The word, I suppose, is madcap.

“Do you feel like going to a mall in Kent tomorrow?” Suz texted. It was very late Wednesday night, and I hadn’t looked at my phone all day. Now, this question.

There is a ritual we go through with my Kuala Lumpur grandmother, a long-faced woman with a warm and ready smile and a head of fine, white hair. “Ma,” my mother says, in Hokkien, some day, any day, “do you want to go out?” “No lah!” my grandmother says. She is in a light cotton blouse and a sarong. We may be sitting on rosewood furniture in the dimly lit living room, or at the dining table while the dog runs under our feet. My grandmother may flick her hand as she says this, partly in dismissiveness, and partly to divert a lazy fly from our noodle bowls.

“Ma,” my mother says, some minutes later, “shall I take you out later?”

“No lah!” my grandmother says, emphatically, before she asks, “Where would we go?”

“We could go to the shops,” my mother says, “just to walk, and see.”

“No need!” my grandmother says. The tabletop fan to the right turns slowly in the warm afternoon. The floor tiles are pleasantly cold to the touch. There is a china cabinet in the dining room, a modest affair with bowls and teacups and plates in jumbly, comfortable piles. I once admired a set of delicate Chinese teacups, each cup small and with a rose printed on it, and my grandmother wrapped them up in sheets of old newspaper for me. She is at that age, has been for a while now, where she parcels off her worldly belongings.

“No need,” my grandmother says, then, “What would we do?”

“We could take a walk, have some coffee,” my mother says, and my grandmother says, quietly, pursing her lips, “No lah.”

We eat.

“How,” my grandmother says, eventually, and perhaps we are spooning up the last small puddle of mee sua soup in the bowl, perhaps there is a small mound of chicken bones to the side, “would we get there?”

My mother is resourceful, and prepared. She is undaunted. This is what we do. “I can borrow Anak’s car,” she says. “We can drive to the shopping centre, walk around the shops, have a coffee.”

“No need,” my grandmother says. In my memory she is very wrinkled – though I know she has not always been so because there is a photograph of her and my grandfather above my mother’s bed, and in it her skin is like porcelain – and her eyes are always bright. Her wrists are small. “Too much trouble,” she says.

The ritual itself may contain minor variations, but the conclusion is generally thus: Within the hour my grandmother is at the bottom of the smooth wooden staircase with her handbag under her arm. “Hurry up!” she is yelling, in Hokkien, to whoever isn’t already standing on the porch-side of the metal gate. “Let’s go already!”

Late Wednesday night, when Suz texted, “Do you feel like going to a mall in Kent tomorrow?” I put down my book and went through my grandmother’s ritual all on my own. Thursday morning I woke up early to take a bus to a train to a train to meet Suz at the North Greenwich Tube station. “Hello!” I said, when she pulled up in her car. “This is gonna be great!”

Madcap was the chitter-chatter to the car workshop in Dartford for a quick tune-up, and madcap was the embracing of the instant coffee machine in the Skoda showroom while we waited. “I will choose Kenyan Dawn,” I said, after considering the free tea and coffee choices at length, “because it makes me see the wildebeest in silhouette against the rising sun.” “Look at all these buttons!” I said then, having picked a packet, and truly the machine seemed to promise a world beyond basic tea and coffee. Capuccino, the LED display read, Mochaccino, Espresso, and I wonder now if one of the choices wasn’t Chococcino. We were the only customers in a showroom of shiny cars and suited car salesman, and madcap was Suz opening the closet in the waiting area, only to announce, “There’s cake in there!” She shut it quickly, as if the baked good were coming to get us. We wondered how to proceed.

Hats off to you, Skoda salesmen!, for, none too shabbily, a man with no eyebrows came up to us. We were laughing at a Spike Milligan compilation by then. Reaching for the cabinet, he said, “Would you like some cake?” “Oh, no,” we said, “no, thank you. Yes, please.”

Madcap, you understand, was our languishing while the twenty-minute check-up turned into an hour and a half, and not even Spike Milligan could save us then. “I wonder if they’d mind if I crawled into the back seat of one of these cars and stretched out for a nap,” I said. We picked the roomiest-looking of the selection and opened the door. Quick on his feet, the man – but not his eyebrows – tried to sell me a car. “I recently stopped working,” I told him. “Started working?” he asked. “Stopped,” I said. “Ah,” he said. “Well,” he said. “When you start working again,” he said, “make sure to give me a call.”

