“See,” she said, and she took a piece of paper out from her jeans pocket. She unfolded it to show two perpendicular lines for roads, and two Xs – one for the Cockfosters Tube stop, one for Parkside Farm. “We just walk straight along Cockfosters Road, then we turn right on Ferny Hill, and it’ll be right there.”

“Okay!” I said. “This is gonna be great.”

I remember now, back in April, when my family was in town, Papa and Mowmy and CC and the kid, and we drove down south to the coast to get the ferry to the Isle of Wight. I’d sat in the front to navigate, the road atlas on my lap. “You’ll want to turn right in, um, a finger-width,” I’d say, and my father was happy to oblige. Perspective, it’s funny thing. Because two perpendicular lines for roads, go straight on one and turn right on the other, they sure don’t tell you anything about how long those perpendicular lines go for.



Past the Five Oaks Residential Care for Elderly Gentlefolk, past the Amazing Maize Maze, we went down the winding country road with blind curves and no sidewalk, past the wheat fields wide and brown – wheat fields! Not a half-hour Tube ride out of central London! – past the cows sitting in the shade, past that bit where I walked in the grass and Nora had to yell, “Watch out – they’re nettles!”, past the tiger butterfly, we’d lost track of time by then, it was hot and there were no other pedestrians for miles, we turned left at the PYO sign in the shape of a strawberry.

“This is gonna be great,” I said.

We had green baskets, and we were deep in the rows of blackberry plants, and Nora said, “And the thing is, you don’t know they are full of worms!”

“Um?” I said, and I paused in the blackberry picking.

“Yes!” she said. “Lots of tiny worms! I was making blackberry jam with my aunt, and you put the sugar in and you boil, and all the worms rise to the top. You can’t see them otherwise, but they’re there.”

I had a blackberry in my hand and I was looking very closely at it. “Um,” I said. “Wum.” I was looking very hard, and the blackberry was still.

“I see no worms,” I said.

“Because they’re tiny!” she said, and she popped a blackberry in her mouth. “Mmm,” she said, and then held another out to me. “Try this,” she said, as if I was wearing a T-shirt that said “I am mad for wormberries”.

“Get away from me!” I said, but after, quietly, I picked a fat, ripe one, checked it for signs of wormy life, then, satisfied, ate it: sweet berry goodness.



We went up the fields and down the fields, blackberries first, then raspberries – the strawberries were on their way out. We pulled onions out of onion-scented ground and rifled about for tomatoes, orange turning red.

The wind carried on it a familiar lilt, and I turned to look. “Those people are Singaporean,” I said, and, as if to oblige, the man in shorts and sandals said to his wife: “Eh this raspberry inside got hole.” “Yah what, raspberry,” the woman said. “Inside the hole got ants,” the man said.



We poked around in the zucchini plants – have you ever seen a zucchini plant? It is amazing, like life is amazing. You know sometimes you go to a restaurant and they have zucchini flowers? They are from the zucchini plant! Yes, smug ones, now it seems so obvious. But you cannot say it is clear when you see it, black ink on a thick off-white menu. Me, I’d never seen zucchini flowers except on a dinner plate. Saturday, the zucchini flowers were on the zucchini plants, yellow and floaty like a dress for the big day at the horse races, and – wait for it – you think you know but you have no idea – zucchini flowers grow out of zucchini ass. This is a true story, and, now you know, life is amazing.

“This is amazing,” I said, because it was.

We picked till we were all picked out, then Nora washed her feet at the steel pipe. Then we went past the tiger butterfly, past the nettles, past the cows, past the combine harvester in the wheat fields, down the shady country road to the Ferny Hill Tea Rooms, where the waitress brought us milkshakes.

There’d been the grassy walks and there’d been sun all day, and we were very quiet on the train home. There was energy enough to wash the stickiness off me before I fell, heavily, into bed.

I tell you what, though: today is tomorrow, I have slept, and now there will be jam for days.

