There was gelato already, that first day we arrived, but that was after we’d put our bags down, after we’d stopped in for pizza to go, after the nun shoved me out of the way while waiting for the light to turn at the ponte Garibaldi. We crossed the bridge and could wait no longer; we perched on the cold stone balustrade under a leaning tree and savoured the thin, crisp slices – porcini and smoked gouda on one, tomatoes and mozzarella and rucola on the other – and I kicked my legs because of pizza, and Rome, and the November sun.



We walked left and right down cobblestoned streets, while the walls were ochre and golden orange and shades of sienna around us. We admired the lemons at Campo dei fiori, the great mounds of colours and spices. Everywhere the wooden crates of lettuces, herbs, romanesco broccoli spiralling into Escher-induced hallucinations.



I didn’t know it, but we were winding our way north to the ice cream parlour of my dreams. At Giolitti, the cannoli and butter biscuits filled the shelves to the left, while the barista took drink orders at the bar on the right. In the back, the cones were stacked to the skies. I don’t remember now what that first day brought. Cioccolata? Probably. Nocciola? Torrone? Lord help us, writing this is like standing in front of the display again. In my mind I went from baci to pera to zuppa inglese and back while the gelato man behind the counter waited with his scoop held high – and all I remember now is that Olive said: “He will say ‘Panna?’ and you will say ‘Sì’.”

We stepped out onto the street and sat on the nearest steps we found. We had four fat smudges of gelati between us, and four days yet to go.

We went to Rome: the sun was out, the sky was blue. We went to Rome, and the nighttime hubbub from the vicolo del Cinque rose to our top-floor window; we ran down stone steps worn from the years and there were glasses of prosecco for us at the bar called Bar.

Come, I tell you more.

Olive’s parents were in town this weekend. Hello, fancy dinners! Hello, delicate dim sum lunch of joy! “They took us to Yauatcha,” I said to CC on the phone today, “at our bidding.”

They came in with the rain Friday midday, with a rolly-bag of treats. Champagne! Cheese! Wine! More champagne! A pot of caramel du beurre salé! The biggest box of macarons in the world! Rose, pistacho, vanilla; caramel and fleur de sel, white truffle and hazelnut, chocolate and passionfruit; they all smiled beatifically at us. I tell you – I think I have no need to tell you – Saturday morning we had macarons for breakfast.

One day I will shake Pierre Hermé’s hand – he may be in his patissier whites still – and I will say, “You are kind to me.” Pierre Hermé, do you have a fine mustache? Do you have a sausage dog named Barnabé?



Saturday was a Smurf macaron, crisp and blue. We walked the mother through the shops while the stepfather ran away to the art museums. Sunday morning saw me cupping a mug of black coffee in both hands. “Okay,” I said to Olive, and I blinked, once, slowly. “Let’s go speak French.”

Oh, stop. The parents are nice and all, truly, and we like visitors because they get us out and about. Claire had come with a sheaf of pages torn out of fashion magazines – all the better to track down the discount Paul Smith store full of stripey shirts, and the thing shop of enamel milkpans, of vintage Golden Books, of perfumed paper fine like butterflies’ wings.

Seven-thirty Monday morning I was back at work. Work is still at the kitchen table, but work is work nonetheless. I am proofreading a tiresome crime novel, where the men alternatively growl or snap, where the police commander, tall and manly, booms. “I can think of six other things I would rather be doing,” I wrote India, “including going to a dinosaur theme park.”

The dinosaur theme park will have to wait, though, for in a couple of days I will be in Rome. Number one, Marc tells me of a place that serves chocolate pizza. Number two, we are out of macarons.

The sun was out to play yesterday, and Olive suggested we pack a picnic and head for the South Bank. “Pour une vue sur la mer,” he said, and I kissed him on the cheek for the good idea.

We packed mortadella and grilled asparagus sandwiches, a Tupperware of leftover asparagus risotto, and two banana muffins wrapped in foil. We walked across the Waterloo Bridge and found a sunny spot outside the National Theatre. It’s not like it’s summer, though, so I kept my scarf on.

We walked east for walks, for hot coffees in paper cups at the end of the pier. The OXO building from the front is nice and all, but suggests secret parties and midnight dancing in the back-end courtyard.



Today we were sprawled, the two of us, on the carpet, on the sofa, just sprawly on a Friday morning, and I said, “How come we’re so lazy?”

“Lazy?” he said, as if it were evident we were made to sway in hammocks all day. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said, “we sure seem to lie about.”

“Would you rather work in the City and snort cocaine and work fifteen hours a day?” he said, because obviously there is no in-between.

“Maybe,” I said, “but only because I’ve never done anything like it.”

He may have snorted, or rolled his eyes. French people, you know, they’re so good at contempt.

