I said, as we got into an unlicensed cab. “Yeah.” “Yah, that was really not cool of him.” “No.” “Yah.”

The in involved, the first evening, a table outside on Frith Street, because Schmio’d brung with her the warmest October day in a hundred years. A bottle of red and a bottle of sparkling (water, that is), while the blue deepened into night. The Bar Italia clock was lit up green and red, as always, and the time read 12:16, as always. And something about it, everything about it, really, except our location, was the good ol’ days.

The in also involved, O, unsettled tummy!, the violent and fascinating emptying of the contents of a night out. I want to say it was the mussels, because that’s what happened the last time I had mussels in a restaurant, which is why I’d closed the window on mussels from there on out. But the fish stew was so tasty, so hot and steamy and gorgeous, with a hunk of lightly grilled toast, and a rakish slather of rouille, and I ate it all, I did, I did, and how I was made to regret it later. In the interests of journalistic integrity, however, I will volunteer that two bottles of wine may also have been consumed that night. Hum.

The in—for it is possible to do it all in two days, when London’s for the taking—further involved a drop-in at the Tate Modern, where Rachel Whiteread has managed to give solidity to empty space. She has made casts of nothing, and she has piled nothing upon nothing, so much nothing that it reaches higher than our heads, nothing stacked all the way up the steel girders of the Turbine Hall. We walked down her alleys hemmed in by emptiness, and children beat on boxes filled with invisible.

Upstairs, Jeff Wall’s massive lightbox photographs glowed, still and tense. He measures the weight of a moment. In his “Picture for Women”, the girl stares, the camera stares, you, too, and click. In “The Flooded Grave”, vermilion against grey and grey, the vision could disappear the next time you look. His “An Octopus” suggests an immobility—or does it?

We walked along the river and across the Waterloo Bridge. Seven o’clock and the dusky sky. We were sitting outside the Curzon on Shaftesbury, and I thought I saw a human-sized sunflower coming out of the evening, but it was a man with his yellow-clad daughter on his shoulders, her little arms wrapped around his neck.



Schmio’s in involved mornings of apples and Red Leicester, of yoghurts mixed with spoons of thick fig jam, of dark coffees in pink cups. One morning, two mornings, and then she was gone.

This morning, it’s Dimitri from Paris into the cool blue. Vous dancez, mademoiselle ? Mais oui.

In an eight-line e-mail explaining why I was not hired for a job, the human resources manager has managed to accumulate three typos. This includes spelling “books” bpoks.

Of all the nights to go to Kew Gardens, we picked the one where the rain fell and fell, first fine and misty, then—once it really decided to apply itself—with admirable gusto.

Still, that didn’t stop us, me and Suzzan and Thush, from spending a good part of three hours there Monday, meandering about in the great glasshouses, where Chihuly sculptures mingled with the greenery. I’ll say I like Dale Chihuly well enough—his glass is a little like fantasy, a little like candy, a little like joy bursting through, innit?—but really the thing that made me buy tickets to Night Lights was the promise of JUGGLERS and FIRE EATERS. So, yes, I really took to the fanciful collection of multicoloured glass floats on the pond just upon entering the gardens; and I did appreciate the is-it, isn’t-it game among the cacti, where sometimes you couldn’t tell if you were looking at a creation nature-made or man-made; and the exquisite curlywurly chandeliers amazed me each time we came across a new one—but the fact of the matter is, I wanted, also, to be perfectly honest, to see some goddamn fire eaters.

We asked a man in a florescent vest, finally, where the circus was, and he said, “Oh, they’re mobile”, and immediately I was quite distressed to think it was possible that we’d maybe been twenty paces behind them all along the path. But then he tipped us off that there might be a juggler over there, leftward, near the Temperate House, so we shuffled off again in the rain. Sure enough, all too soon we saw the neon clubs spinning in the air above a gather of heads, and heard the wacky commentary of a travelling showman: “It would help if you’d cheer and clap quite loudly, maybe even throw your children in the air.”

The ride back to the city was damp and wearied, and it was closing in on ten o’clock, and we were wet and hungry, like little rats on a slow boat to China. Happy fortune, then, that it wasn’t China but Chinatown ahead of us, and the Hong Kong Diner on Wardour Street open till four in the morning. The Hong Kong Diner did us well, as always, with jaunty Cantopop over MSG wantan soup, and unnamed greens stir-fried in garlic, and a spicy sliced beef dish, with spring onions—y’know, the classics. I will tell you a secret about the Hong Kong Diner, and it is that Kim Jong-Il moonlights there. I know it sounds crazy, but you come visit, and I will show you the man with the disdainful eyes and the wild, curly hair, this man who will not seat us in the upstairs dining room, and you try and tell me he is not a Korean dictator.

It rained on Suzzan and me as we shuffled home, and through the rain we looked at a young man in his room across the backyards. He was sitting, reading, quietlike—(well, it was quiet from where we peered out of my living room)—and the light in his bedroom was warm and yellow like butter melting on the stove. “That’s nice,” I said. “He’s all calm and reading in the rain.” And Suzzan, she takes a beautiful thing and does, well, she does something to it, Suzzan said: “Maybe he is looking at porn on the computer.”

It rained as we talked into the night, and it rained as we went to bed. By morning, though, the sky was clear, and the breakfast menu read: CAKE. It is not always I have cake for breakfast—in fact I don’t know that I have ever had cake for breakfast—but for reasons of my birthday, (twenty days ago now, my little nitpickers, but you know how it is with birthdays in this house), (and anyway the presents are arriving still, why, just yesterday the packages in jolly yellow, and tied in red ribbons), and for reasons of Suzzan in the city, it was all systems go.

Down the street—

and I am the sort who says “the other day” when I mean “that one time that summer two years ago”, so here I mean “down the street and down another street and ’round the corner”—

down the street in Soho, the cake displays at Amato were gleaming like a birthday welcome. And I say we had cake for breakfast, but “cake” is a mere abbreviation, for we had a slice of chocolate-blueberry cream sponge (species: cake); a chocolate brioche (hardly a brioche, but that will teach us to order French in an Italian bakery, and in any case, species: bread-like); a palmier (species: biscuit); and a squat doughnut filled with cream, SOAKED IN RUM, and then topped with cream and fresh fruit, including a beauteous fig (species: unspeakable heaven). Suzzan raised her arms in the air and said: “Happy birthday!” in the only way one can, when there are four varieties of baked good fighting for room on the table. The phrase explodes, up front, like a celebratory firework: HAP-py birthday!