Well, I’ll tell you, life sure is interesting, there is an Italian in my house. He is Claudio, with dark, laughing eyes. He is the boyfriend of a girl I know a little bit, but who is also the boy’s BFF. I hadn’t met him before Thursday night when he moved in, but sometimes you figure: Someone needs a bed, I have an extra bed, why not. I know this might sound familiar to some of you, but truly I think this will be different from Operation Julia.

Julia, she was a friend of a friend of a friend who arrived late one night with a large rucksack on her back. I told her to make herself at home – a phrase I never use, so I was surprised to find it coming out of my mouth – so she spent the next so many days packing herself take-away meals from my lunch provisions. Her second night in town, I came home to find her on my computer, drinking the Mariage Frères. “Hello,” she said, “want some tea?” I thought I had walked into someone else’s flat by mistake.

She was charming, though, Julia, who brought a box of wine as a thank-you gift and then drank most of it. She told us stories of the people she met in London – an aging ex-model, recently single, who wanted to move to Paris for a life-change, an exuberant Australian whom she out-drank one night. You knew that there would be a movie, you knew that Angelina Jolie would play her, or, wait, not Scarlett Johansson, but what’s the name of that girl who wears terrible terrible clothes that the fashion people love? Bloomers with heels, that sort of thing? Chloë Sevigny. “I wish I could be Julia,” Laureen said, some months after Julia had moved out. “So relaxed, so unhindered, so French, so oblivious.”

Claudio will be different, I think. For one, he brought me cheese. For two, he plays me vintage Vinicio Capossela – and sings along.

His English is sort of half-past-six, which is charming – in a different way that Julia was charming – and doesn’t seem to be a problem. Yesterday I was trying to explain to him about the berry picking this weekend. I said: “We are going? To pick?” – and here a frantic digging motion here, I tell you I was never good at charades. Where is Doug when you need him! – “Berries? Um. Berries? Fragola?” And he said: “Fragola! You are going to look for fragola!” “Ya!” I said, and he said: “Carini!!!”

“Yes,” I said, “we found a farm, and we are going to pick berries.” “You are going to pick berries,” he said, contemplating, “for a farmer?”

Where is my Under the Tuscan Sun book contract, I ask you.

The boy he is in the south of France, and he calls and sends texts that say, essentially, “It is hot”, “I am doing nothing”, “This is great”, “We are going swimming later”. Evidently he cannot say or write more because he is in such a state of relaxation that what he offers already requires some great effort. I was talking to him the other day, and I said, “Alors quand tu dis que vous faites rien, genre, vous faites rien ? Mais rien rien rien ?” “Rien,” he said, and if he were a cat he would also have been licking the last of the cream from his whiskers. I am going to be in the south of France, me too, in some weeks, so I said, with some concern: “But me,” I said, “I do things.” “We will,” he said, “teach you to do less.”

It has come to this, you see: some nights ago I looked at the hour and realised bedtime was long gone, and there was work yet to be done. I said to myself, then: “I can sleep on the train to work tomorrow morning.” I think I did it, too.

Tuesday night I was planning to chair a panel, then Wednesday night I chaired a panel. It gets easier every time I do it. Mia’d asked me, last month, when I chaired last month’s panel, if I was any good at this public speaking thing. I’d wiped my palms on my skirt, probably, and said something like: “Rurgh.” “Yeah, I know,” she’d said, “last time I had to do it I thought I was going to throw up in my mouth.”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth then, and I didn’t throw up in my mouth Wednesday night; and Wednesday night I only trembled once, and briefly, rather than throughout the first half-hour. So I am not perfect, but I am certainly practicing.

After the panels, though, everything is relaxed and you go to the pub and the only thing to worry about is when dinner will happen. I don't know how they do it, these jolly Englishpeople – how do you do it, jolly Englishpeople? – but they seem happy to sit about and drink and natter for hours on end with no dinner in sight. No mention of minted broad beans, or sugar snap peas tossed with sesame seeds; no references to small clay dishes of grilled sardines, no hankerings for puddings sweet or savoury; no words spoken, even, about a sausage on a stick. Olive says it is because I don’t drink beer, because apparently beer would fill me up quick, but the thing is, beer smells like pee, whereas the orange-passionfruit J20s are sweet and orange, and generally cost less than two pounds a pop. (FYI, one day you might think to try the apple-melon J2O, partly because it is green. Do not. It tastes green.)

