badly. The smell from the saucepan fills the room, and the extraction fan isn’t working, so it clings to everything. A sort of dry glue smell. Wet paint smell. It’s oats, oat milk, brown sugar. I leave it to thicken into a paste while I put on clothes. Shirt, trousers, waistcoat, and by the time I am back, it is a crust. I flip over the patty of grains and it makes a sound as I glide it into my bowl. On top, banana, grapes – not even halved today – and nothing else. I have places to be, so I drink peppermint tea fast. I don’t have time to nurse the burn. I put three pieces of apple in my coat pocket for the road, and I get going.
On a call, between sentences, at around noon.
With the ends of a cucumber, batoned, I dig onion up from the glass I usually store salt in. It’s squat with still a little salt at the bottom, and so I season each stick like a sherbet dib dab.
I have an affinity for bad supermarket salsa, with its tongue-stripping aftertaste and jamminess. Today, I add onion, add tomato, add coriander and garlic to the dregs of a jar in my fridge, and talk about monogamy with a friend for a while as I scoop.
I make sure I keep the stalk from the cucumber intact, and leave it until last to eat. It’s turgid like a little nipple in my mouth.
Oh how the mighty fall
In 2019, I moved back to the house I grew up in with my parents in Wales, after graduating and struggling to live in London for a year. Working in Waterstones part time and stealing sandals from Zara instead of doing anything I truly cared about meant that I was empty like a sad sock, and had to plod back, embarrassed, to my childhood home. After a few weaning days and weeping days, I drove to the cafe I spent many mornings in growing up, to buy myself a lunch. Fried egg, toast, roast peppers. The man who took my order was a boy I went to primary school with and, as I stood at the counter to pay he asked what was going on with me and whether I was here for a visit.
Oh how the mighty fall, he replied, when I told him I had recently moved back in with my parents.
On a little plate (listening to Cai talk about how fucked up the idea of a cultured palette is, and about bringing new flavours to small villages, and about, basically, gentrification, and money, and burnt peppers) is this:
A small marrow (or big courgette) forgotten about in the knots of the garden. I cut it at an angle, shallow fried it in the pancake pan then roasted it in paprika with some little peppers (stalks and all) and four whole garlic cloves I spread on like butter.
Rye bread (now undoubtedly stale)
An olive tapenade made with an abandoned jar of olives at the back of my fridge, lemon, too much salt, chilli.
A fried egg.
Also, on eggs:
There used to be a fishmongers, a bakery, a butcher and a greengrocer in my village. Now there’s a post box and a Premier corner shop. In there, they sell eggs laid by chickens in their backyard. On the boxes, the stickers say Mighty Hens. Six. Roaming Free.
I use these eggs for my lunch and, after taking a few bites, watch them fall to the floor and split open like memory, the yolk and oil seeping into the gaps in the carpet.