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For a wonder, I didn't cook at all yesterday, if we bar from counting a slice of toast for breakfast.
Instead Karen and Laurie and Katherine and I all drove up to San Francisco, to Andrew's house on Potrero Hill; then we dropped Karen in the FiDi for a business lunch while Andrew played tour guide to the rest of us, taking us for a tramp around parts of the city that had survived the firequake in '06. Also, he may have taken me to a cutlery store (NB: "cutlery" in the US means kitchen knives and the like: serious sharpware. What we Brits call cutlery is flatware or silverware over here) and we may have bought a boning knife each, because knives.
Then we collected Karen again and drove out to the coast, to see the remains of the Sutro Baths and sit in a window corner of the Cliff House and snack and drink and watch waves and windsurfers and pelicans and such. And at last we had to leave, so we set a placeholder there (because there is more of SF to see, and starting again with breakfast at the Cliff House seems not such a terrible idea to me, or to any of us) and went back to Andrew's. Where we schlepped up and down the stairs with stuff while he loaded his truck for camping; and then it was time to drink wine and eat a lovely baked paella and eventually alas come home.
This morning I went to the library to work, and came home to find m'wife and m'cat napping together in her chair, in an expression of ultimate cute. Alas, I woke her; so I made a shrimp'n'spinach salad where I rather brilliantly fried the shrimp in the orange-and-fennel-flavoured oil that I'd poached the fish in a couple of nights ago, and then squeezed in a lemon to deglaze the pan and poured off what resulted and beat it up with a fork and called it dressing for the salad, om nom.
And now I am trying to fuss my way through a final draft of Being Small, only I'm tired and losing weigh. But I do still love this little book, and it does keep surprising me with passages I don't remember, so here, have a darling of the day. Context is for the weak.
"Come and sit," he had said. He might have lost height and breadth, but he still had all the depth he needed. Not in his eyes, they were flat and shimmered only on the surface; not in his voice, which was reedy and hollowed out, sounding like a tracing of what it must have been, another intractable measurement of loss. Everything he had seemed stubbornly to define what he had been, how far he’d fallen and was falling still.
That should have been a weakness, a statement of defeat, and it was not. I didn’t know where it lay, the sense of strength abiding. I felt it, though, and responded in the simplest way, like a dog to a whistle, blindly trusting. Except that I wasn’t blind and I didn’t trust, excepting only that. The prince of darkness is a gentleman; Lucifer must still have had an angel’s air about him as he fell. He never could disguise or deny what he was made of, the very stuff of heaven. I would tread warily here, and commit myself to nothing.
Instead Karen and Laurie and Katherine and I all drove up to San Francisco, to Andrew's house on Potrero Hill; then we dropped Karen in the FiDi for a business lunch while Andrew played tour guide to the rest of us, taking us for a tramp around parts of the city that had survived the firequake in '06. Also, he may have taken me to a cutlery store (NB: "cutlery" in the US means kitchen knives and the like: serious sharpware. What we Brits call cutlery is flatware or silverware over here) and we may have bought a boning knife each, because knives.
Then we collected Karen again and drove out to the coast, to see the remains of the Sutro Baths and sit in a window corner of the Cliff House and snack and drink and watch waves and windsurfers and pelicans and such. And at last we had to leave, so we set a placeholder there (because there is more of SF to see, and starting again with breakfast at the Cliff House seems not such a terrible idea to me, or to any of us) and went back to Andrew's. Where we schlepped up and down the stairs with stuff while he loaded his truck for camping; and then it was time to drink wine and eat a lovely baked paella and eventually alas come home.
This morning I went to the library to work, and came home to find m'wife and m'cat napping together in her chair, in an expression of ultimate cute. Alas, I woke her; so I made a shrimp'n'spinach salad where I rather brilliantly fried the shrimp in the orange-and-fennel-flavoured oil that I'd poached the fish in a couple of nights ago, and then squeezed in a lemon to deglaze the pan and poured off what resulted and beat it up with a fork and called it dressing for the salad, om nom.
And now I am trying to fuss my way through a final draft of Being Small, only I'm tired and losing weigh. But I do still love this little book, and it does keep surprising me with passages I don't remember, so here, have a darling of the day. Context is for the weak.
"Come and sit," he had said. He might have lost height and breadth, but he still had all the depth he needed. Not in his eyes, they were flat and shimmered only on the surface; not in his voice, which was reedy and hollowed out, sounding like a tracing of what it must have been, another intractable measurement of loss. Everything he had seemed stubbornly to define what he had been, how far he’d fallen and was falling still.
That should have been a weakness, a statement of defeat, and it was not. I didn’t know where it lay, the sense of strength abiding. I felt it, though, and responded in the simplest way, like a dog to a whistle, blindly trusting. Except that I wasn’t blind and I didn’t trust, excepting only that. The prince of darkness is a gentleman; Lucifer must still have had an angel’s air about him as he fell. He never could disguise or deny what he was made of, the very stuff of heaven. I would tread warily here, and commit myself to nothing.