Like Girls Gone Wild because of a birthday, we went to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie in the middle of the day just because we could. The Odeon cinema in Leicester Square is so swank that even the daytime reduced-price ticket costs a painful seven pounds, but truly that is a cinema of fancypants and lushness. Like a birthday, like a holiday, like a midday movie, inside, among the seats of plush leopard print, there were kids with balloons—fidgety kids whose sticky hands, every now and again, let go of their catch so that it floated, free, past the regal gold relief on the walls up to the ceiling.



Cake for breakfast is nice and all, but it meant that my stomach started getting growly during the movie, somewhere in between the floating bunnies, and the candy floss tumbling by. We headed for Chinatown after the movie let out, and fought our way into the bustling Kowloon Bakery for a char siew so and a plain sponge cupcake. The unexpected treat was the arrival of three lians, the lianest lians in Lian Town, lians the likes of which have never been seen before, and even Suzzan, dear, sweet Suzzan, who is not only a nurse (that is, loving and giving, even if she wasn’t born on a Friday) but also loved by all, Suzzan whispered and pointed. I don’t know how they achieved it, the three girls, with neither Cucci bags nor Fendo purses, with nary a single LV print in sight, but they, in their wet-look perms and shiny, tight-fitting black pants, they encapsulated lian-ness in a way one could only step back and admire.

Down Gerrard Street we popped into the New Loon Moon Supermarket—in the grand tradition of anglicizing oriental names, the grand dragon’s gate (lóng mén) has become a silly bird squawking in the maudlin night—we popped in for a bottle of soya sauce for Suzzan, and we came out with, well, I think Suzzan came out with a bottle of soya sauce, but I came out with some egg tofu, a slab of fish cake, a packet of genmaicha, a bag of lychee White Rabbits, (yah! lychee rabbits!), a small box of milk-flavoured Pocky (“226.33 mg Calcium”), and a plastic take-out container of pandan–water chestnut coconut-milk kueh made in an unidentified local kitchen, yum yum. I’d pointed to one box of green-and-white delicacies and another box of green-and-white delicacies (they are, of course, all unmarked, save a nonchalant ingredients list) and said, “What’s the difference between these two?” and the countergirl’d said, “One is jelly, and one has water chestnut inside,” which made it so the choice was clear: Jelly is jelly but water chestnut inside is Hidden Treasures to be Discovered (with a Satisfying Crunch).

We were heading home, then, with so many treats as to include half a roast duck, when I thought it imperative, some doors down, that we pop, also, into the Wonderful Bakery, because (a) clearly, and (b) from the street we could see piles—piles!—of coloured confection. Upon closer inspection, the piles revealed themselves to be boxes and boxes of moon cakes and daifuku mochis, now that’s what the word “galore” was created for. Never was a shop so aptly named, and there were rainbow sponge cakes and Wife Buns and lotus seed biscuits and Traditional Wedding Cakes like no wedding cake I’d ever seen, for they were small shortcrust pastries filled with red bean paste, AND they were pink. You know I was reaching toward them with claws for hands, but Suzzan was sensible enough to keep her wits about us both. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, I forget that I can come back another day.

Back home, we cobbled together a late lunch to worthy the efforts of Joseph—no, wait, Joseph was a carpenter, not a shoesmith, oh, never mind—

we cobbled together a late lunch of zaru soba, roast duck, and sweet tomatoes, and who woulda thunk it, Japanese and Chinese and Italian go together no worries. PS, I know one of these days I am going to come home from Sainsbury’s with a bunch of water-tasting tomatoes, and then I will shake my fist at the sky, and then I will know to stop buying the fruit till summer swings ’round again, but for now we seem to be doing okay.

OH. I am forgetting—

I know this is already the longest blog entry in the world, but what can you do, we were celebrating the birthday, and the activities kept coming, one after the other, and it was just one of those friends-in-town sprees that was good feelings all over, enough to write down and store for a gloomy day—

I am forgetting that Suzzan also got, in Chinatown, a bag of tapioca pearls for bubble tea, which was an exciting moment because who makes bubble tea at home? We do, apparently; oh, Suzzan, you are a brave and an adventurous one, and you walk out into traffic without a care in the world. But, so. The bubble tea. Surprisingly easy, but also surprisingly time-consuming. FYI, you really need to boil those buggers for a good long while. You boil them all through the lunch preparation, and then through the eating of lunch, and then you boil them some more. We put them in glasses with jasmine green tea and sugar and semi-skimmed milk for a tasty treat, but still not rivalling the real Chinatown deal. We think maybe more sugar, and full-cream milk, or maybe condensed milk, who doesn’t love condensed milk. Next time, then.

Grace came by to pick us up, and she fondled my floor lamp and said “We love him”, which is why we like Grace.

(I knew a guy once who asked why I said “we” instead of “I”, but this guy, he showed up, unannounced, at my door at four one morning, so what does he know.)

Hem.

May I just say, about the lamp—the only things with which I have adorned the living room are Mr Lamp and a big white Ikea cushion. Otherwise, we are talking bare and spare and I like it like so. I like the lamp wire trailing, unabashed, like a line drawing, from the wall socket, and I like the big space in the middle of the room so I can lie down on the floor under the skylight. It looks like truth—because it looks like I just moved countries, and it looks like sometimes all I want to do is to be still, and read.

