summer scraps

I went from cooking a few meals a week at home to breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week- with more time to read and wonder what I would cook for us and to shop at the markets, to compare prices. When you don’t cook for a room full of customers every day and because of the season most of the lunches and dinners were based on green beans, aubergines, courgettes, peppers and tomatoes. Limitless possibilities. The market in my neighbourhood sells mature tomatoes for 1.10. a kilo - I made various tomato sauces, ketchup, pa amb tomaquet, gazpachos, crespus, baked tomatoes, stuffed tomatoes, tomato and sweet onion salads.

Without a wage or unemployment benefits, without a job, without savings, without a trust fund you make it with what you have. instinctively, this is how I cook and shop as did that for myself growing up, making a meal, making cakes and biscuits out of scraps and leftovers gave me a skill to trust instinct. Going from cooking 10 kg tripe a week to only having cooked it once in the last two months is something I adapted too, adapting too to being sacked. rolling with the punches. Its called life. The instability of childhood and youth could be a horror story or I could live and move on and see it as a strength. I don’t take it for granted. the complacency that settles into the comfortable doesn’t sink in, doesn’t suck me under. When the things I can’t control happen I can accept, I can detach and move on. It does hurt and changes the course that life was taking me -stop- I can’t do anything, can’t fight or make others change their minds or actions . Reality and others cant be escaped. Readapt. Find a different rhythm. Improve. Build another self. Pick yourself up. Get back on the saddle. Buy more tomatoes, plan a menu, set the table, polish the glasses, read a recipe, somebody wrote that down for you to try, there’s no recipe for life.

The cars pass fast and blend into the air conditioning, the tv screen stays black. By the way his face hangs, eyes dogged, the damage has been done well, done by the standards of rain in the puddle, wind on the surface, a pavement coated in condensation ,a man trapped, rolled up, skin peeled, skin layers chopped and covered in a moss or mould. In a gash on the left arm blood comes to the surface its a steak the lighter pink water coloured of Monet; window water drips drop drips onto coloured umbrellas and hats and feet in leather and feet in branded trainers that cost more than a weeks worth of food.

Shelter? shillings? On a unlived past it was there about to be set off but stopped by a numb cold liquid. The moment doesn’t break. There’s a fountain. Go back and its dry. Spread butter, slabs of cow milk coloured by grass spread open there’s a field- go play go stay on the land of grass the celebrity skeletons selling us salvation, in a coffin or an urn with a watch? An electric car? Over the country was the male of a town of frog legs and skate wings and chartreuse. Rich monks sold off their recipe and estate to buy televisions and computers to talk to other bald monks in Spain or an islands off the coast- a dad singing, a mother on the piano, the daughters dancing sharing this. It was young, the moment in the day when the chicken heart or rabbit tongue to curly tripe fried in peanut oil came to your desk and filtered the flirtation to a discussion about a singing headache, the dead junkies idolised in walnut shells under a greengrocers table - the allergy to family photos and ripping the bit by bit, day by night the corner of well wrapped gifts. It was the oasis in the year, the mirage that we would eat together and share with Clark Gable or Bogart in black and white watching over us the Hollywood of alcoholic halitosis and while we stabbed at a bird sitting on bread sauce.

At the school bus stop with cereal stomach churning the older ones talk of a chelsea smile outside the bakery of bloomers, iced buns and fruit cakes, find a way out. No one gets out of here alive, in the last few pages he slid into death while taking a bath with his heart punching, the window open onto the Marais.