“Aren’t you interested in lives you haven’t lived?” I said. “I mean, the life of a City worker is so far from anything I’ve ever been interested in, and I just wonder, you know?” I said. “I wonder what it would be like.”

“I suppose I wouldn’t mind it,” he said, “for five minutes.” “It’s not that I’m not interested in lives I haven’t lived,” he said, “but the life of a City worker? Not really.”

“A bounty hunter?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“A tiger?” I said.

“No,” he said, and like suburbs still we sprawled. We were looking up at the ceiling, and already I could see the jungle in my mind.

“A monkey?” I said.

“What kind?” he said. He propped himself up on an elbow, and there was anticipation in his eyes.

And still the birthday celebrations continued, well into the month after, which is just how we likes it. We went out for dinner in the fanciest of pants, me and Olive and Hens and John and Marc and Emily, and at Moro they greeted us nice and warm on a cold November night.

Our dinner reservations not till just after nine, we’d started down the street at the Eagle for drinks all ’round the table by the radiator. “Weelll...” I’d texted Marc before he arrived, “they are serving grilled sausages and butter beans at the Eagle, is all.” “Sounds like a decent predinner snack,” he wrote back. “Be there in 15.” But we were strong, we were – hungry but strong – because we had a feeling about Moro, and so there were Guinnesses and glasses of rosé, there were flutes of prosecco for girls for whom sparkly trumps all, but there were no grilled sausages, no butter beans.

When the big clock on the facing wall showed nine, we stepped out onto Farringdon and up to Exmouth Market, where the strings of lightbulbs winked and grinned. Oh, Moro, you are good to us, with your perfect lamb and your flawless skate, for your unexpected yogurt and pistachio cake, not cake-like in the least – rather a fool of some sort, a mess, a splodge – but smooth and electric at the same time, while pomegranate seeds burst like soft rubies on the tongue.

“What,” we’d asked the waitress when she came ’round for dessert orders, “is a ‘Bombolas’?” It had been hand-written on the bottom of the drinks menu, below the sweet liqueurs, beneath the coffees and teas. I’d assumed it would come in a wide-rimmed glass, on fire. I’d hoped its arrival would be announced by brass trumpets.

“Don’t ask,” I’d said to Hens, “just order.” We waved our hands in the air and said “Bombolas!” as if we were dressed up for Mardi Gras, and clowns were dancing and tumbling behind us. “Happy birthday!” we said, to no one, really, because a night like this is everyone’s birthday, “Bombolas!”

But the waitress came ’round, and “What,” we said, “is a ‘Bombolas’?” “It’s a chocolate, with an almond inside,” she said, and a thousand hearts sank. Still, an order was placed, this note of sensibility and restraint amidst the rich chocolate-almond tarts and the frou-frou yogurt and pistachio. A pound-fifty for a small white porcelain bowl of bombolas, and, I tell you, we ate them all. Every single chocolate-dusted, chocolate-coated nut was devoured – held up to the light to be appraised, and then popped, with a satisfied smile, into our mouths. “Petit mais costaud,” Marc said, and I think he ate the last one, too.

We tumbled out into the night. It was late, and cold. Two went right, two went around the corner, and two disappeared southwards. The lights on Exmouth Market were bright still, like the party wasn’t quite over yet.

Just last Friday, then, the birthday presents from Suz, a brown paper bag of nice smell. I reached in and took out two rose geranium and lavender soaps and we held them to our noses and said, “Mmm.”

“Do you want a trip on the London Eye,” she’d asked me on the phone some days before, “or a bar of organic soap?”

“No need present lah,” I said, “no need.”

“Trip on the Eye?” she said.

“No need!” I said.

“Organic soaps?” she said.

“No need!” I said, and then, “What flavour?”

“Ah!” she said. “Rose geranium and lavender, lemongrass and marigold, lavender and camomile. Come!”

“Aiyah,” I said, “no need presents lah!”

“Lavender and camomile?” she said.

“No lah, no,” I said.

“Lemongrass and marigold?”

“No—”

“Rose geranium and lavender?”

“Oh!”

“Okay!” she crowed, hence: Friday night, and the brown paper bag of nice smell, and the fancy soaps, and the mmm. We went into the Natural History Museum, then, and the Diplodocus grinned us a toothy grin, but that is another story.

In Ireland the sky was blue and we went to the beach. No, really! We rented the smallest, cheapest car from the airport Avis, me and Olive and Nora and Walter, so small and so cheap a car that the desk girl didn’t even try to talk us into an upgrade because it was clear we weren’t looking for luxxxe. “A small automatic,” I’d said, and we walked across the parking lot, following the instructions on the rental form that read: Lot number: Fence.