Grace? She came by to pick us up, and then we three headed up to Bloomsbury to adore Stephen Fry. The man was in a red bowtie, and a green cardigan buttoned over a comfortable belly. The jacket could have been tweed, or it may just have suggested it, I don’t remember. The hair flop, well, of course. He is a delightful one, that Stephen Fry, and he knows stuff. He makes the case for formality in poetry—to pay respect to tradition is not to become mired in it—and for the useless things that make a life worth living. Sometimes when a day without a job offer is followed by a day without a job offer and then by another day without a job offer, it slips my mind that I came here for the nebulous intangibles. I forget, sometimes, (I have a mind like a sieve, which is why I write—to remember), I forget that I have met a boy who makes me laugh, that today I had lunch with a tailor of bespoke shirts, that tomorrow I will learn to bake a ricotta tart, that next week I might be translating French on a film set, that in a couple of weeks I will get to watch Anthony Minghella’s “Madam Butterfly” at the Coliseum, that in a month I will be in Paris again.

Holy crap, you think it is cool crossing the river with Saint Paul’s on one side and Westminster on the other, wait ’til you cross the river with Saint Paul’s on one side and Westminster on the other, lit up in the night. Seeing the London Eye and Big Ben in lights to my right made me look out for the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, too, before I remembered I was some miles too far east.

“Stranded” at the National Film Theatre was good like yellowhite light through curtains threadbare and falling to the ground. A funny-looking girl with a fringe made me think about growing my hair out again. Also, I realise, sometimes you need a car that doesn’t go anywhere, and sometimes you need one that does.

This morning so far it has been drippy drizzly, but me and Dusty Springfield, we are doin’ good upstairs at Ray’s Jazz, where a girl is just high up enough, skimming the tops of the big red buses.

At the end of the work week—well, okay, half a work week—I remember now about mindless office work, about how you drain away, disappear in the mouse clicks, bleed between the papers filed—first alphabetically, then by month. One afternoon in the filing room, I threw my head back and groaned. The air vent in the ceiling was breathing, steadily, and a sheaf of papers on the cabinet top fanned, steadily.

At the end of, FINE, half a work week, I have a paper cut on my knuckle, and it stings.

It is good to be earning money again, though, and if I put together the money I earned this week with the money my grandmother sent for my birthday, it makes a sum EXACTLY EQUAL to the price of the Tabasco-coloured Marc Jacobs coat I’ve been having an affair with at Liberty the last couple of weeks, ha-ha!

+

Kilburn Friday night, Kilburn way the hell out, northwestish, in Zone Two, for Sichuan food. I’m not sure whose idea it was, Lulu’s or Mimi’s, because when Elaine said that her friends Lulu and Mimi were meeting us there, I was consumed by two more pressing questions: Are these their real names? and Are they poodles?

“I thought they were barmaids,” Shzr Ee said, so of course then I said: “Are they poodles dressed up as barmaids?” No, and no again, for one is a Harbin beautician and the other a Taiwanese filmmaker-slash–erhu student.

I think I need not tell you that five girls of varied Chineseness inside the neon-lit storefront of the improbably named Angele make for a rowdy table. The spaces left unfilled by Tsingtao bottles or the deep dishes of spicy whatnots were filled with smatterings and chatterings in Chinese and English and Hokkien, even, and ha ha ha all around. The English Mimi’s learned on the street comes out in the way she punctuates her sentences: “Ni kàn nà wèi rén, yeah?,....” And here I think it is appropriate to give special mention to Lulu’s goading Mimi on to say something: “Ní you shen me huà quài dian shuo, you shen mè pì quài dian fàng!” Now that’s Chinese poetry right there.

(And, P.S., if anyone knows the key commands for the first-sound and third-sound accents, don’t be shy to say.)

The Chinese-speaking. One of these days I’ll stop feeling guilty about how lamely I handle myself in the language. Lulu asked me what my mother tongue is, and I said “English”, but I don’t actually know what the answer is. What’s “mother tongue” supposed to mean these days? Ethnically, I’m Chinese. Ethnically, my mother’s Chinese. But if we’re talking Mother China—well, Mother China is a mother I’ve never known. It’s probably closer to the truth if I say my mother tongue is Singlish....

We were trying to figure out how to translate “superbitch” into Mandarin when the waiter boy (we were calling him da ge—big brother—by then) came by to refill our teapot. He adopted, teasingly, an expression of shocked sensitivities, so Lulu said not to listen to us, to which he said: “Wo bú yào ting ye bù ké yi”, he is sharp, that one.

Later, the wind blew us down grotty Kilburn High Road, past the faded Seventies coin-op laundries to a corner shop called Cookies and Cream. So apt a name to attract girls in search of dessert!, and with so many cakes on show!, even one, in the revolving showcase by the door, with a whole apple perched on top, and the entire thing drizzled with chocolate. Inside, there were pyramid cakes against orange sherbet walls, and tables of dark men nursing darker coffees. A grey layer of cigarette smoke divided the room up-down.

It wasn’t till quite some minutes in, after we’d sat down around a rubbery slice of apple custard tart, a rainbow-sprinkled cream cake at least a couple of days old, and a claggy pink confection, that someone raised the possibility that maybe, sshhh, MAYBE the cream cakes were FOR SHOW, and maybe it was OTHER CAKES for sale here, wink wink nudge nudge—and here we are talking maybe LADYCAKES, or CAKES WITH HERBAL SUPPLEMENTS. “No, lah, nooo,” I said, but I was shouted down, because look!, that girl in the corner!, sitting alone!, and smoking!, clearly, but CLEARLY she was a LADY OF THE NIGHT. Elaine was nervous that one guy was watching us over his espresso, but the thing is, I’d be watching us, too, five giggly Chinese girls in an Eastern European cake shop.

+

The weekend round-up, oh, there is so much to say and I haven’t been online in DAYS because of the job, the weekend round-up, quickly now, for I am popping off to see “Stranded” on the other side of the river in a bit, the weekend round-up has involved coffeehouse introductions to Jamaican guys; a teatime hello with Gigi, with plum tarts and two Emmanuels, and a fake rooster tied up in pink chiffon; a cheap ticket to Paris in a month—so cheap that apparently the train leaves at five-thirty in the morning, good going, Elaine; fish and chips and the largest, most luscious sticky toffee pudding around; late-night visits from a new friend and two newer friends, ending up, as one will, with loungeabouts on the big red carpet; and, oh, and maybe I’m going to be an extra in a student film.

