8:20
I wake up shocked at my maths and sweaty from an uncomfortable restaurant dream where I’ve just accidentally given someone a massive tip on top of an already extortionate bill, only because I couldn’t calculate quickly enough and was ashamed to then correct it. Sadly I can’t even remember what expensive fancy food I’d been fantasising about.
Lots of laptop work to get done this morning, so I go to pick up breakfast from a bakery as a treat. The closest one isn’t the best for viennoiserie I have to say but I don’t want to walk much further so it’ll do. The queue is long and the person in front of me is so impatient and agitated about the wait that they end up forgetting their pastries on the counter as they rush away. I realise what’s happening but my French isn’t there when I need it so I just make an undefined alarming noise – it works anyway.
When it’s my turn to order I go for the chouquettes. A friend has mentioned them at several occasions so I should give them a try, plus they do look really cute. I have no idea what an appropriate amount of chouquettes for 1 person would be. In my head I think that 5 is good, but when I walk up to the counter my mouth says – 8! (Now that I write this I do realise it is a bit of a miniature version of what happened in my dream.) All good though, the chouquettes turn out to be delicious: A small choux pastry with large sugar chunks on top, crispy shell but a surprisingly soft moist inside. I eat them slowly, all 8, with a large jug of the Kenyan coffee while I work at my picnic bench.
12:10
A group of people in yoga clothes start roaming around my picnic table, each of them equipped with an impressive lunch box. It’s obvious that they want my table but are too polite to say anything. My eyes feel funny from too much screen time though, so it’s probably good to take a break. I go back upstairs and give my fridge a routine check. Nothing exciting in there, so I do a lucky dip into the goldbears and win a perfect range of reds and yellows (hate the white ones).
An orange has started to go mouldy in my fridge, it’s still got the sticky price tag attached to its skin so I can exactly see how much money I’m about to throw away. I build a little waste sculpture in the sink and think about my art professor in Germany. She once told me that when she started art school, the only thing she did for a year was placing fruit and veg on the studio floor and watch it decay. I can relate to that, and realise that the photosensitive work that I do at the moment is also some sort of active waiting. Like fishing, or fermenting.
I remove a lumen print from the narrow strip of sunlight on the floor of my studio where it’s been exposing all morning, and pop it in a tray with fixer. My shower has turned into a makeshift darkroom, but sharing a space with my practice means that everything has to be a bit flexible about function anyway. My desk is also a dinner table and my bed a cinema and observatory. I’m using empty plastic bottles for keeping my chemistry. I didn’t bother removing the labels, so it looks like I’m developing with Schweppes and fixing with Perrier.
13:20
I cook some rice to go with my last bit of the bean stew and balance the box with the stew on top of the pot to heat it up in the steam – thrifty, I know! I set an alarm for the rice and return to my desk, but my nose is more precise than the timer and smells the sweetness of the rice on the brink of burning at the bottom of the pot before the timer goes off. As I eat, the two bay leaves I’ve cooked with the beans reappear on my plate; they were stiff and dry when I last saw them, now they’re leathery soft. They look beautiful and tired.
17:00
Back from a swim. The pool is fed by a well at 600m below ground that is 28˚ C warm and apparently really good drinking water too, I haven’t tried it yet but there are fountains in front of the building where you can fill up your bottle.
I eat a small bowl of cheap granola with fancy organic yoghurt and a handful of halved mirabelles on top. I don’t think that’s a very common fruit in the UK but it’s in season in France and Germany at the moment and it’s delicious; a yellow stone fruit, shaped like a small plum with a similar fibrous flesh, and a sweet taste that gets disgusting really quickly once the fruit is overripe. I take a photo of the bowl and my view and realise that both things feel equally private to share.
21:35
A few of those Prince cookies that have choc cream between two layers of butter biscuits. I sit in an armchair and, trying not to make too much of a mess, inhale while I bite. Of course I choke on the crumbs. Pint of water. Another one. My magnesium tablet.
Eleni Wittbrodt (she/her) is a German visual artist based in Glasgow. Find her on instagram @wttbrdt .