You know?

There is a lack of donuts. Inter freakin' alia, right, but donuts would be a good start.

Garble

It is a strange, unfriendly enterprise, this one, stack words in piles that make them say how things are, like stuffing cold butter into a keyhole. Casting around among the lego pieces to get a two-er for the edge of your 1:100 X-wing, nothing like the real thing, not at all, but my god so cool just like it when you're done, flying it around the room with ILM effects in your throat and miniature light sabres caught between the floorboards. Me and my big box of morphemes, winsome as the guess-how-many fairground jar of jellybeans.

Everything cocks its vast effortless eyebrow of already being how it is, apples and birds and the smell of pipes on the morning tapwater, loneliness and soap, the strangled underwater music of the upstairs Kinder leaving for school. Make coffee. Shake the box, to hear that there are things inside.

West

I went for Kaffee off Kurfürstendamm with my friend Once Was Architect today, shaking out my lungs in the frozen air, stamping my feet and my Einzelfahrschein AB against the solid comfort of German trains, zurückbleiben bitte, pink-and-purple cubist seat covers and a red button, please shut the doors on cold days.

Literaturhaus café, wonderland of dark wood and padded-leather corners, majestically average coffee for €3.20 and an arresting waitress with her pad holstered thigh-level on an antiqued belt and a rope of peppered dark hair sheafed at her collar. She thanked me in French.

Gluten

I baked bread yesterday, primal yeasty solution to everything. It smelled precise like gecko feet on glass, and was crusty and percussed crumply-cellophane as it cooled.

A loaf, my loaf, round and whole as salvation and just as prone to go stale.

Tally ho

Reluctantly packed away the Christmas decorations, winding the fairy lights around and around my hand. Incredibly they fit back into the box. Bells and red stuffed hearts and the gloss-painted birds I bought from Habitat back in the New Square days along with the Swedish garland made of straw and red cotton. Packing like dragging wet sheets out of a stormwater drain, I feel like a hibernating grub but I must plan outfits, god help me. It yawns black nylon at me with this suitcase expression like, dude, what the hell would I know about what goes in here? I'm just the one with the zippers. But lo, on the other side of this and getting bitch-slapped by border control is England, England! Sandwich shops and chocolate bourbons and laissez-faire trains and unlikely snack foods and signs that never say FORBIDDEN but just DON'T.

List

Leaky mussy black outside, winglet navigation light flickering far out past the rooftops. I am on a plane the day after tomorrow and suddenly everything is everywhere and nowhere to be found, things ordinarily peaceably resting in their places, a hairbush, this week's New Yorker, a pile of clean washing folded now a wilful barricade between me and getting away, lists on three different kinds of paper and god knows what else I've forgotten, that nippy milk-toothed imperative to capitalise on every possible opportunity, every corner of the carryon, what can you bring back in the suitcase, ten minutes for lunch, roving exhibitions, one-off that, now this who's that. Screw it! New scorched-earth travel plan. Underwear in the pocket, passport between your teeth and you're away. With your QUEUE: OTHER Ryanair boarding pass, natürlich.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, there was a hooded crow who was in love with her accountant. Her accountant was an oyster. Really good at filtering out the crap and getting to the nitty gritty, you know? So settled and purposeful. She sat on a chimney pot and thoughtfully settled her pewtery gilet into place.

It was unrequited.