This weekend there is a feeling of home. I think it was this afternoon in Bar Italia, with a mozzarella-tomato-basil panino and a cappuccino, and the guy behind the bar, the guy who looks like Michel Houellebecq, but Italian, he’d said “Next weekend, you and me, we go out, yeah?”; there was the panino, the cappuccino, the big Sunday paper, and the Sugababes on loud in the back, and the feeling was good, like a smile slowly spreading. Hold on to your hats, folks, there might be a Londoner in her yet.

What I want to know is, how come I was told to wear a suit to my temp job today, when there was this one woman in the office walking around all muffin-topped, her too-small T-shirt riding up over her torso all day so that the tattoo etched into the small of her back was on show for all and sundry?

Because I am a Professional, people. And hot damn, even after all my whining about Smart Casual, I got a white button-down shirt at the Gap the other day—and today, when Nai was showing me how to eat on the cheap among the throng of LSE students, I looked pretty okay waiting in line for a lunch-hour sandwich.

Today till Friday I am updating a company’s staff directory with each employee’s personal information that’s been changed over the past year. Data entry, it’s a funny thing. Well. It’s really not. It’s really mind-numbingly mind-numbing. But you get into a state of Zen—and wasn’t that some famous book?—Zen and the Art of Data Entry?—and then somewhere in between the left-clicks and the right-clicks, the employee numbers, 8006725 and 67382 and 519973, become Bela and Allan and Linda, and the Matrix appears.

They live all over, in storybook towns, Sunny This and Something-on-Sea and Thingummyshire. A surprising number of women have “Jane” as a middle name. Over the past year, someone’s mum died—and the call-in-the-case-of-an-emergency number changed. There were divorces, marriages, people moving out. Where someone once listed a wife as next-of-kin, it is now a brother. Hyphenated names become non-hyphenated, and “Married” becomes “Separated/Left”. But it is not all dire. “Widow” became “Married”. “Fiancé” became “Husband”. One man wrote, of his relationship to his next-of-kin: “Partner for 25 years”. One woman said to call, in the case of an emergency, Fiona, “my friend for more than 30 years”.

There was this one guy: thirty-one, a doctor, French, single. I entered his e-mail address. I wished the forms came with photographs.

Another guy wrote, in response to “Do you consider yourself to have a disability?” : Yes, sometimes I lose my balance. I know what he means.

In other news, so far this week I have been rejected from three jobs. Two I didn’t care about; one I did, very much. This means one rejection per day of the week. (And I’m remembering now that one of those rejections began: “Dear Name”. That’s cold.) Damn, no, FOUR jobs. Which means I’m overdrawn, doesn’t it? Or that I should have a job credit somewhere down the line? Something. Man, I never got into Economics. I took that one class at Uni ’cause I had to—and I made sure I took it with Mark Witte, ’cause he was cute.

I was planning to head out to South Kensington to watch Fellini’s “La dolce vita” at Ciné Lumière last night, but—as these things will happen—I ended up, instead, in a basement room lined with Korean video tapes, and a bowl of fierce red kimchi on the laminate table. How? Oh yeah, because I LIVE la dolce vita, ha ha ha.

Elaine knows things, secret things, like storefronts that look like hole-in-the-wall grocery stores, but that hide unlicensed restaurants in their concrete undergrounds. I say “restaurant”, but I mean “two tables and a collection of plastic stools against the wall, with room for karaoke off to the side, and a view of the cook slicing pork, very thinly, in the back”. I believe her text earlier in the day had said something like: “We are going for dinner, bi bim bop for £3.50, want to join us?” Say no more.

“Us” ended up being the roommates, Elaine and Nai and Dan, and they are cute, these three, they hang out together and discuss the virtues of Thai versus Japanese rice. It’s just nice is all, when people like people.

There was a red bean ice lolly for after, and then a walk to Kings Cross—through the library, past the park, down the funny alley where we had to bow our heads under the arch, after the fish-and-chip joint on the right—a walk up toward Killick Street for Faye Wong and fancy tea in a yellow kitchen.

Thing is, I still need to watch “La dolce vita”—and Maud, I know you are right now shaking your head and saying: “You don’t know your classics!” So. I have a big white wall and a recipe for smoked haddock pie—anyone wants to bring over a projector and the DVD, you are more than welcome to do so.

Disaster, and it’s not even noon yet. Number one, I am wearing red pants and purple shoes. It looked okay when I glanced in the mirror on the way out, but now it just looks cuh-ray-zee. Call in the clowns, people, just call in the bloody clowns. Number two, I rolled out of bed all grody-headed into the Internet café, where I ran into my hairdresser. It was like I’d just been called on in class, and I hadn’t done my homework.

Had to take a typing test today at the temp agency. Apparently I type a hundred words per minute, which was fast enough to render speechless the temp agency woman. I don’t know what an average typing speed is, so one-hundred-words-per-minute doesn’t really mean anything to me, but it sounded good, so I, when she announced this, I threw up my hands and cheered, which I think might have erased all earlier semblances of professionalism.

The earlier semblance of professionalism was dressed in a striped button-down and a black skirt. The geniuses over at Veronika Maine, they have made out of a black skirt an architectural statement conveying Efficiency and Trustworthiness. I assure you it is Dry Clean Only.

But that—give or take a suit, and a couple of shirts with buttons—is about it, professionally speaking, if we are speaking about my wardrobe. It was with some panic that I realised today I don’t have enough officewear to last me a week at a nine-to-five. My wardrobe is one half I’m-a-grad-student-hanging-out-at-the-library, one half I’m-a-flower, I’m-a-party-thrower, and-yes-I-can-catch-the-bus-in-these-heels. That, my mathematical fiends, leaves no halves I-really-like-to-photocopy-and-may-I-collate-too?.

Meanwhile, a quick look-see in the shops revealed one thing uglier than the next, sensible separates, horrible, horrible. Dear god, don’t tell me I have to buy a white button-down shirt.

The rain after my interview at the temp agency meant that I had to skip across the street to Liberty for shelter; Liberty, where all is LUSH and GORGEOUS and COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE for the office, and where they have a WHOLE ROOM OF CHOCOLATE. The Carnaby Street store on a rainy weekday afternoon is a living toyhouse for grown-up girls: Edwardian coinpurses and art deco bedside clocks downstairs, while secret staircases lead to Marc Jacobs coats in orange and green and blue.