Madcap, I tell you, was the car stalling as we pulled it out of the lot, and madcap, too, going round once, then twice, the traffic circle. I waved at the dappled horses in the fields. The trees were lush, still, though some leaves were turning a yellow-reddy-brown. We made it to Bluewater mall before our hunger consumed us inside-out. “The mall!” I said, as we pulled into the carpark. And then, because the emotion held me tight, I said, again, “The mall!!” I have instituted a moratorium on spending money, but a giant mall in an ancient quarry, its imported Canadian geese paddling on its gently rippling landscaped lakes among model sailboats, still sends the heart a-flutter. So many surprises England yet holds!

Mad, maybe, but not madcap, the ordering of chicken livers for lunch. “Yurgh,” I said, as Suz licked her lips. “Hey, but you know what Yumeibalasingamchow eats?” I said. “Brains!” I said.

“Yah, brains,” Suz said unblinkingly, “they’re nice.” She was slicing a chicken liver.

“Do brains look like brains when they come to the table?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, then, considering, “but chicken brains are smaller lah.”

We walked the mall in one direction, then we walked it in the other. There were a lot of babies and a lot of old people. The balloon woman held so many ballons they formed a shiny coloured-foil canopy over her head. We tried on fancy moisturizers in the shops. I was putting on a divine orange-scented lotion at L’Occitane when Suz whisked a bottle off the shelf and headed for the counter. “Here,” she said later, thrusting the small shopping bag at me. “Happy birthday!” “What?” I said, and my hands were out and palms-up in surprise. She hooked the bag on one of my wondering fingers and grinned.

Madcap, truly, the last stop in Asda, this giant of supermarkets I read about. The sign outside read “Asda, part of the Wal-Mart family.” “The mall and Wal-Mart,” I said. “This is great.” “Oh, wait, Asda!” I said, the realisation dawning. “Home of George at Asda!” I may not buy things, but I read, and I like to touch. And I had heard about this line of clothing, this George at Asda, whose clothes, though probably made by fine-fingered children in Southeast Asia, are also, in the grand tradition of Isaac Mizrahi at Target and Kate Moss at Topshop – though possibly not so much Jaclyn Smith at Kmart – the height of cheap chic. Like the first prehistoric hunters who appeared in the Dartford area 250,000 years ago, I approached with an optimistic caution. I pulled on a knitted, three-quarter-sleeved cardigan with big buttons and we turned the corners of the aisles in search of a mirror. The knit stretched unflatteringly over my chest and the cardigan ended, mushroom-like, around my hips. “Um,” I said, faced with my reflection. “Something… wrong,” Suz said helpfully. We wheeled the trolley round to meat and veg.

Mark my words, there are adventures to be had everywhere – and some, though sadly not all, of them will end with mango-passionfruit jams and jars of Nutella on special, with four bags of groceries carried home in the rush-hour crowd. This is where “Hurry up!” will take you, as you stand at the bottom of the staircase with your purse under your arm. This is where you find that “Let’s go already!” will not lead you astray.

“I conned you into making us dinner,” I e-mailed Emily, and it was true, too, even though I hadn’t planned it. I’d asked her to dinner this weekend, but the girl is going to be weekending in Paris. “Come over Tuesday night,” she offered instead, so I said, “OK!”

I started volunteering at a non-profit this week, an advocacy group for sustainable food and agricultural policies, and all day yesterday I researched England’s orchards for a report on how we like them apples – apples in Herefordshire, apples in Cumbria, apples in Somerset, apples in the mid-Kent Downs. It was a slow start, as I tried to figure out where these counties even are. By mid-afternoon, I’d started on a damson project, too, but the damage was done, and I was hankering, hard, after a slice of apple pie.

“All I’m saying,” I wrote Emily, in response to her telling me not to bring anything, “is that I’m going to stop in Euphorium after work, just to see.”

I know you know.

Emily was slicing potatoes when I arrived. I held a box, and the box held a bitter chocolate tart, a glossy banana tart and a slice of apple pie.

“Where exactly,” I said later, reading the label on the box of yellow chanterelles, “is Belarus?” Bee-LAR-ruhs, I said, and I will remind you that as the nine-year-old director of the class play, I’d once said, with authorité, “Who wants to be Penelope?” Pen-uh-lope, I’d said then, and last night I said Bee-la-rus. Emily stopped making the dauphinois to come over and look at the label. She was still holding her knife, and she laughed very loudly.