I was telling Doug, Wednesday night at the Pitcher and Piano, that I am going berry picking this weekend with Nora – yes! City girls go berry picking! O, how the farmers will laugh – and he proceeded – he is full of surprises, this Doug – to show me the different ways of picking berries. His wrists were dexterous, and nuanced. “Blueberries,” he said, and his fingers made quick, snapping-picking motions. “Blackberries,” he said, and, with thumb and forefinger close together, he slid his hand down a fragile and an imaginary branch. “Strawberries,” he said, and rifled in imaginary bushes thick with berries deep red like the deepest red of jewels.

Time was, the early hours of the a.m. found us in the dim light of dreams. New York City was ours, one night we were in some hookah joint in the East Village and he popped a set of mega headphones on my ears and made me listen to the new Missy Elliott. Then there was that other time, in Williamsburg, and that guy, Mark Something, someone as cute as that don’t need more than “Mark”, anyway, one of the Omaha crew, Mark Something, was there too, and Conor Oberst was very drunk. Another time we were sitting on the stone monument at the Ninth Street entrance to Prospect Park. It must’ve been three, or four. It was cold, the way it is at three, or four, and I couldn’t light his cigarette with Schmio’s piece-a-shit souvenir lighter. So many nights, I remember, he hailed me a taxi, then shut the yellow door after me. The Manhattan lights, from the Brooklyn Bridge, were always on. I left, he left, the stories are different now.

If it is a nice day for walking, I go past where I’d normally turn for the West Finchley Tube stop, and I keep on truckin’ down Ballards Lane to Finchley Central. It’s a funny thing, Finchley: up by where I work, you find the klatsches of expatriate Japanese mums dropping their kids off at school; continue southwards on Ballards Lane long enough, and there’re the drunks slapping each other in the street. Today, a fresh-faced flower of a girl in a pink tank top and the smallest of skirts was handing over money to a stumbly gent so he’d buy her a beer.

There’s a grocery store I pass sometimes, when it’s a nice day for walking. The Aroma. The hand-painted lettering on one of the side doors reads, from doortop to doorbottom, white on black: WE SELL POLISH GREEK TURKISH IRANIAN PRODUCE. A stand-alone signboard out front says: PRODUKTY. In the last so many weeks, they’ve had a large wire bin of giant watermelons by the entrance. The cut halves show a luscious red, like sin.

I had never gone into the Aroma, though I have thought of it often—but I have work to do at home tonight, so of course I was procrastinating like the best of them. I might’ve stopped in the Tasties caff, even, a greasy spoon with laminated menus and Technicolour food photographs, if I hadn’t already planned a chicken-zucchini bake for dinner.

O!, foreign-produce grocery stores!, how you never fail to disappoint! I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: the world is an amazing place. So many treasures in one little hidey-hole: the Attiki honey, yes; and the collection of halloumi, sure; but also the buckets of yoghurt—truly, buckets!, with handles!; the selection of preserved cabbage leaves, a small army of squat glass jars; the aluminium tubes of varied hams and meaty spreads; and, CC, are you listening?, Ülker enough to make a girl wild-eyed in the narrow aisles.

There will be pistachio halva tonight, moppets, and this weekend, “the best kind of coffee, roasted and pulverized for the people”.

I had one pie per hand and I was stepping, delicate-like, through the crowd, and when I found Suz she was grinning because the pies had come home to roost. One was Thai Chook, which was a Thai green curry pie, who knew this was possible?, and the other was the spicy lamb, because I don’t know how to turn down lamb, and this one you couldn’t even see, really, because of the mushy peas and gravy. The mushy peas were minted, and perfect. “Mushy peas are sooo tasty,” I said. “How come ah?” I said, and then I said, “How can we make this happen at home?” “Boil, then boil,” Suz said. “And then?” I said, interested now, because it seemed like a real possibility, and Suz said: “And then mush!”



