I wake up to the light in my friend’s living room and lie about for a while whilst everyone else in the flat gets ready. We have big Scottish strawberries for breakfast, and I eat my squashed nectarine. Over a couple of mugs of tea, I do some work on my laptop and slowly get dressed.
For lunch we walk down to Ta-Bi Island, a Taiwanese restaurant that serve sushi rolls, where I fill mine with crispy chicken and get a brown sugar milk tea with tapioca pearls to drink. This is the first time I’ve tried either of these things! I keep it simple aside from the pearls and leave out any other toppings. The sushi roll arrives in two separate plastic wrappers - one around the entire thing and another around the rice and filling. You pull out the wrapper around the rice so it kind of plops nicely into the seaweed wrapper, then I squeeze it out the end and have a nosh. I eat the wrap before starting the tea because it feels like a dessert, so I drink it walking to a bakery in the sun where I get a cream brioche roll. I asked for the milk tea warm, which was perhaps a weird choice on a warm day but is delightful and sweet, and I like the little chewy pearls that melt a little into the milk after a while. After a while though, it gets a bit much drinking a huge cup of what is essentially very sweet milk sloshing around whilst I try to cross the road and walk from place to place, in the end I can’t finish it, but I enjoyed the journey. An honourable mention at this stage goes out to Lighthouse Books, where I picked up a copy of King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes.
Dinner is a gigantic bowl of veggie spag bol and a few glasses of white wine in front of Love Island. Basic bitch of me but I do love it, and it takes me two sittings to polish off the pasta. I ate the cream roll at foursies so the gigantic portion of pasta is probably a mistake in hindsight and I feel very sluggish by the end of the evening. 100% my type on paper x
Sophie Paul (she/her, b. 1998) is a designer and writer based across London and Oxfordshire. Her work intersects critical theory, trashiness, and eroticisms.
Alongside Kaiya Waerea, she is one half of Sticky Fingers Publishing, an intra-dependent feminist publisher based in London.