Em and Marc are moving to Paris before the year is out, too early for me and Olive to finish off our lease and charm their rasta landlord into letting us take over their dirt-cheap apartment on the Regents Canal. “Oh, Emily,” I said. She was squeezing half a lemon onto the fish, a flat, silvery bream surrounded by cherry tomatoes in yellow and red. The candy-coloured cupcake moulds were drying on the rack. “Emily,” I said, “What am I going to do when you move to Paris?” “Come and visit,” she said. We want her to move to Paris and open a cupcake shop on the Canal Saint Martin. There will be a small room above the bakery for when I go visit. A small room has small windows, and the curtains will be white with red stripes, like dish towels. They may even be dish towels. There will be a small windowsill, for one cupcake. Maybe two.

I woke up three times this morning before I finally got out from under the pyjama-striped covers. The sun was out so I read with the window open and my feet on the windowsill. Somewhere down Church Street someone was driving with his windows down so Sunday morning sounded like the Everly Brothers thinking that they’re gonna cry-y.

Last night we broke into the honeymoon fund to honeymoon at Locanda Locatelli. We eat at Locanda Locatelli but we are still one who is unemployed and one who earns minimum wage, so we took the 73 bus all the bitter way to the ass end of Oxford Street. (Is there an ass end of Oxford Street? Is not all of it quite bottomish? I suppose the spot in front of the Selfridges window is not so bad.) There was a girl sitting in front of us who had a bad connection on her mobile so she had to say, again and again, “Wo’?” “You know,” I wanted to say to her, I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. You know,” I wanted to say, “there is a ‘t’ in there somewhere.”

Tucked away two quiet streets behind the ass end of Oxford Street, we had a corner table and a bread bowl and a glass vase of breadsticks –

I wound my hair round to hold it between my nose and upper lip, I wiggled my new pointy-ended moustache, and I puffed on the breadstick as if it were a cigarette on the finest of silver cigarette holders. You put me in a black dress and gold shoes, you put me in antique Peranakan jewellery, and this is what I do

– we had the corner table and the sommelier was a precise man with sculptural spectacles and a smile for punctuation. “Would you like some wine?” he said, his accent drawing out his i’s, and the smile, a small one but a warm one, was both question and answer.

We had prosecco, of course, and then too much bread – the olive bread, the grilled-onion bread, the garlic? bread, the crisp-topped cheesey bread, and a magic wand of a parmesan breadstick – and then, and we hadn’t even begun, really, Olive said, “J’ai plus faim.” We’d known this was going to happen, we’d known we’d run into trouble with the bountiful bread selection, even if we didn’t follow Laureen’s recommendation. “Go for two bread baskets!!!” she’d e-mailed, as if exclamation marks had been on special that day. “TWO!!!” she’d reiterated. “They are free!”

In between courses I stretched out my arms and rested them on the top of the banquette as if I were Giorgio Locatelli surveying my kingdom. In Giorgio Locatelli’s kingdom, the clouds are handmade gnocchi, delicate and melty. The hills in the distance are chocolate-banana doughnuts dusted in sugar, and passionfruit jellies hang from the trees. I stretched out my arms and rested them casually on the banquette as if to say, “I am pleased,” but really I was making room, rearranging my insides, for more.

I was at a Thing last night, you know, these Things, for meeting and greeting, with the wine and what-nots –

“Hungry,” I texted Nora before we arrived. “If we’re lucky, this will be a dim sum careers evening!” But in fact we showed up and there were five plates of crisps and dips

– I was at this Thing, and catching up with acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while, and so on and so forth – the things, you know, that you do, at these Things, where you’re smiling and smiling and smiling.

Where I’m getting to is this: People hear I got married, they ask – and it’s always women who ask, as if they have the name-change form signed and ready in their purses – if I’m changing my name. Am I the only person who’s surprised by this? It’s my name, people, I like it; it’s not going anywhere soon.

I’m not offended or anything by the asking – hardly even taken aback – just surprised. Different strokes, right? But it’s a curious thing. I mean, someone tells me they just got married, I don’t think to ask if they’re changing their name. Did you have cake?, I might ask, and if they say Yes, I will probably say, What kind?. Can I see your ring? is another I might ask, and I might wave my hands about as I say this. I might also say, Tell me about your dress!, which I am aware is not a question, but which seems appropriate anyhow.

Nora, on the other hand, is not asking about my name. She asks about the mice. We walked up to Oxford Street while she figured out where to get her bus. “You are getting attached to the mice,” she said. “I can see it in your blog.” “Kill them,” she said, interrupting my weak protestations, “kill them all.”

