For breakfast I have a toasted crumpet with butter and a squidge of vegemite, a satsuma, berocca, a cup of tea, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, the latter so tart it stings a little when it hits the back of my throat and, once I’ve swallowed it almost in one go, saliva pools around my teeth and under my tongue. I feel leaden and dull today and this mostly orange breakfast is meant to be antidotal, an attempt to balance my humours with bright, sharp flavours. K brings me some pears, a few plums, and an apple or two because I’m determined to make something today. Something for lunch, then maybe a crumble. I was so bored yesterday, but felt quite unable to do anything that might alleviate the boredom, and I felt lonely, I realised, too.
Crumpets, satsumas, three drinks
When I am the opposite of lonely, when I’ve tried to pack too many things in without leaving time for rest or silence, I often joke that I should become a monk. At least once I’ve looked up how one goes about it, stored the knowledge somewhere safe in case of an emergency. A few weeks ago, in such a state, I went on what I kept calling my monastic retreat, by which I mean I went to stay at my mother’s cottage to look after her dog while she was away. She lives, essentially, in a field. As I don’t drive I would not be able to wander far beyond the bounds of the field. I could go up the bridle path, where I often see buzzards against a backdrop of distant turbines turning in the wind, or up to the church where there are some stained glass windows of note. That’s more or less it and it suits me perfectly. The circumstances of my visit were not dissimilar to my current ones: I was recovering from a different respiratory tract infection, I needed to take some time off work, and I had not much else to do but read, write, and cook. I had spent the previous few days getting more and more wound up by people I love, like, and work with but because they were not actually doing anything wrong, I had also begun to feel pretty angry with myself for feeling so on edge. I knew why I was caught in it, but it was a tiresome loop nonetheless. I had to get away in order to soften my edges, to take a strigil to every inch of me, to rest and reset, to come back smooth and renewed.
For lunch, I tip a handful of dry green lentils into a bowl, pour over some water, grind a teaspoon of salt into the water, and agitate the lentils a bit with my fingers. I don’t really know what I’m doing but it feels right. I decide lentils alone will not be sufficiently filling, so dice some potatoes, coat them in oil, add salt and a few chilli flakes and stick them into the oven to get crispy. I drain the lentils, spoon them into a saucepan, add half a stock pot and some water. After ten minutes I realise I have made many, many more lentils than I’d intended to. I fish a few out with my fork to test: too hard, they need more time. When they’ve had it, I poach an egg and steam some asparagus tips. I pile the lentils and potatoes onto a plate, add more salt, more chilli flakes, a little olive oil, the final squeeze of yesterday’s lemon. Add the asparagus and gently scoop the poached egg on top of everything. More chilli. I’m not sure what I’ve made, but it’s very good. I have seconds of lentils and potatoes and after I’ve eaten, I immediately need to lie down.
Lentils, crispy potatoes, asparagus, poached egg
While I was there I watched a documentary called Essene. Like most of Frederick Wiseman’s films, it concerns the daily life of an institution, in this case a Benedictine Monastery. Essene is comprised primarily of the particulars of monastic life: the monks pray, they eat, they work, they read, they bicker, they pray some more, they sleep, and they repeat. The main event, such as it is, of the film is a discussion over whether a postulant will join the monastery as a novitiate. Watching, I was thoroughly disabused of my notion that the monastic life was an especially peaceful one. For one, you are almost never alone. What the film shows well is the clash between the necessarily communal aspects of living in a monastery and the monks’ own desires to arrange, organise, and control what they can, to bend other people to their own preferences. I was watching on screen what I’d come here to avoid in my own life. In one scene, a monk offers Wiseman a fairly lengthy disquisition on why the other brothers should not refer to him by his first name unless they are explicitly invited by him to do so. He was so obviously—obvious even to himself, I think—being a complete pain in the ass and also I totally got it.
I spoon a mouthful of lentils from the sieve I left balancing over the sink into my mouth. Lentils! They are so good, almost peppery. I peel a satsuma. This time, I peel the skin from each segment too, and place the serried vesicles directly onto my tongue. I make and drink a lemsip and a cup of tea in quick succession.
At the beginning of the month I had finished an enormous writing project and as soon as I finished it was poleaxed by exhaustion, I just could not get off the sofa or think of anything to cook or eat or do, friends would text and I’d reply days later. My exhaustion reminded me of the long depression I’d not long managed to shift and nothing frightened me more than that. The thing about having spent four years in a protracted and intractable, grief-induced state of numbness and then having climbed—with considerable assistance—out of it, is that now if a difficult feeling sticks around for too long say, longer than a day, I assume it’s going to stick around forever. Once that domino falls, so do the rest: work was frustrating, the news was terrifying, I kept getting ill, I couldn’t get anyone else to join the union, it seemed transphobia was being sown like salt anywhere trans joy was able to crop up and flourish, and on and on and on. I was overwhelmed—I felt like pulled sugar, overstretched into a brittle little filament. I responded by trying to wrest control where I could. At work and at home I wanted things to be done my way and felt cross when they weren’t, even when the way they were being done was completely and objectively fine. I suddenly found the things I usually love about other people absolutely maddening and I didn’t want to open my mouth lest something like ‘familiarity breeds contempt, no one should use my first name unless he is invited to’ came out of it. I felt like I was going mad and I knew I needed to be alone.
I eat the five remaining munchies by biting off one side and sucking all the caramel out. Let the chocolate melt on my tongue.
Of course, now that I must be alone when I feel neither the need nor the desire to be alone, I feel lonely, like a faithless anchorite or Carol White from Safe. And I hate it. My friends text me and I feel as though I’ve been plummeted back in the early days of lockdown, when seeing colleagues was legal but seeing friends was a crime. Fuck this, I think, c’mere, I want to smell the day you’ve had. I can think of nothing I’d like more than to listen to a story about how someone on a bus was playing music loudly from their phone, or whatever. Then, standing on this balcony I can almost touch the front door of my old flat and I think, had it not been for those lockdowns, all the drinks we had standing on our respective balconies, I probably wouldn’t have come to know Catherine, whose flat I am convalescing in, quite so quickly or quite so well as I do now. Which is not to say I’m grateful for lockdown, I’m emphatically not, but to remind myself that it’s over and that so too will this be.
Pizza
For now: I top a pizza with broccoli, the last of the asparagus, and a potato I’ve boiled and smashed. I drizzle a little olive oil over everything, slide the pizza into the oven, pick up my stupid little phone and make a plan to go for a beer and a walk with someone. Tomorrow, crumble maybe.
Cornelius Prior (they/them): I’m a writer and an editor in the cultural sector. I write about books, homosexuality, cities, and occasionally art and moving image.
Klaussie Williams (she/her): I’m an artist and bookseller. I make abstract water colours, book jacket illustrations, and draw the places and things I like.