I was slathering egg white on the shortcrust pastry with my bare hands, thinking, “Just as well Hens isn’t here to see this” when the doorbell buzzed downstairs.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of having to set up a kitchen all anew. Thing is, I’d have a pastry brush if I’d just bought that issue of delicious magazine at the bookshop last week, ’cause this month the magazine is giving away free pastry brushes. But, oh, they are so evilicious as to offer said brush in blue (sky), or green (mint), or pink (pink), which meant I had to lay all three out in front of me on the magazine rack at Borders and look back and forth and back and forth till I felt ill, at which point I had to say to myself, Leave, just leave, don’t buy a bloody thing, just bloody leave.

Oh, well, or I guess I could just go buy a pastry brush.

In any case.

The dinners have begun, people; come, come, do not be shy. Last night: a chicken tagine in an orange pot—I was flinging in spices without a care in the world, cumin and coriander and sweet paprika, even, oh, how we like large stewy pots; a peach tart, the recipe copied, so covertly—so covertly and quietly, quieter even than a mouse, as quiet, perhaps as a mouse breaking into a mouse’s house—the recipe copied in a corner upstairs at the Borders down the street, from Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion, which, honest, I would have bought, had I an extra thirty-five pounds fighting their way out of my pockets; wine all around; and tea on the carpet, which is to say, we sat around, post-dinner, on the carpet drinking tea, BUT ALSO someone, who will remain unnamed, (hi, Henny!), spilled tea on the carpet, it’s a party now!.

(Although I suppose one could say it’d already been a party much earlier than that, like maybe when me and Henny and Elaine broke out the Cointreau, waiting for the boys to arrive.)

The company was half-unknown, which is to say, Henny’d said, Let’s have dinner, and I’d said, Okay, and didn’t have a clue who was coming. Eventually, around the table: Hens, of course; Elaine, who, apparently, is moving in; Loke, who drove; Nai, who put on the Flaming Lips; and Dan, who said, when I asked where he was coming from: “Notting Hill, and I’m English.”

At one point Nai and I were talking about Justin Timberlake and the chatter in the rest of the room stopped, which goes to show that no matter how much one discusses international politics, evaluating implementation this and regulation that and NGOs the other, one ALWAYS has an ear open for what really matters.

(You may mock me with the Justin Timberlake, but you don’t know how much I don’t know. The job I have not applied for, and now the deadline has come and gone, and I think this is for the best, is to be a staff writer at Smash Hits magazine.

See, before I came out to London, my sister, oh-please-tell-me-some-more-good-ideas, said: “Maybe you could go work for Smash Hits!” This because, once upon a time in the tropics of my teens, I wrote a letter to Smash Hits and mailed it all the way to far-off Britain, AND THEY PRINTED IT. I don’t remember now the precise fascinating content of my letter, but the editor’s response read: “What exactly do they put in the cereal in Singapore?”

And then I got out here and saw the job listing for staff writer, calling for someone who knows what teenage girls want, and it was CLEAR to me that ALL THE PLANETS WERE ALIGNED. Still, a girl’s got to do her research, so I handed over two pounds at the newsagent’s and got a current issue of the rag. Two pounds in London can get you approximately nothing at Harvey Nichols, OR an issue of Smash Hits, complete with an extra signed poster book (“BUFF BOYS SPESH”) and a set of eight—EIGHT!—smelly coloured pens.

How I tore open the box of pens at home!, like an Eighties-era glue addict in the void decks of Singapore—revelling in the grape-smelling purple pen, the lemon yellow, the strawberry red....

I was paging through the signed poster book later, as confused as if I had been handed a flipbook of Turkish film stars: McFly? Who? Nathan from One Tree Hill? What? Lee Ryan? Where AM I? And then the magazine: page after page of shiny happy pop stars, and I must have known maybe one of them. By the time I tried to refer to the group Girls Aloud by calling them Boys Alive, Thusha had just about fallen over laughing at my plight.

Maybe I should have saved the pens for after....)

So,

but.

Dinner.

At another point I was quizzing Loke about his wheels: “Tell me about your car,” I said. “Is it actually a Vespa?”

“No,” he said.

“Is it a Mini?”

“No.”

“Well then I don’t care, do I.”

But I did, really, so he showed me a picture of it, (I know, right?), and I said: “Oh! It’s cute!” But his brow furrowed, so I said: “Oh, no, wait. It’s...hot?”, which didn’t seem to go over much better either.

(And I’m sorry, but now that I am talking about the Vespa, I remember that a guy came to see about the boiler yesterday afternoon, and, look, you think “Meh, guy coming to see about the boiler, he’ll be large and grey and boring,” don’t you, and you dress in smudgy glasses and your raggiest potter-around-the-house clothes. Well, DON’T GO THAT ROUTE, my poppets, because CLEARLY when I thought “large and grey and boring”, I was thinking about the BOILER. Guy-who-came-to-see-about-the-boiler was hot, the kind of hot where you forget what you were saying, the kind of hot spelt H-O-T-T. Matthew from Brighton, with tattoos up his arm. And last night he was going to Tooting, where his brother will do him more. “I’ll probably get these flames finished,” he said, “and add another skull here.” “So no happy tattoos, then,” I said, to which he said: “All these skulls are smiling!” HA HA HA!

Oh, but, with the Vespa—he’d said he rides bikes, (I know, I know, not Vespas), with the Vikings motorcycle club, and I said, eyes darting around and wide with possibilities: “So many questions!” And my first one—I went to journalism school, so you see I am well-trained—my first question was: “Do you wear the hats? With, y’know—” and here I mimed a pair of Viking horns smiling up from above my ears.

COME ON, you were thinking it, too.

The answer, by the way, comes with a bit of a bemused smile, and is: No.

Also: They go biking all over Europe, and it’s boys-only, no girls allowed. “What if they’re just hanging on off the back?” I said. “Oh, that’s alright then.” “Well, well, well,” I said. “Well, well, well.”)

But,

so.