We were up late last night, Tym and me, giggling up a storm. The mouse came out from behind the fridge – to see what the hullabaloo was about, I suppose – and did a quick brown-grey U-turn when he saw us. Tym calls him Moses now, too – she says they are on a first-name basis because of that night they slept in the same room – but she says she is also humouring me by pretending that there is just one mouse in the house. The thing is, I am quite aware there is more than one mouse in here. I’m sure they are high-fiving and slapping palms behind the fridge like the whole thing is one big relay race. I know that while one mouse is out on the frontlines, the others are jogging on the spot back there, warming up, punching the air. They have their headbands on. The air behind the fridge sounds like “Eye of the Tiger.”

We were up late last night, Tym and me, giggling up a storm, while Olive, who works hard for the money, slept. He’d cooked us a beef compote and plied us with prosecco and red wine. There’d been Carluccio’s strawberry and chocolate slices for dessert, and fancy mint teas. We eat well, you cannot say we do not, even though there was that first dinner upon Tym’s arrival, where she’d suffered the misfortune of a mediocre pie. The gauntlet had been thrown down that night, I guess, and I felt those first, firey beats of a challenge. We have been moving onwards and upwards since then. Ottolenghi welcomed us with a bread board and an array of salads. At Abeno Too, with the Japanese pancakes following a screening of the melodramatic and triumphant Hula Girls, the okonomiyaki boy brought us a bowl with maccha ice cream and a bowl with a rabbit print. From Borough Market – we’d met Suz for a coffee and a gander, and Suz had said, seriously and curiously, in the manner of an anthropologist peering, “Do Raffles girls like to eat?” – we bought a selection of Pieministers to nosh on at home with a herby green salad. “Are you underwhelmed?” I asked at dinner that night. We’d stopped in the grocery store on the way home for some salad leaves and had come out with strawberries and a pot of cream and a box of meringues. We’d picked up beer and a bag of Haribo. “Are you underwhelmed?” I asked, as she tucked into her pie, and she said, “No, no, I am whelmed.”



Sunday at UpMarket, we sat on the curb in the sun with a falafel wrap for one and yakisoba for the other. My dress, with a halter-tie, was striped red and pink and yellow and green and four shades of blue as if my name is Carmen Miranda. We strolled about in Spitalfields and admired Japanese T-shirts and handsewn wallets and aviator sunglasses and felt headpieces and beribboned party dresses – then we sat on the curb in the sun with a lemon-sugar crêpe for the other and a Nutella-banana for the one.

I was iChatting with CC with the webcam on – and it always comes to this when we are nattering on camera, it always comes to one or both of us looking around our respective rooms saying, thinking, “What... can... I... show... you?” – and this time I was showing her the box of Honey and Milk Pocky I’d found on buy-one-get-one-free special at Oriental Delight down in Chinatown, and she was showing me how her camera was balanced on a tower of old food tins – I was iChatting with CC and I was telling her about Tym and Kumix being in town, and she said, “Were you all sitting outside Bar Italia speaking Singlish very loudly?” “Tym is actually restrained and quite quiet,” I said, and she said, “I like that in a person.” “Hey!” I said. “Sometimes I make exceptions,” she said.

We are not always speaking Singlish very loudly, but we do keep up the chatter, Tym and me. And you’d think two girls hanging out 24/7 would run out of things to talk about, but we seem to do OK, barrelling our way through serial commas, our mothers, Penguin paperbacks, simulation as stimulation, London on the cheap, poster-boy poets, Sang Nila Utama, Before Sunrise and Cordon Bleu cookbooks. Among other things.

Sometimes we fall quiet on the bus, but sometimes it is hot in the buses anyway, and it is all a girl can do to not nod off on the number 73.



Meanwhile, two girls in the house means that the ranks of shoes at attention in the hallway have swelled. There is a part of me that is sort of done with having things, but there is also a part of me that wishes they were all mine – especially the shiny red ones. I ask you, is not a pair of shiny red shoes a fair exchange for a bed and a mouse?

The thing about people in town is that they take you curious places, too. At Tym’s behest, we found ourselves, yesterday afternoon, in the sort of no man’s land that is St George’s Street in Southwark, heading up the garden to the two giant guns mounted at the entrance of the Imperial War Museum. War museums – who knew? This one is a beauty, with a welcome foyer of handsome planes suspended in a circle of natural light. The War Museum must be sitting on the finest and most dust-free of hermetically sealed war archives – and in my mind everything is labelled on a small square of stiff white card, in a curving fountain-pen script – for their exhibits are rich with, well, things, really, a fascinating array of things and videos and voices and stories. So many little one-eyed teddy bears and battered suitcases and picture books tearing at the spines were on display at the show on the war through the children’s eyes, such a selection of Make Do and Mend posters and ration books and yellow letters from the unforgiving front, and, in particular, one large, wall-hung embroidery sampler for wee Janet from her grandmother, with the chickens on the farm and Janet’s little house and the family ration book and Father fighting the good fight reproduced in a tight and colourful stitch. At the huge Holocaust exhibit, the dark and hollow eyes stared out from black and white photographs, and one room held an architect’s model of the Auschwitz camp: the tiny, white-plastic guard’s towers; the tiny, white-plastic hordes piling off the tiny, white-plastic cattle trains; the tiny guards brandishing tiny guns; the uneven ground kicked up by marching and shuffling and falling and being dragged; the piles, outside the tiny gas chambers, of what once belonged to the living.