She was round and golden, like a buttered biscuit out of the oven, an Irish soda bread loaf of a car, and we took the highways south, tucked in between the massive Thursday morning delivery trucks, circling Dublin and southwards still, till the signs read “Wicklow” and we hooted with glee like a weekend away.



We sat down for ham and cheese sandwiches on brown bread that first day, and tea in a yellow enamel teapot. We wandered down the main street called Main Street, into a toy shop and a thing shop and a Baltic food shop. “Polskie produkty!” Nora said, and we went in to unfamiliar cheeses and tubes of red sausage and graphic tubs of yogurt. From the butcher we bought lamb, and there was lamb for dinner that night, and salty roasted potatoes, and a bottle of wine, and then another.

Nora’s house is on the water, with the view of the squat red-and-white lighthouse and the fishermen and the boats coming in to dock in the river. At night we stood on the balcony and the stars were low and bright. The sound was the sea, the sea, there was the lighthouse flashing on the water, and the sound was the sea.

In the morning I stood on the balcony as the weathered fishing boat came lurching in. “I’m going to yell ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!’,” I said, “D’you think they’ll hear?” “They won’t hear you across the water,” they said, “but we will, and we will smack you.”



The breakfasts were those breakfasts that stretch into lunch, with the coffee pot always on the heater and the blue milk jug at the ready, with the plates cleared just in time for more, please. There were raisin scones one morning and corn muffins another; there was melted cheese on toasted potato bread one noontime, and squash risotto and stuffed eggplant one lazy late afternoon. One night a rifle through the cupboards turned up a box of brownie mix – “No Pudge! Fat-Free Brownie Mix,” the box read. “Just Add Yogurt.” We added yoghurt, and a bar of chocolate, and a couple of good glugs of whiskey. We ate half the tin before we dragged ourselves off the couch and into our coats, across the bridge and down the street for three Guinnesses and a half-pint of cider.



The days were for poking around in the main-street shops, for an almond tart from The Griddle, for the beach at Brittas Bay. Olive and I teased the waves till the bottoms of our jeans were soaked, and then we retreated to the sand and the smooth stones. After, the boys kicked a football about in an empty parking lot the colour of the end of summer, while a farmhouse on top of a hill was orange warmth golden glow into the twilight. Sunday we tumbled down the country lanes, and all around us it was green and green, and then green again. Nights, the fine, soft rain came down in the halos of streetlights.



And there was Nora’s band of merry men – Donnchadh, a Crispin Glover double whose girlfriend took weed out of her handbag; who made us laugh and then took off into the Saturday night with a cold beer in his jacket. He hugged me and said, “Good-bye, my chicken.” Brian, who directed us home via the long drive home from the beach to show us the look-out point over the town. “You bring a girl up here,” he said, “tell ’er her eyes sparkle like the lights in the nighttime.” “If you don’t get her then,” he said, “you were never gonna get her.”



Oh, but it was good to get out of the city, to hear the sea from the sofa, to call to the ducks and the swans under the stone bridge, to watch the seal in the water, to have him watch us. I woke up early one morning for a walk down the lane with the little doors and the lace curtains. A little old lady was in red against the morning grey. The hills surrounding the town were waking too, and dotted, already, with cows.

It has been a very curious day.

I finished the third of three freelance projects that have been keeping me in and up for a week. Three! Just when I was about to throw my hands up in the air. It never rains, they say.

Three freelance projects, and the most boring one paid the most. Even from the most boring one, I learnt things. Things – who doesn’t like things? (I had typed “who doesn’t like thighs?”, but that is, perhaps, another question for another day.) I worked on a wine guide, and I learnt this:

Gletscherwein: Fabled oxidized, wooded white from rare Rèze grape of Val d’Anniviers; offered by the thimbleful to visiting dignitaries.

Dignitaries drinking out of thimbles. Delicate-winged dignitaries, maybe, visiting my treetop salon, where coloured baubles and sparkling diamonds hang from the branches.

A curious day.

I went to the post office this afternoon. An old man showed up in tweed and a hunch. There was an aura of smell around him. The queue stretched front and back and he cut in front of me and looked at me out of the corner of a glassy eye. I said, “Excuse me” and he looked at me out of the corner of a glassy eye. He looked at me out of the corner of a glassy eye, he took a step forward, he wobbled on his cane, he took a step forward and began to shout: “Help, help!” There was a flurry about. He said, “Help, help!” – his helps came in pairs – and I said, “How can I help?” He looked at me out of the corner of a glassy eye. A woman came out from behind the counter and he said, “Need to sit.” They found him a chair.

Later we were in Tesco and someone had left five pounds at the self-check-out counter. I felt bad for the girl who left it, but she was gone already, disappeared into the city. We spent it on bacon and chocolate milk.