Last night? Dinner party for guests unknown? A-plus all around: Henny and Elaine and I are crashing a research trip to Morocco; Nai and I are going to have a “Chungking Express” screening party, oh, Wong Kar Wai you are so clever; and, plus, now I have a date for the Seu Jorge show on the thirty-first.

For some reason, this afternoon is punctuated with exclamations coming from the houses ’round back. I can distinguish two.

Imagine a stout British biddy. She lives by the sea, has rosy cheeks and thick ankles. She smells of lavender, maybe, she is soft, and her grandchildren love her. She is visiting Venice for the first time, the trip a gift from her sons. She is with a small group of British biddy friends, one of whom is named Margaret, and likes a spot of whisky in her late-night coffee. Just past noon, they have stepped into a restaurant on the Piazza San Marco for lunch. They found the listing in their Fodor’s guide. (The black ink risotto was especially recommended.) One of the waiters—he has the eyes of a young man—used to the summer rush of tourists, has just come up to this group of biddies, and has reached out with a theatrical cheekiness to pinch Margaret’s bottom. Her eyes widen in surprise, her hand goes up to her mouth. She exclaims. That is one.

Imagine a pirate. Not Johnny Depp—an older one, a less dapper one. The stubble on his chin is white. His parrot has just leaned over his shoulder and pecked the last bit of mackerel off his plate. He exclaims. That is the other.

Bar Italia for a late lunch Sunday. A barstool by the door, and the paper folded first longways then shortways. A cappuccino, and a panino hot off the grill. When the kitchen brought up my order, the waiters yelled: “Mortadella!” Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta on the big screen in the back. Plus the clink of thick glasses and sturdy crockery behind the bar, and the ring ring ring of the old brass register up front.

Holy moley, you pack up the basket with

an Ikea tablecloth-picnic-blanket;

a bottle of water;

a handful of squirrel snacks (where the squirrel, really, is you, and you are the sort of squirrel who eats not only handfuls of walnuts and dried apricots, but also squares of Green and Black’s orange-spiced bittersweet chocolate);

the Observer; and

a pullover, because for many years you were a Brownie and you like to be prepared;

you pack up the basket and you head to the park, and what you really don’t expect, coming in from Trafalgar Square, is horses!, horses! all in a row, and their riders in brilliant red and shining silver.

We were gathered around watching the horses do not very much at all, and I think I may have muttered under my breath something like, “Well...this is fun and all...”, when a suited gent ambled up and explained that they were going to be shooting a film in a bit.

“It’s called ‘Children of Men’,” he said, “and it’s starring Clive Owen—” and here a group of English ladies said: “Ooh!”

“I’m glad someone’s heard of him,” he said. “They’re filming at Scotland Yard right now, and they should be here at one—” and here he looked at his watch, (mine said 12:54), and said, “—but I don’t believe it.”

Me, I like my celebrity sightings to come to me. Like that time when Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke and their kid came, in happier times, and sat down to lunch across from us at the Coffee Shop in Union Square. Or when Ryan and I were walking through the Met and Kofi Annan was hanging out, too. Though I’ll say, that time, I didn’t know whom Ryan was pointing out. He may have said, all quiet-like: “Look, look,” and chances are good I looked and said: “Yuh-huh?”

In any case.

So I wasn’t about to wait around for Clive Owen, especially as it’s not till right now writing this that I realise this whole time in my mind I’ve been picturing Colin Firth.

Oh.

Clive Owen.

Yuh.

I left the horses and found myself a sunny spot and spread out my blanket and set about updating myself with all sorts of current affairs, which is to say, I kept an eye on the paper while I needled CC via SMS till she rang me. (Look, I was reading. It was somewhere between the story on the crack-addicted squirrels of Hoxton and the article on Saddam Hussein’s upcoming trial that she bit.)

We talked, a daytime sister and a nighttime sister, and a small boy skipped by singing, to the tune of nothing, “Hey-hey-hey, hey-hey-hey.” He wore a sweater the colour of the sky.

I remember looking around, at one point, and seeing a flash of red and gold—and if you know anything about anything, you know that a flash of red and gold means square shoulders and smart epaulettes; means, Gather ’round, moppets, the band is come to town.

And then it was one thing after another: more horses, and a zebra, and a sheik leading a camel. I don’t know which Volkswagen they were all tumbling out from, but, man, this is a Sunday in the park. A lady in a veil rode by, side-saddle. Another one, in a magenta concoction on her head, sat in a horse carriage. There was a very manicured poodle, too, who could only have been named Lord Nigel Bigglesworth.

Clive Owen, what movie is this?!

In between takes, the fancy ladies in their capes and parasols sat on the lawn, while the nobleman dipped into his tweed jacket for his cellphone. “Action!” they called, and the band was brassy and jaunty like a Sunday afternoon.

No milk for ready money—all the stores open at noon. That’ll teach me to say, “I’ll go to the shop tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.” No milk means no cappuccino, no Triple Chocolate Crunch cereal.

Still.

There are fresh figs from yesterday at Borough Market, and a chocolate brioche for lightly toasting, and sweet peaches, one pound for a whole bowl, from the hollering fruit man. (He was hollering: “Peaches, peaches, one pound a bowl”, which was appropriate, I think.)

“D’you think this’ll be enough for a tart?” I’d said. “Yes,” he’d said, “oh and I like a good tart meself.” “Hur hur hur,” we’d said. “Hur hur hur.”

Today the sun is out, for the paper and the park.

What is a good show to watch on occasion of my birthday—

(I know, technically no longer my birthday, but if you know something about me it is that I have a tendency to celebrate my birthday over a month, and a month of birthday celebrations leaves little time for technicalities)—

is the film “Kinky Boots”, which, (a), opens with David Bowie on “The Prettiest Star”, and, (b), features disco, camp disco like crazyboots, and one, two, hell, I don’t know, I lost count of how many montages there were altogether. And in a shoe factory yet!

It was a good show on occasion, also, of one month in London, because when Charlie Price explains that Northampton is in the Midlands, and Lola says: “I’m from Soho, darling, Tottenham Court Road is the Midlands”, I understood it, HA HA HA!

