tales from an ordinary world

2002-01-21

"I am terrified but I'm not losing sleep"
David Sylvian.

How foolish to food-shop when tired and soulless and full of Monday - I passed up all the things I should've bought for easy, convenient crap that didn't require effort, because effort was the last thing I needed. I've let my cooking slip, ever since I moved out of my one-bedroom flat all those years ago. Even then, I was only just starting to try, I suppose. It's laughable. But maybe, much like the relationship between myself and music, I'm destined to be a consumer rather than a producer. Somebody has to do it.

I remember the seemingly endless meals eaten at my parents' dinner table, with its thin, square black metal legs, with a top of woodgrain-flavoured laminex (actually, here's a picture of it from Christmas. My aunt is holding my copy of Geoff Ryman's 253 over her face, and my uncle's next to her). I remember busily reading some book with one hand while I absently ate with the other - I'd cut up things like sausages first, so I didn't have to use both hands later on, or I'd just use the edge of my fork as a rather blunt knife. Either way, it made life easier. Dad, who sat to my left, would do the same with the paper, or his copy of New Scientist. Sitting to my right, Mum would ask why we couldn't talk at the table instead, but I found that every time Dad would ask me what I did at school, my teen angst antennae told me he wasn't really interested. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn't. I don't know. Perhaps it was just the way he asked. So we'd stick to reading. I'd hurriedly finish my meal and go back to whatever it was I was doing before I was made to eat my food. Mum would point out, disappointedly, that Dad and I ate to live, whereas she lived to eat (I forget where my sister fitted into it at the time). Nowadays, that's a lot less true. I enjoy a good meal, even if I haven't really taken to making food, like my sister has. That can come later. I hope it will.