Breakfast
Woke up to a cup of milky black tea on the bedside table and Jack showing me a compilation of Gordon Ramsay videos to inspire me for my day of writing. Had a handful of pecans before yoga practice where my hunger made itself very present.
Porridge with berries and pecans. We accidentally picked up bread flour instead of porridge oats in the weekly shop, and didn’t realise until the flour was in the pot with the oats. Oats and bread flour makes for a very creamy porridge. Two rounds of frothy coffees and a recounting of a dream about tiramisu.
Huge blue skies again.
Lunch
Time moves very fast this week. Unsure if it is because the days are finally longer than 4 hours, stretching out and yawning into evening, or I am moving at an incredibly slow pace through the week. Spent the whole afternoon piecing together fabric to make an olive green top, which turns out to be too small. I turned the fabric strips the right way round using a broken chopstick from the sushi place at the bottom of the hill, thinking about how many chopsticks they must go through in a night, a week, a month. I make red pesto pasta whilst thinking of maki. Our kitchen table chairs, traditional wooden chairs painted blue, were found in the charity shop that wears the disguise of a 3-story house, cosied away underneath the motorway. They reminded us of Greek tavernas, but our Norwegian friend very quickly broke the aura by telling us they were a classic Norwegian design. Identity crisis ensued. The grey-white-blue checked tea towels, potato peel leftovers on the white counter and white walls remind me of Jeanne Dielman’s kitchen.
I had another big orange and the juice spills all over the floor. I don’t clean it up and my slippers carry citrus scent through the house. Matched cucumber to my nails.
I feel very guilty that at 5pm the sky has grown bluer, bigger, brighter and I have not left the house. I open a window and drink a cup of tea. It’s been a translucent kind of day, with the day before and the day following seeping through on either end.
Dinner
Squeeze into too small top and put on white jeans with tomato juice down the leg from sometime this week. It feels like there is never any food in the house, yet we've been going to the shops everyday and the house feels very messy, but we’ve been cleaning everyday. Chalking that up to the stars being in weird positions these nights. Find some noodles at the back of the cupboard and make them with lots of spices and ginger, soy-soaked mushrooms, sugar snap peas and a fried egg with some lime. Ideally would finish with spring onions and coriander, but our fridge is lacking. Ginger, lime, spring onion and coriander to be filed under “4 things that go really well together, almost too well”, alongside tomato, feta, olive oil, salt and anchovies, chili, olive, capers.
Somewhat uninspired today, in both eating and writing. I blame Gordon Ramsay. Thinking about the possibility of a negroni tonight but I acknowledge it’ll probably be a Hansa. Hansa is essentially the equivalent of Tennents, but without the teenage-boy-bedroom-sweat after taste and it doesn’t yet bring out a tipsy patriotism in me.
Ruby Eleftheriotis is a curator and writer, with one foot in Scotland and the other in Norway. You can find her on instagram here.
To get a better understanding of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine, have a look at this list of resources, compiled by Marta Bohdanna Iwanek.