day 3 - Salad Judgement

by Wes Knowler

In between an almost-overdue commission and a night-shift today, I’m a little behind. So this will be a slightly shorter (and, I promise, less ranty) dispatch!

The first thing I remember: bleary orange juice fountain straight from the carton in the back of my throat, the fridge door hanging open, docile. My body aches. Black coffee – this has already been spoken about – and Aldi own-brand muesli. There is almost nothing to say about muesli.

I am off to get my hair cut in an actual place(!), which is something I haven’t done in a long time. Since 2016 I’ve yo-yo’d between growing it out long and shaving it off completely, but in the last year or so it’s been stuck in a faintly mushroom-y stasis; indecisively meandering without committing to one extreme or the other. This place called DKUK have a pay-what-you-can first cut offer, which I am, a little sheepishly, taking advantage of. Get a head massage, (which is insane! How is that included?) and a glass of sparkling elderflower (weird choice – I could have got a beer but it's definitely too early). The gas in the water has that kind of thin, prickly, extra-small bubbly texture that lets you know it’s either posh or going a bit flat, but blessedly the tiny bubbles mean that the cordial has sunk to the bottom of the glass, pooling there like a delicious oil spill. That’s the best way to drink anything like this; not fully mixed in, so that the drink has a tempo, an elongated journey. Every return to the glass is not the same – the first sip is profoundly different from the final gulp. At least that’s what I do, hurriedly; necking the last third as I get up to pay in a tangy, syrupy exhortation.

Elderflower is amazing and free if you live near some elder trees. I love using the word ‘frothy’ to describe the heads of petals right at their peak. Me and H mean to make cordial every year, and always forget, but this year we half-remembered, after putting it off for weeks, stumbling home, pissed, too-late in the season, picking as much of it as we could carry and stuff in her handbag and white pleather jacket, even though it was already on the turn, in a thin drizzle at three in the morning. I obviously didn’t properly sterilise the glass bottles for long enough in the oven, (I think I overcompensated for the flowers being past their peak by adding too much sugar), so both litres thick, gloopy mixture bloomed a little stopper of grey scum only a couple days later. I had to pour the whole quietly fermenting batch down the sink.

For lunch now, I blast through the limits of palette and good taste by opening with a triple-chocolate cookie from Sainsburys. The best ones are slightly underdone, as all cookies should be, and if I had more time today and had been organised enough to get the ingredients in, I would definitely have chucked some in the oven. This one’s still incredible, better than any supermarket-cookie has any business being, but it’s a liiiitle overdone; just beginning to crisp around the edges.

Next I scramble to think what to do with the rest of the bougie loaf. There’s still so much of it. Two meals, two days, at least one clandestinely un-noted slice of toast, and it’s like I’ve barely made a dent. My mind spirals. I realise that I’m actually sweating. What on earth could I possibly begin to prepare on a scale that would use this much bread before Friday, when I need to leave for Glasgow? Will I have to take it on the train, swaddled under my arm in brown paper like some orphaned babe? To what end? I think the sugar rush from the cookie is kicking in. I’m also aware that I promised to try and make this week as interesting as possible – despite my admittedly, and slightly abashedly, unvaried diet day-to-day – and yet this same ponderous, inexhaustible loaf has featured in every single one of my dispatches so far. Ominously looming in the kitchen, what was at first a recklessly appetising gift to myself has gradually mutated into a fiscal responsibility that I arguably shouldn’t have taken on originally, but which, as it implacably hardens and stales with ferocious velocity, I’m now critically in danger of incurring diminishing returns on. I realise that I’ve become the ‘I will never financially recover from this’ meme. This fathomless sourdough has forced me to the brink.

Mackerel on toast with cucumber. Okay yeah I can do that. I know how to make that. It won’t use that much of the bread but that’s okay – whatever it takes to chip away at it. I run to go get the salad out the bottom drawer of the fridge and, neglected since last Thursday when it first arrived in the Oddbox, the bottom half of the bag has gone all dark and slimy. I immediately tear it open, running on sheer adrenaline, and start sifting the baby spinach leaves and rocket into two different piles on a teatowel; one passable, one unsalvageable. I’m doling out determinations left and right, casting some aside, wavering over others, stuffing whole handfuls of what looks remotely edible to the left. I am judging this salad at the crusty gates of the sandwich that hasn’t been built yet.

Next I go to toast the bread and discover that the slice I’ve shorn off is slightly too thick to fit in the meagre gaps of the toaster (I’m trying to use as much as possible of it at time). I take a smaller bread knife to carve off the excess, devouring each offcut in turn as I go; whittling it into shape like a beleaguered woodsman. In the toaster it goes again; still won’t work. Take the bread out and hold the plunger down with it empty. No response. Nothing. I futilely slam the plunger down a few more times, like I’m banging on its chest with a defibrillator. Overwhelmed by the urgency of the sandwich, and the critical responsibility placed upon it in the hour of need, my toaster has given up the ghost.

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For dinner, and much less frantically, H generously makes a quick red lentil stew with Thai jasmine rice. It’s warm and calming, and simple.

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Wes Knowler is a writer living in London. @otter_cobra