It’d rained early Saturday afternoon while we were in Greenwich for the film festival, and I’d said, “This sucks,” and Suz’d offered me another chocolate drop biscuit from the Tupperware. And we’d waited in line to get into the festival—it’d stopped raining by then, at least—and they were late letting everyone in, and all we wanted was a lie-down, maybe, if we could find a dry patch of grass, and maybe, eventually, a nap. “This sucks,” I said. “Yah!” Suz said, “eeeyur!” and she portioned out the last two chocolate biscuits in the box.

A cheer went up from the front of the queue, finally, and we started shuffling forwards, and then, I mean, you think you are going to a film festival—all you really know, because Suz was in charge of the tickets, is that you are going to see “Kill Bill” outdoors and on the big big screen—and look what magic comes exploding out of the fairgrounds. We went into the big tent on the right, the circus tent!, with its freaky freak show and the creature in one of those Georgia O’Keefe horse skulls who followed me around the room with its hollow eyes. “Suzzan,” I said, “freaks,” and the trembling made it a two-syllable word. “Ha ha!” she said, “you are scared!” “Eh,” I said, “they are freaks!” There was music, black-and-white and old-timey, like the first films, and I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been spun out of the grim, post-rain air.



There were popcorn girls and roll-up-roll-up girls, there were girls with snakes for hands. A wind-up girl turned round and round in the black heart of a black flower. Later, we wound through a dusty tunnel while a stripey aquaballerina kicked and pointed. She was sort of there and sort of not, a projection on gauzy screens, layers of dreamlike ethereality.

We scored two seats up front on vintage velvet chairs to watch the film shorts. In Nacho Vigalondo’s “7:35 in the morning”, a music video ended with a confetti bang; in Jan Schomburg’s “Ni solo sein”, a story went backwards and forwards; in Nagi Noda’s “Sentimental Journey”, a day went from pink to pink to flying to pink to black. Benoit Mariage’s “Le Signaleur” had a hedgehog. “I cannot speak,” I said, for I could not. There were so many things in my head by then—these wonderful, wondering stories—these fine, fragile vignettes—some of them accompanied by a slow electric guitar—and we went out, squinting, into the sun.



We found a sunny spot where the ground seemed dry already, and lay down on our blanket. “This is great,” I said, and then I said, again, “This is great.” We ate orange Soleros and a cranberry brownie, we put on sunscreen, we lay down, we sat up, we lay down again. “This is great, I said, and then I said, again, “This is great.” The boys playing frisbee kept missing, and the girls to the right were dancing with ribbons. Lying down and looking up, I saw green only, green and green, and then the blue of sky.

We moved closer to the big screen, eventually, in front of the guy in the Pac-Man T-shirt, right by the guy with the paper parasol. The National Symphony Orchestra was playing the “Ghostbusters” theme. They would play the “Time Warp” later. People would dance. Suz said Alex Zane smiled at her.

Such jollility! They cheered when Nancy Sinatra began her “Bang Bang”, and every now and again someone would whistle the Daryl Hannah bit from the hospital. The air was laced with marijuana.



An hour and some in, my right arm was sore from being lain upon. Our picnic blanket was cold, and damp, because the night was cold, and damp. I needed to pee (so this is what it’s like to attend an outdoor film festival). I put on my Onitsuka Tigers and ran to the portaloos, and when I came back Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu hadn’t even gone outside to fight in the fake snow yet.

The credits were rolling on the big screen behind us as we left Greenwich Park some time after eleven. We were heading down the hill towards the High Street and the pier, the tips of the Cutty Sark were silhouetted against the night, and I said, “Look,” I said, “you can see the stars,” because you could.

Hey, you—yes, you, asking me which part of China I’m from—it’s not helping your case that you’re talking to my chest.

Since Tuesday I have been feeling like it was Thursday, is how much I crave the weekends these days. Work is boring boring boring, and then post-work we are thick like thieves, stealing about the city, Monday night at the Scala with Camille crazy shouting, fidgeting, meowing, dancing, she was late, she was late, then she came on stage and we were all in love with her. The show ended out on Pentonville Road, where the shuttered shops were a glinty grey, and the Americana Cosmetics sign was red and blue in the dark night. She was in white all over, she was glowing, almost, and she'd hoisted herself up on a lamppost while the frenchies lit up their cigarettes.