Tym is in town –

she arrived with Singapore Gaga, a book on soba and a bag of White Rabbits. “Pretend these are all wrapped up very nicely in a hamper,” she said, handing them over in a motley pile shiny with promise

– so we take buses and trains and we walk and we have sandwiches in the sun. At the Young Vic this afternoon, her soft-shelled crab and bacon sandwich had legs. It looked like it was trying to escape, claw by succulent, curling claw, from her grip.

She has met the mouse already –

I looked into her room this morning and all her bags were zipped as if she’d been planning to climb out the window at dawn with the London street map between her teeth. “I was reading in bed last night,” she said, “and out of the corner of my eye I saw a grey streak go by. Then I looked at my bags,” she said, “and I thought I should maybe close them up.”

– and I have taken her to see the deer and the rabbits and the goats in the park. “I like goats,” she said, as we paused by the enclosure. “There is something about their face,” she said, musing, and then she said, and the air was still, “goat face.”

We have sat around the breakfast table with cheeses and jams, and around the dinner table with mangoes and still-warm chocolate biscuits for dessert, and stories such as these: “When I was a kid,” she said the other night, “my mother used to make these sandwiches for us, she’d take a slice of grocery-store bread, cut it in half this way” – miming parallel to the table’s surface – “spread Miracle Whip on it, roll it up with a cocktail sausage inside, and put a toothpick through it.” “That was lunch!” she said, and then she said, “And she was a nurse!” She says these things, Tym does, and she makes me want a spam sandwich on white bread, or, when she talks about the coffeeshop uncles of Singapore, a porcelain cup of kopi, with the plastic spoonful of condensed milk in the bottom.



We are trying to entice the girl to London, if only for a year, if only to enroll in some Master’s programme on “cultural studies”, so we only take her to the best places. I direct her to turn right down alleys with garbage piled high on one side and the hum of air-conditioning units above us, I wave her onto crowded rush-hour buses that stall and vibrate in the dark shadows of dark bridges, I point her down narrow streets where ladies with a lot of eye make-up stand under hot bulbs and neon lights while the bass thumps out the doorway. This afternoon in Southwark, a helicopter hovered and droned above our heads. First we were talking like this, and then gradually we realised we were TALKING LIKE THIS. “Look,” I say, as we walk up St George’s Road, and you cannot deny it is true, “which tourist gets to see Elephant and Castle?”

To be fair, we were walking away from the disfigured child of urban planning that is Elephant and Castle, having made our way through its system of dim underground tunnels, and later, in the gardens up the street, I made her smell the deep pink roses, the light pink roses, the one perfect yellow rose. We went to the Charles Lamb tonight, because no list of best places is complete without it, and Olive had saved us the table in the centre of the room.

“What’s a posset?” I asked the bar boy, planning my dinner strategy by keeping an eye on the options for afters. “It is a cream-based dessert,” he said. “Done,” I said, “and done.”

The One Love Hackney Peace Week event in Clissold Park today meant that festival-goers were still streaming down Church Street nearing sundown, the girls yelling “Hey, slut!” at each other and the boys spitting mouthfuls of water at passing buses. One kid gangsta-limping past with his pals threw a plum stone at me, so I said, after “Ow!”, “Hey! What is wrong with you people!” “What’s wrong with you?” he said, clearly a member of his school’s debate team, and he reached towards his thirteen-year-old crotch.

I hope he grows up to work at Argos. In the Returns department.



Tonight we made artichoke risotto, stirring stirring stirring while the new Rilo Kiley album played. The new Rilo Kiley album has songs to yodel along to and songs to dance to as if you’re twirling a glow stick and songs to make a girl want to wear a hat and learn to play the gee-taw. I want to play drums again and I want to be in a band. Marc says we should get together a whole bunch of people who know how to play various instruments, and then get everyone to play the instrument they don’t know how to. I mean, this could be great.

