I am hopelessly, fervently hearth-bound. Five minutes anywhere and I will be nesting, arranging some talisman brought in my pocket, sanding off the rough disordered edges left by those for whom places to live are just places, places which trap and bore them, filled with distasteful responsibilities and cringeworthy capital-M-middle-class aspiration, choking blockades built of bricks and books and spare lightbulbs in the cupboard under the stairs rising up implacably between them and escape velocity, exotic locales, anything-might-happen.
God, give me some bricks, dodgy guttering and a chimney that has to be swept twice a year. I love my apron. I don't wish I was in a train station in Hungary buying a sleeper ticket to Istanbul. I need butter for a dozen friand, stepping the kitchen accompanied by the wooden-metallic tap-click-whirr of the familiar pattern of tools and spoons, knobs and doors, the startling, never-gets-old smell of I Made Food! galloping arrogantly into all the airspace.
This is basically uncool. Sometimes I'm over the uncoolness. Other times I like some veneer. At the moment I am disguised by the fact that I'm holed up writing in an Altbau in Berlin. But really I'm nesting with this Bialetti stovetop espresso maker. Hot milk in the one saucepan, old school. Gurgle. Ropes of oily coffee steam. Hilariously bad mug. It's almost my house while the Bialetti is still hot.
The coffee's in the fridge, sealed with a peg in the shape of a bird that my brother gave me for Christmas.
2 comments:
"Anything-might-happen" *is* overrated, not least because it's the deceptive marketing pitch for "be a cog in the machine of upper-class aspiration."
Genius. Another arrow in the quiver of my neurosis legitimations! Um, I mean healthy, adult emotional life. Tom, you rock my world.
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