Mid-week we were at the Embassy of Japan with the Pecha Kucha crew talking about pokey ceramics and a footheld comb for an armless barber, about shifting, and windows, and gardens, about kitchens for kids with biscuits; about a one-step ladder, a one-cell honeycomb. Listen: one houndstooth. I couldn't stop looking at everyone's clothes—is it possible that all Japanese girls are cute all the time?—and there was a man nurturing a Dali moustache.

Thursday night finally rolled around, and I was out back and outside at Nora and Walter's. The voices mingled on the evening air: someone on the phone upstairs, the TV from up in the trees somewhere, the Somali men from the café over the wall. Nora and Walter have a spider out back and outside, she's just had babies, and she wobbles on a wobbly web. Nora and Walter have a Venus flytrap. His name is Spiky Norman, because, of course.

The 134 heading home seems to never come down Kentish Town Road when I want it, but there's plenty to look at anyway, like Captain Nemo's Fish Bar, or the Indian take-away with the dirty lozenge store sign, or the Coin-Op, where one night a skinny girl sat cross-legged on the folding table.



The heatwave broke, finally, last night, Thursday night, and I stayed up too late with red berries and a crushed Tim Tam in a China-blue bowl.

We heard the band from the bus, we were on the 38 to Angel, and we heard the band from the bus, I craned my neck to see, and then I said, “Okay,” I said, “this is the new plan.”

Exmouth Market I discovered when I temped at Amnesty last autumn. There are flowerboxes on Exmouth Market, madeleines, orchids, postcards, foosball, jellied eels, felt purses, and shiny, fancy jewellery that glints as you go by. It’s one of those places, see, you come ’round the corner and you exhale quiet and low from the wonder. It was early that first day, I’d gotten to work too early, and Exmouth Market was tranquil too, the guy from the Middle Eastern restaurant was still setting up shop. There were strings of light bulbs hanging zigzag from the lampposts, because it was the season for it, I’d figured, but now I know there are always strings of light bulbs hanging zigzag from the lampposts of Exmouth Market, because it is always the season for it. Lunchtimes, last autumn, I’d sit at the bar in Moro sometimes, for soup or a little earthenware dish of grilled chorizo. The barmen were hot, and, if there was enough time before I had to put my book away, served up a minty mint tea.



Sunday everyone was outside, and the Caribbean boys smiled Caribbean smiles. There were knitted doughnuts, and giraffes made out of Seventies fabrics; there were church jumbles; there were rides, even. There was homemade vanilla ice cream, there were free cupcakes for a drink or a kiss, down one end there was a side of pig rotating in the grill. There was a cute girl selling cute mushrooms. (Yes, nameko, I am looking at you.) The boy at the Brindisa stand was telling me about two legs of ham. “This one is very, very nice,” he said, pointing at the something, “and this one,” he said, pointing to the jabugo, “is wonderful.” “I’ll take the wonderful, please,” I said, because how could I not, and there were green olives, too, that came with, and a hunk of crusty bread with a garlicky garlic spread.

We walked down the market and up the market and down once more. Later, we headed home along Rosebery with two pastéis de nata in a Jack Gomme bag.

Saturday in Croydon —and Emily’d said “Croydon is the armpit of London” but there we were on the two-fourteen train anyway, me and Olive—there was a man in a very big sombrero; a girl in a hibiscus-print muu-muu and a wide leopard belt; there were toenails painted pink and blue; there was a boy, blond and golden, running like it was the Fifties. There was the music festival, you see, and we like music festivals, but mostly we like free music festivals. And I’d never been to Croydon, so why not, even though maybe that is not always the best reason for things, and I remember now that when I told Marc we should do a tour of funny-sounding places in London—“Let’s go to Barking!” I’d said. “Let’s go to Tooting!”—he’d said, “I assure you it will be a lot less fun than what you imagine.” I’ll say that Saturday on the platform at King’s Cross, waiting for the Croydon train, with the train delayed and the epilectic station clock stuck at 14:01, with the woman blowing cigarette smoke into her toddler’s pram, I’d thought, What hare-brained scheme have we signed up for this time.