Laureen tipped us off to the curry festival on Brick Lane this afternoon, so we took the bus down to Spitalfields, where the sun was out and then not and then yes and then maybe. We turned left off Hanbury for a stroll through the Sunday UpMarket (“Just in case,” Olive said, which I think means he is in the market for a new T-shirt) and then wandered down the street in search of said festival. I’d imagined stands and stalls and curries galore, and balloons, maybe, and – this thought was fleeting – cardstock cut-outs of sequined tigers, and smiling men holding trays of small and spicy samples.

What it was was this: where the Bangladeshi restaurants lining Brick Lane will, on a normal day, position a man at their door to entice customers in, today they each had a man and a number of tables and chairs set up outside. “This is the curry festival?” I said. “Surely this cannot be the curry festival.” One man leaned into Laureen with a smile and an arm open as if to indicate the many culinary pleasures of the Indian subcontinent. “Is this the curry festival?” Laureen said, because she likes to get to the bottom of things. “Yes,” the man said, and still he was smiling, “curry festival, yes. Table for three?” We made our excuses and walked down the street with the plastic tables left and right and the red paper napkins held down by overturned glass goblets and Laureen said, “This curry festival sucks.” Still, we soldiered on to the bitter end of Brick Lane – because “just in case” holds for other things but T-shirts, too.



The grand philosophy of just-in-case brought us to a woman behind a couple of card tables pushed together who sold us a bag of veg samosas for a pound fifty, potatoes and peas and cauliflower bits nestled in a light and salty crust, and just-in-case led us by the nose to Sweet & Spicy, where no tables had been set up outside, and a man behind the red storefront rolled and packed treats for a takeaway.

The handwritten Help Wanted sign in the window read thusly:

Wanted
Counter Helper

And then, in a smaller print:

(Experience Required)
(Leave CV on Counter)

And then, smaller still:

(No Students)
(No Time Wasters Please)

“Come in,” the takeaway-wrapping man mouthed through the glass, so I said, to the window, because, me, I have no time to waste, “OK!”



Inside, they were pleased to introduce us to the stacks of puris and pratas, to more samosas, to the potato ball. I got a kebab wrapped with salad and sauce in a warmed puri to go, and then we went back up the lane to where the kids dressed crazy queue up for cheeseburgers on the grill.

Saturday night we rocked up to Favela Chic, me and Em and Marc and Kris, we rocked up to the bouncer with the dreads and we were on the list. I was in gold shoes and Marc had said, before we left the house, “What am I going to wear? What am I going to wear?” but I think he might have been wearing the same pair of jeans he’d had on when the clothing question came up.

We got a pitcher of caipirinhas at the bar and Kris took testing sips – “Still strong,” she’d say, time and time again – till her glass was empty. Already at eight in the evening, the music was very good and too loud and we stood around shouting at each other while the bartenders danced and spun their bottles in front of the giant disco ball. They’d hung chandeliers from a high-up ceiling, dusty chandeliers and crepe paper trailing down like primary-school jellyfish and upside-down lampshades and pastel-coloured bath sponges and plastic stars and hula hoops. The T-shirted and dinner-jacketed deejay behind his turntables was Don Johnson in disguise and Marc said, “You know, he is naked from the waist down.”



We were standing to the side by the sign that said “No Tequila” when Seung Yun came in, and we might have shouted “Surprise!” but the music was playing way too loudly for her to know it. We smiled surprise in our eyes, then, and sang Happy Birthday as best we could, and there were hugs all around and the pitchers of caipirinhas kept coming, and crushed ice and limes never felt so good.

Dinner at the big table saw us squished one against another – me and Marc and Kris and Em, and Seung Yun still delighted, and Diana from Princeton, and Rumi in shimmering red on chocolate skin, and Nick, who lives down the street from me, and Etan, who invited us to his gallery opening, and still others too far away to talk to, the girl with the black eyes, and this guy Fred, and a ballet dancer in a white lace shirt – we squished together on long wooden benches while the room packed and swayed and shimmyed behind us. There were girls with their hands in the air and girls who jiggled their hips and girls with their hair in their eyes. There were Japanese girls in furry boots and dark-skinned boys in newsboy caps and blond, straight-haired girls – they are everywhere, these girls – blond, straight-haired girls in tunics and leggings who elbow you in the back.



Past midnight the 243 up Kingsland Road passes the young people in all their wide-belted skinny-jeaned mussy-haired glory, and the huddle passing the lighter outside Jaguar Shoes. I have never been that girl, you know, never really thought about being, with the thick cat’s-eye streaks of eyeliner and the patent-leather ankle boots and waiting behind wine-coloured rope to get in; but there is something electric about being in the thick of it on a late-summer Saturday night.

