A little piece of what I do

One of the nice things about revising is that every now and then you get a buzz on, you hit one of your unmurdered darlings, you think oh yes, this is why I do it, this. It may not be best form for half a dozen reasons, self-indulgence not the least of them, but - yeah. For me, for now: this'll do.

And one of the nice things about having a blog, and being connected? I can lift my baby out and drop it in and cry Look, look! See what I did there?.

So. This is my darling du jour so far: a quick page out of context, out of Pandaemonium by Ben Macallan (who is me). Enjoy.

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Sometimes, a doorway takes you by surprise.
People have done studies, how you can walk into a room and abruptly forget why you came there. It’s all in the doorway, in the process of passing through, it’s like you reboot your mind. Like there are magnets in the frame, to wipe your short-term memory.
Or a doorway makes itself a metaphor, however solid and substantial and really in the world it is. You step through, and your life will never be the same.
Or never mind the metaphors and never mind the brainshift, it’s just a physical actual doorway and you go from here to there, one place to another, and things are different.
Whichever: you can be ready for any of that, if you only see the doorway coming. If you know it’s there. If you choose. If it lets you make the choice, in or out, this side or that.
Sometimes you’re just bulling along, head down, working up a sweat, and someone sticks a doorway right in front of you, and everything changes.

Heat is work and work is heat. Not a metaphor, that’s a rule.
Basically, Fay always wanted to be hot. Okay, that’s a metaphor.
Desi? Likes it both ways. Metaphorical and otherwise. It’s hot to be cool, but regular heat is also good. Sunshine or sauna, fresh air or pheromones, dance-time or double-time, it’s always good to be getting sweaty.
The sun beat down on the back of my neck and even the air tasted hot in my mouth, even the road beneath my wheels had stored up enough heat to be radiating back at me.
It felt gritty too, that road, like I was rolling over hot hard gravelly sand rather than laid tarmac. I hadn’t really looked for a while, I’d been zoning out, automating; but I looked now, and–

Oh.

Hot hard gravelly sand, oh yes.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.

Not By Bread Alone

We have a couple of people coming over tonight, to hang out. Karen asked if I wanted to feed them. "Well," I said, "not dinner - but we've got those samosas from the farmers' market, and that watermelon from the farmshare, and..."

So: come for snacks, we said.

Obviously, I've been thinking all day about what I can actually feed them. I'm going through the fridge shelf by shelf, throwing out what's bad and categorising what's not: and I think we can offer samosas and pickle and crudites and garlic dip and watermelon and olives and cheeses and crackers and smoked chicken and salad and cold chicken and fried potatoes and the fresh bread that I'm baking as we speak, and if anyone's still hungry I could make peach and apricot cobbler with fresh cream for dessert.

I think that'll do?

In not utterly unrelated news, I'm thinking about writing a blog series for Book View Cafe, about my transplanted culinary adventures: a British cook in US exile, what travels and what doesn't, how tastes and ingredients and methods differ, that sort of thing. If I do it, if it works, I could patchwork it together as an e-book. It'd need a title, though. Ideas, comments, brickbats all gratefully received (except the latter, perhaps: except that I'm not really sure what a brickbat is. Is it related to a halfbrick?).