A drowsy, not-quite-hungover but definitely dehydrated start to today, late in the morning. Read at the launch of MAP Magazine’s Bodies, Proximity, and Place pamphlet last night, alongside some complete legends.
Dinnerless and a little wiggy the night before, whatever the embodied trudge I’m feeling this morning has definitely been exacerbated by the stage of hunger that goes beyond nagging insistence, being blunted by drunken sleep into a kind of disparate drizzle; something just outside your periphery.
So it’s with this ambient, unpressing reminder of oh yeah I do actually need to eat in tow that me and L make a pilgrimage across the sodden gold of Queens Park to Deanston Bakery. This place man. I think about it when I’m not here, I go here everytime I come up. It exerts an inextricable pull. It’s a little pricey, but everyone I’ve met who works there is lovely and they seem to be well looked after, so I’m more than happy to momentarily quell the prang of parting with a little more cash than normal because, fucking hell, everything here is of another order entirely: Smoked salmon and cream cheese sesame bagel, a chai bun that they didn’t have last time I was here, and three lemon and almond biscuits, dusted in powdered sugar (which are sort of like soft, chewy biscotti, seemingly made with loads of egg white(?), and are probably in my top five favourite baked goods I’ve ever eaten. Not that I’ve ever made a list. The only other one I can think of, off the top of my head, would be the purple-spiralled, burnt liquorice bun from this warm, boxy lozenge of a bakery in Reykjavik, just down the hill from the cathedral). In the straining paper bag they also chuck some long, amber shortbreads that they’ve given us on the house.
The bagel is deep and tough in a really fresh way because it has bite. It’s not complacently doughy or easily pulled apart – you have to fight to get your bites in. Bagels are meant to be dense. They’re supposed to be like chewing 4 slices of bread at once. The only denser thing I’ve ever eaten is the coconut bread from the Colombian bakery off Brixton junction: I love that place so much, and I’ll try and squeeze in a visit before my stint on the gazette is up, but it’s like this stuff is baked at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Tastes great though.
Back to the bagel: a cheeky pink tongue of salmon lolls out the side – thick, a little pensive. There will never be a better iteration of this bagel than the one from Katz in New York but this really hits the spot; eaten now back at the apex of the park overlooking the surrounding hills of Glasgow and the silhouetted frond of wind turbines picked out in the distance to the south. Because the chai bun is a comingling of a solid and a liquid, it sounds like a bit of a gimmick. But between the spicy warmth of the swirled, dark-brown sugar paste and the sharp tang of the clear, lemony glaze, it still retains the semiotic cohesion and ambient, Scandinavian homeyness of the cinnamon bun, whose form and structure it mimics. It’s incredible. It’s so good that hunger is a bit of a limiting variable. I wish I’d spent more time with it.
Not long after, and following a strong, yet unremittingly dozy cuppa at B’s flat, we clock that Sunday’s trains are trashed in the lead up to the next round of industrial action on the 17th. We were all gonna go out for tea tonight somewhere cheap, but faced with the premise of a seven hour, four-change train back to London tomorrow morning we sack it in. Train snacks, or something that could now feasibly stand in for both late-lunch and dinner, become the next port of call.
We wind up with a bottle of Dr. Pepper, (they didn’t have a can – everything tastes better in a can), some red and orange baby tomatoes (including one solitary, dark green one) in a waxy brown bag, chocolate buttons and caramac buttons (bit weird), some hummus and dry yellow corn cakes, a packet of peanut crisp-curls (the best crisp that exists), and a single bright green satsuma which I’ve never tried before. It’s sharper and more sour than the watery, weakly-orange ones you get normally. The skin smells faintly of piss, but the inside-pith is foamy and electric. One of my favourite things to do is rub my hands and nose in the whites of an orange skin once its segments are gone, so that the zest or spray lingers in the air, in your pores, for a little while afterwards.
Late train, dark evening, nice things shared. Two drunk guys get on at Preston and joke about spooning each other’s dogs and “accommodating four mates in a king-size waterbed”. I’m cracking up under my collar. Why is Dr. Pepper so good.
Wes Knowler is a writer living in London. @otter_cobra