I’d wanted to go to Bath, to see the pretty Pulteney Bridge, to flounce around pretending I was checking in for a day at the thermal spas, to maybe have tea and some cake at the fancy Pump Rooms, but the National Rail man behind the glass window wanted forty-seven pounds for a day return ticket. Forty-seven pounds for a whimsy! I took the Circle line instead (£1.50) to Portobello Road and the sun coming out on George Orwell’s old house.



The Portobello markets on a not-Saturday are a different beast from the weekend crush – a gentler beast, a less shouty beast, a nicer-smelling beast. The red antique shop on the corner is ripe for discovery and adventure, with vintage bicycles hanging from the ceiling and seamstresses’ models at attention in stripes and plaid, with sailboats and queens, with pharmacists’ bottles labelled Cough & Cold Mixture, with old delivery crates so polished with age their wooden splinters have been worn down into the handsome sheen.



Up and down and up the street, in piles and rows and bundles and stacks, on shelves and hooks and stools and makeshift tables – in gorgeous battered suitcases, even: delicate, engraved fish knives with creamy bone handles; silver tea trays and silver teapots; great gold mirrors; wooden galley trays from print shops long gone; jewels enough for many a magpie’s eye; torn hardbacks of England’s Botanists and England’s Rebels and England’s Wildlife. (There were hot Nutella crêpes as well.)



I sat outside at Gail’s for an eggplant-feta bureka and the smiley manager man said, “Shopping today?” “Oh, no,” I said, “no-no-no, after this bureka my wallet’s staying in my bag.” I’d forgotten about the food market down the other end of Portobello, you see – fifty-pence artichokes and brown paper bags of figs and eggplants going cheap. In my Celia Birtwell tote – pushing aside the mega guide to Grande Bretagne and the paper fan and the notebook for notes and the Didion and the sunglasses and the fountain pen and the Kapuscinski – I found my blue market bag. Good day to you, sir, with the bowl of fragrant greengages piled high.

Houston, we have a mouse.

The signs were there early on – there was that one morning I woke up and found the garbage bag I’d put on the floor had been chewed through – but the critters were nowhere to be seen. One day I discovered they’d crawled into my bag overnight and nibbled through a corner of 65 percent Lindt. I must have shaken my fist at the sky, at that great mouse in the sky.

Because the mouse has yet to eat through a bag of Olive’s Haribo, Mr Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité thinks it is cute. “The mouse is cute,” he says. “It’s small.” Small? Small for what, mister? An anteater? Small is what mice do for a living – they encourage smallness. They cultivate smallness. When they sign up for duty, the list of requirements (itself petite) says: 1. Be small. 2. Squeak.

“It is not cute,” I say. “And do you know what is small?” I say. “Disease carried on the backs of mice,” I say, “is small.” Olive says, “Look, he is not ‘it’, OK, he has a name.” “He has a soul,” he says. “His name,” he once declared, “is Moses.”

Very late one night, finally, as I sat at the kitchen table, the mouse poked his nose round the side of the fridge and looked at me. I looked back, making my eyes as big as cats and thinking flaming claws shooting out of them. The mouse squeaked mouse warnings to his no-good hooligan mouse associates, and there was a scuttering and a scrabbling against the wall.

The mousetraps in the Turkish off-licence are called “Little Nipper” but I cannot buy them because mice is one thing but dead mice is another. My devious plan, colour me cunning, is to remember to keep any bag containing food off the floor. Still, I am aware that I am but a pawn in this game. Yesterday, as I grated some grana padano for a pesto, it was clear to me that each little cheesy fleck that fell upon the kitchen floor was another neon sign flickering “Vacancy” to the mice. “Come on in,” I might as well say, and I could stick out a finger to take their hats and furs, “the cheese is fine.”

I’ve been fighting a losing battle against the oven in the new flat since we moved in. Cakes don’t rise as well as they should. Tart pastries don’t cook through. Pizzas burn. I’ve come to wonder if a soggy pie bottom is a defensible reason for breaking a lease.

Last weekend I was making desserts to bring over to Laureen’s. A foie gras–eating vegetarian from Nashville, Tennessee, she was fixing a Puerto Rican–style roasted pork shoulder studded with garlic and oregano (although: “Not fixing,” she says, “fixin’.”). I told her I would bring her a strawberry shortcake and some chocolate meringues. “If you pronounce it mer-eng-gay,” I said, “it is almost Puerto Rican.” I made the shortcake while Dolly Parton played. It was golden on the outside but, I was to find out much later, heavy – sullen, even – on the inside. The meringues turned out OK, I think – fantastical chocolatey swirls on the outside, melty chocolatey goodness on the inside. But can a girl live on meringues alone? And what will I do with all the leftover egg yolks? Turn them in for cholesterol medication once I’m done with the pots de crème, the mayonnaise, the zabaglione, the aioli?