After the movie let out, Thusha and I hopped on and hopped off the hop-on, hop-off bus that took us to dinner at Mango Tree,

(“Where are we going?” I’d said, and a normal person might have said: “A Thai restaurant some streets west of here”, or maybe: “Belgravia, it’s fancy in those parts”, or even, if she wanted to be mysterious: “Mind your step getting on the bus, luv, and wait for the surprise”. But Thush, because she is Thush, wasted nary a moment to say: “The arse end of Buckingham Palace.”)

where, somewhere between the mojito and the tom yum gai, one of the two guys at the table next to us started a chit-chat across the narrow space. Maybe it was as easy as “How are you?”, I don’t remember now, but we were chatting up a storm by the time the green curry and the pineapple rice arrived, me and Thush and the dudes: Jon and Jerry from Pittsburgh, good ol’ guys from back in “the States”, business-tripping through Europe.

They took turns telling us stories about setting off the German-language GPS in their rental car; about hanging out at the Amsterdam sex shows with Bud from “Married...with Children”; about Oktoberfest, and the Germans rocking out to Frank Sinatra. FYI, the latest word from our European explorers is that in Lichtenstein they call a mobile phone a “handy”. “Call me on my handy,” Jerry mimicked, “on my mobile. Goddamn Verizon doesn’t work out here.”

Meanwhile, “I love Amsterdam,” Jon kept saying. “I really loved Amsterdam.”

“Dude,” I said, holding an invisible joint to my lips, “you’re saying it like you really loved Amsterdam.”

They were a-laugh-a-minute, because they were American; because they were in “sales”; because Jon quoted, like a maniac, from “Zoolander” and wore a party as a shirt: red and white spots on a black button-down, and the cuffs folded up to reveal a flower print.

Somewhere along the way, Thush slid in that it was my birthday, so they bought us a round of Bangkok Fizzes. We clinked glasses: “Pip-pip,” I said, to which Jerry said, “Pip-pip? What the hell is that?” “I don’t know,” I said, then, “No,” I said, “actually I think it means ‘good-bye’. But it sounds good here.” “I love it,” he said, “I’m gonna say it all the time when I get back to the States.”

Jon insisted on paying our bill, which was sweet, and then he gave me the chocolate that came with it—which means he rocks. Midnight just gone, we pointed them in the direction of the Victoria tube station and waved across the street. “Pip-pip!” we called down Grosvenor Place. “Cheerio!”

I want to see the movie of these two guys making their way through Europe, Jerry the straight-guy foil to Jon’s spiky-haired party boy. “I like lounge,” Jon’d said, and here he’d grooved to an un-lounge-like beat: “Dk-chk dk-chk dk-chk dk-chk.” Jerry’d be played by John Cusack, maybe, and Jon by, well, maybe Bud from “Married...with Children”. That bit where the Dutch guy offers Jerry a line of coke? We’ll call that “inspired by a true story”.

They head back to America tomorrow, tonight wrapping up their ten days on trains, planes, and automobiles around Europe. “I’m going to watch ‘Eurotrip’ all weekend,” Jon’d said, and he probably will, too.

I tease, but really we liked these American boys, because, COME ON, who doesn’t like goofy American boys. Especially tonight, especially after having had to hear, a surprising number of times, actually, over the past month, how disliked Americans are here. Tonight, I say: Get over it, people, I don’t have time for this drama.

It’s like I said when I’d been here a week and Ren was telling me the Brits nurtured a distaste for the Americans: it’s not rational, it just doesn’t make sense, you can’t really hate a nationality. But then I kept hearing it, from all quarters, and for a while there I found myself trying to tone down everything I said or did—and I’m not even American! At the end of a series of particularly frustrating days, Thush called to say something about something, and ended up having to hear me bluster about: “I just want to stomp around my house and swear in my goddamn American accent!”

I was silenced, I suppose, I silenced myself. Didn’t know what to say, or, really, how to say it, even.

But then, after so many speechless days, I wondered why I was doing this, why I was suddenly so hyperaware of my words and my actions, because, sure, I think there’s some embarrassment to being an American in the world these days, what with the dodgy president who, I see, today, according to the headline in the Guardian, claims that God told him to invade Iraq—

uhhh—

so, okay, yes, el presidente gives Americans a bad name—

but the thing is, “Americans” is different from “an American”—(and a New Yorker, well, that’s something else completely)—and the thing is, I have very many brilliant American friends, and America has taught me a lot and given me a lot and, hot damn, America is alright.

London is unexpected in ways like this, by which I mean I did not think—and it was foolish of me to not consider this, I guess—that leaving America would make me nostalgic for it, and, more significantly, make me think about what America is to me, and about how much America has formed me in the last ten years. I spent the last ten years fighting against it whenever someone said I was too American, and now here I am defending it.

Anyway.

Funny thing, twenty-nine: one day you wake up and you’re twenty-nine, and you think, I don’t have time for this drama, and you just get on with it—

because it never ends, does it?, for I still remember that girl, Chandra Whatshername, my first year at university in the American Midwest, oh, she was mean, that one, she flicked back her hair, long and brown and straight, and she said, because I didn’t have an American twang, “Why don’t you move to England, since you like it so much?”—

you just get on with it, Chinese eyes and a funny accent, and—pointy purple flats, Kishimoto sneaks, starry cowboy boots, it just doesn’t matter—you’re out the door and into the world, eight gold bangles jangling down the street.

Jonny Goodrum from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this goes out to you.

...and Boston, and Chicago, and Oakland. AAAAAA we LUV birthdays over here, and today the huge-a-licious bouquet of lilies in pink and white, But SO mysterious a bouquet, for it arrived unsigned, and of course I have WAY TOO MANY admirers to figure out who it’s from....

I woke to a white sky today, but white also means teeth in a big smile, and my iBook, and icing on a coconut layer cake, so that’s alright.

Up the narrow stairway on Charing Cross,

jazz and cowboy boots,

and twenty-nine rocks so far.

Henny whisked me off with her dad to Greenwich (“It’s the Extended Asian Family lah,” she said.) yesterday, Greenwich of the Mean Time, even though when she first mentioned it on the phone my immediate thought was: “Connecticut?”