At first we sat in the shade under the big tree with the shaggy dog and the twelve-year-old smoking pot, we took turns lying on each other’s stomachs, then we moseyed on over to the main grounds to forage for food. Fairground food is candy floss and ice creams, or soft onions glistening in pools of oil on the grill. I handed over a pound for a blue Slush Puppie and regretted it immediately.

The crowd was waving and screaming for Ojos de Brujo, meanwhile, and the singerlady whirled in black and yellow. We went to see Daby Balde smiling and singing in the cool of the circus tent striped blue and red, while his guitarist hung out and twanged like he’d just dropped in for a cool gin drink. They sounded like the hot, still day and the bright summer breeze all at once, like fat beads forming on glasses of tea, ice cold. Olive disappeared for a second, then he came back and said De La Soul had started on the main stage. He pronounces De La Soul “De La Sool”, which made me laugh, he took my hand and we headed out into the grassy field again.



My hair was very ratty by the end of the day, I know it, but the boy was happy to kiss me still.

See, last week Olive and I were tooling around Camden Passage, and we came across Mr Christian’s, with its table of breads and baked winnings outside; and the Scandinavian design shop, all clean white and woodgrain inside; and the handsome purple chocolate shop with its chocolate display winking and beckoning from the display window—and there Olive said, “Il-est-là-il-est-là,” and I turned around and the Mr the Chocolatier was taking a break on the vintage shop bench across the five-foot-way. He wasn’t smoking a chocolate cigarette, as you may expect a chocolatier to be doing on his break, but he was talking to a girl, the way you may expect a girl to be doing with a chocolatier on his break.

We were tooling around Camden Passage, see, and I think it was inside, in the gourmet deli cool of Mr Christian’s, when finally, with the fancy fruit juices behind me and the deep dishes of prepared salads in front of me, one more enticing than the other, it was then, finally, I said, “Goddamit, I can’t believe Emily hasn’t told us about this.” “Yeah,” Olive said, and I said, “Shit!” “Yeah!” Olive said, and I said, “Yeah!”

We went ’round the corner and knocked on her door, and she made us tea, and I showed Olive how to drink a Tim Tam, and it made my head feel a little funny, and then the next week she invited us to Saturday brunch in Camden Passage.



Elk in the Woods is forest-shack chic, with vintage mirrors on one wall and milk-glass lamps with nipples, beat-up straight-backed schoolroom chairs, and wallpaper in the back room to make a girl want to buy a house and do it up nice. We were four for the table by the door, half in the sun and half out, and we ordered lattes that melted brown into white, and pineapple cocktails sweet and luscious, and homemade lemonades that were actually Sprites. Emily’s friend Kelly had dark hair, and laughing eyes, and a tattoo between her breasts. At work she monitors the model of a lung. “I need to think about this some more,” I said, “but I foresee I will have many questions.” The sun was streaming in the wide windows, and I was warm on the shoulders.



I ordered the kippers and egg salad, because I remembered that at Tesco you can get a couple of kippers shrink-wrapped with a pat of butter in the shape of a flower; it was a kippers and egg salad “with coriander”, and it turned out the salad was the coriander. Unexpected!, but so tasty, and at no point did it taste like bugs.

What happens when you sit outside for dinner is, the bugs drop in like old friends. I brushed one off the boy’s sleeve, and, not minutes later, out of nowhere, another landed on my hand. A dragonfly arrived just to say hello, and then he was off again to the dragonfly ball. Dragonfly finery is green, and shimmers.

I think we were already onto dessert by then, I don’t remember now, certainly we’d already dug into Olive’s pesto penne and his tomato and red onion salad, and certainly we’d already taste-tested and double-taste-tested Emily’s broccoli-anchovy orzo, and for sure we’d scooped up sloppy spoonfuls from the platter of sweet grilled vegetables—

I seem to think we’d cut into the peach frangipane tart already; in any case, all of a sudden we were shouting, and confused, and Zidane was sloping off the field, sad and hunchy. Or maybe just pissed off, it’s hard to say from someone’s back.