I’m going to have to do some temperature tests, I think. Let the bake-offs begin! I’ll show this oven who’s boss.

(Fingers crossed it’s me.)

The sun come out means reading in the park with the roses. Ya!, the roses are still out, and the yellow ones smell of sweet butter. I packed a chicken pie and a strawberry shortcake with the picnic blanket.

There’s a really wonderful article about Claudia Roden in this week’s New Yorker, the food issue. I came to the woman a couple of years ago through her cake – her orange cake, that is, the one cake I regularly make that inevitably results in its tasters asking for its recipe. I made the cake and I made the cake and then one day I realised that Claudia Roden was Somebody. The cake, of course, we already knew, much like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web was Some Pig, was Some Cake.

Jane Kramer’s article takes us through Roden’s literary and culinary life, through the kitchens in which she cooks and in which she watches the cooks. There are kitchens in Cairo and kitchens in Damascus; kitchens in Iran, in Lebanon, in the Spanish province of Asturias; there is especially one kitchen in North London, next door to two prize pigs. There are mangoes and spinach soup and a slow-roasted lamb. There is a pantry full of “grains and preserves and flower waters”. There is also a nice picture of the woman and a goat.

It’s not just kitchens, either. A scholar of food, Roden adventures among philosophers and historians, poets and tale-tellers to gather her material. She meets potential sources of recipes outside bean shops. Bean shops! This is a life. I wonder if it is the kind of life I would like mine to be like. I could hang out outside bean shops in dark glasses and a chocolate cigarette. These things you think when the sun is warm on your back and the kids in the park are cheering for birthday cake.

How the week flies when you’re, I dunno, traipsing down to the market, reading on the sofa with the windows open, grilling broccolini to go with baked salmon fillets, popping into little chocolate shops for little chocolates! I met my ex-colleagues for a drink at the Tap a couple of days ago, and they said, “What are you doing these days?” “Nothin’,” I said, and we savoured the word. “I would make a great house husband,” Christos said. “Your wife would get home,” I said, “and you’d be sitting on the sofa in your bathrobe watching the soaps.” I took an invisible cigarette from my lips and blew an invisible smoke ring. “As long as you’re sexy,” Christos said, and he is Greek and spends his holidays on Athenian beaches, “the housework doesn’t matter.”

This past Monday morning we woke up at ten, maybe later, me and Olive, we rolled over and stretched and the sun was out and housework was not on the agenda. What is better than a bank holiday is a bank holiday that creeps up on you. Two years in this country and I still can’t keep them straight. It just means, though, that when a bank holiday swings round, it’s like it’s being handed to me on a shiny pedestal platter, and in a swirl of rainbow confetti and rose petals.

We thought we’d check out the Notting Hill Carnival, because why not. “Biggest street fair in Europe,” the stories went. “Steel bands,” they said, “costumes, parades, floats.” “OK!” I said, because I am easily sold, “although I have a feeling we will get there and it will be crowded and noisy and we will want to leave.” “In which case,” I said, because I like an exit plan, “I suppose we will leave.”



At the Westbourne Park Tube station, the hordes. “Ah,” we said, and it became clear to us that we’d thought we known, but we had no idea. The hordes along the train platform, and the hordes up the stairs. The hordes pouring out onto the street. “Left or right?” Olive said, and I looked at the hordes, first, then the hordes. We went left, maybe, or right, I don’t know now, and it’s quite possible we went left first then right, there was music everywhere and the beats thumped in my chest. Great black speakers balanced one on another on every other street corner, it seemed, and the beats thumped and bumped in my chest. Down one end, the air was smoky and delicious with meat on the grill. Jerk chicken, the signs read, and grilled corn and rice and beans, and there the breeze carried suggestions of curries and palm trees and sun-smelling skin at the end of the day.

Where the reggae played, the girls and boys in dreads and loose cotton trousers swayed and nodded. On another street, men dressed like Elvis on a Hawaiian holiday danced to Frankie Valli and the Ronettes. The parade came down Westbourne Grove and the girls waved their bandannas and the drummers the drummers the drummers.



We got chocolate ice creams for the walk through the park afterwards, after we’d strolled some and jiggled our heads some and admired the police horses some and looked at the Ralph Lauren crowd screaming along to Guns N’ Roses.

I don’t know how it’s September already when, with the sun out now, it feels like summer’s just finding its groove.