There is a catamaran—a birthday catamaran!—that takes you up—down?—the Thames, well, east along the Thames, in any case, under the jolly Tower Bridge—you can say all you want about its gruesome history, and blood running down the stones, but today it is a jolly bridge, there is no other word for it, held up as it is by bright blue girders, and crossed to and fro by toy-like double-deckers in primary
red—

under the Tower Bridge and eastward, along the winding waterway lined with the solid industrial beauty of oldtime wharves, all those stores of rice and coffee and tea from back in the day now million-dollar lofts of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, Eames cabinets, Aalto glassware.



Not an hour out of London, a funny feeling of movie-set simulation. A great old tea clipper to greet you at the pier. Windows of curious curios. The regal curves and lines of the Old Royal Naval College, and its wide central paths. And the past—save the Starbucks by the old Gipsy Moth pub—the past seeped in and in, and became real in a way that hushed us but for the pebbled ground crunching beneath our feet. We looked up, to see Time holding Truth up to the light, to see Thames as a god.



What is an unexpected discovery in Greenwich is that such a post as ASTRONOMER ROYAL exists. We want to be the Astronomer Royal, Henny and me, even though, with no more than three-quarters of an “A”-level Physics course under our belts, we would fail so deeply, so deeply and hilariously, really, so—wait for it—so astronomically. Our pronouncements would have to begin: “Okay. So. Okay, y’know light years, right?” We would keep having to take moments to consider the wild trippy fantastical reality of the stars and the galaxies, time and space and the great beyond. We wouldn’t be able to stop ourselves saying: “Astronomical! That’s astronomical!” Meanwhile, we’d show up late to work every day ’cause we’d have trouble reading the twenty-four-hour clock. This is a true story: me and Henny standing by the massive galvanomagnetic clock outside the Royal Observatory, just outside the courtyard where the red line designates zero degrees east-west, where the latitudes are marked so you see Hanoi and Havana on the same plane—me and Henny comparing the Royal Observatory’s galvanomagnetic clock to the time on our mobile phones, saying: “But it’s off! It’s HOURS off!”



Down the hill and to the left, we followed the walking tour map CC sent me to the thick glass panes and deep green storefront at Number Forty-five Greenwich Church Street: Goddards Pie House, where I passed on the daily jellied eels (I passed on the stewed eels, too) (also the pie, mash and eels) and headed straight for a hot Cornish pastie, mash and beans on the side, and gravy over the lot. We had our designs on a rhubarb crumble and custard, but a certain sensibility and tightening trousers reined us in.



Back in London, though, there was time—there is always time—for tea and jam doughnuts. Some hours after it’d all begun, we were standing in a red doorway, unable to say good-bye.

And what with the texts and e-mails and calls and cards from Bangkok and Brooklyn; Singapore and Sydney; New York, New York—this must be what it’s like to be a little bit a rockstar.

One month in, I live here now:

I am up the stairs, and up the stairs some more.

Late Saturday morning ’round the corner at Diana’s Diner, there are potatoes in their jackets, and a pool of baked beans. The hot chocolate is from a packet. The man in charge is dark-eyed, with big hands. He calls us “beautiful people”: “Yes, beautiful people, what can I get you.” Over in one corner the skinny girl reads a detox-diet book through her cloud of cigarette smoke. At another table, a mussy-haired guy in fitted jeans and the Financial Times.

The sign in the window at my local chippy reads: “jam sponge banana fritter sticky toffee pudding £2.50”. Nights, they turn on the globe lights strung in the trees so it looks like the birds are having a party.

For weeks now the clock at my bank has had a handwritten note pasted on its face: SORRY!, THE CLOCK IS BROKEN. NOW IS THE TIME TO MAKE YOUR OWN TIME.

Tomorrow I turn twenty-nine.

I finally made it to the Kahlo exhibit at the Tate Modern today, just days before it closes. There’s that one where there’s two of her, hearts exposed; and the one with Diego, and her feet so little; and the ones with the spider monkeys; and always she is staring, staring. A vivid flatness, and her black eyes.

In the museum store, they were selling a book I designed. I won’t make a bigger deal out of what was not, ultimately, such a big deal, but, I have to say, that felt pretty good.

Walking back along the South Bank, I somehow missed my bridge. The long way home, then, and it’s nice when mistakes like this happen. Back lanes and patches of sun.

Cara called, out of nowhere, this afternoon—she’d gotten my number from a mutual friend. It’s a funny thing: we were never very close back in school in Singapore—we were friendly, sure, but you know how it is, everyone’s got their own posse, and the two of us never really hung out. And then we graduated secondary school, and she went one way, and I quite another.

So it really was a surprise to hear her voice down the line this afternoon as I was tossing some mushroom and chicken in the pan. I thought maybe she was someone from the employment agency, ’cept she didn’t say “—and I saw this really great listing and thought of you.” And I don’t know why she called, really—maybe just to say a quick hello as she blew through town—but all of a sudden we were making plans for Italian in Soho.

And it’s funny how things just fall into place—even things that begin, tentatively, “So what happened after IJ?” “IJ” is our once-upon-a-time, sixteen-year-old Convent girls in white blouses and blue pinafores. Twelve years to catch up over pasta and Primitivo. We talked about the ends of six-year relationships, and the starts of infatuations with European boys; about being expats in New York, in Tokyo, in London—and about being expats in our own homeland; about being in awe of our school friends—the one who is heading up a hospital’s speech therapy department, the one who is saving the world in Aceh. Dessert bought us extra time. And we talked about how we all, it seems, are slowly, surely, in our own time, on our own terms, finding our own ways back home.

Some three, four hours later, a tight hug on the corner of Charing Cross and Old Compton—and then she went her way, and I quite another.

In other news, my horoscope in Sunday’s Observer Magazine said to not give in to my “Libran indolence” this week, so I’ve been camped out at Foyle’s for the free Internet, applying myself to applying for a job. There’s one I want this week, and it’s ideal in many ways—children’s books, for one; and a six-month contract, for two, that means that in six months I can maybe take off, because why not, to Spain.

In other other news, I finally remembered to get some cheese today, a nutty, bitey Saint Gall and a small ashy mound of Dorstone, and they each taste a little bit like heaven.

P.S. Also, I have just discovered heaven is hiring.