We were still hopeful, though—jaunty, even, or maybe it was just the nervousness making us jumpy—and I said, “If they win, we can celebrate with cake!” Covering all the bases, Suz said, “And if they lose, we will drown our sorrows in cake!” There was still a goodly half of the tart on the chopping board, you see, for Walter had brought a bunch of shy Irishpeople who seemed to not eat a thing; and some of us knew there was something else in the kitchen, a hazelnut meringue–chocolate cream tower thing—what qualifies as “cake”?—on a squat white pedestal.

You know by now, they lost, so the sorrows were drowned. And still the shy Irishpeople didn’t eat, which meant, as that lady once said, a friend of my father’s, one afternoon when her family took my family out to a many-coursed lunch and my sister refused, and then refused again, an extra serving of some unremarkable something: “less man more share.” Does this translate directly from the Chinese? I know you know.

“Eeeyur!” I said, and Dan and I were gossiping in Mandarin. “Wèi shen me ta mén bú yào chi?” I may have been waving the large slicey knife at that moment, or licking chocolate off my fingers. “Bú yòng zhè mè dà sheng shuo ba,” he said, and he reached out for a second helping.



Weird, we were so quiet after, while, outside, people honked car horns and blew shrill whistles in the street for hours yet.

“Oh!” I said when Emily called yesterday morning, “I tell you, I have tea in my bag because when we were leaving the house this morning I said, ‘I’m just going to bring the tea in case we’re invited over for teatime.’” “I was calling,” she said, “to invite you over for tea.” Which is why, closing in on four in the afternoon—and by this time I also had in my bag a box of Montezuma truffles from Suz—after poking around the antiques market at Camden Passage—there’d been the little sterling silver dessert forks, and the bone-handled pie servers, and the tins that said “Sugar” and “Flour” and “Rice” and “Lentils”, and I’d wanted them all, but when I went back for a second look it was really just to say good-bye—closing in on four in the afternoon, we found ourselves, me and the boy, in the garden out back in Angel, with a tray of wheaten crackers and Vegemite, and some Tim-Tams, and, indeed, Emily’s Blue Mountain tea, le fameux, English tea hand carried from Paris, just because we can. The afternoon sloped by, tea on the deep green tablecloth and the green canopy of leaves above us, and it seemed like a long time since I’d sat just to sit.



There’ve been the houseguests, so many houseguests, and there’ve been the parties, the football match parties—me, football, yes, I know, unexpected, but I mean, (a) Zinedine Zidane, please, smile some more for me, and (b), parties mean cake. “There’ll be snacks,” I’d emailed the crew to entice them to France-Brazil last Saturday, but then I think no one was more surprised than me when it turned out, come kick-off time at eight, that the snacks included an array of meats and cheeses, and a curly pasta salad, and a salad salad, and three cakes for nine people, and mojitos all around. “Mojitos are made from mosquitos,” Emily said, as she squeezed the limes into the penguin cafetière. “Hee hee hee,” I said. “I stole that from Jerry Seinfeld,” she said, “you would have found out sooner or later.”

There was a summer dance party in Paris, with cherry clafoutis and hunks of Cantal. The air was thick with singing and cigarettes, and we held melting mojitos in our sweaty hands. Sometime at three in the morning, the last glowing guest departed into the night. It’d just started to rain by then, and we opened the wide windows to the cold, and the sharp, and the fresh.



There was a Sunday trip to Cambridge for punting and a picnic, Pimm’s on the waterways and the bottle of sun lotion passed from one boat to the other. We moored for ice creams, and I dangled my feet in the water while I licked at a Strawberry Split.



One night, there was me and Jason and a table outside at the Eagle in Farringdon. That was nice, with the cuttlefish ink risotto and the sloppy burger ordered at the grill inside, the warm ale that made him make a face. The individual espresso maker and the twin pastéis de natas arrived with the evening chill, but the espresso cupped in small hands staved off the cold for a while yet. We walked home down the back streets, Lamb’s Conduit with its curious candy store and Red Lion, where the dusty discount bookshop used to sit.