a tale about an unprejudiced heart…
It’s been another lovely peaceful week! Now there’s a surprise.
This last weekend has marked a full calendar month of not working and therefore a full calendar month of not wearing makeup, lingerie or – thinking about it – any garment that isn’t pyjamas or a dressing gown requires fastenings. I can’t pretend I haven’t wondered whether I ought to put on a bra just for the practice as I suspect I’m going to struggle, but no rush.
I somehow managed to find a couple of free afternoons to rewatch some personal classics, among them True Romance (last seen on a balmy August evening in 2015 on the Somerset House courtyard alongside Warriors – definitely a double bill to remember), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (obviously) and one of my favourites of all time Babe, a near-masterpiece which I could watch non-stop on a loop for a week and never tire of although I don’t believe I’ve ever made it through even the first ten minutes without sobbing (and usually full on ugly-crying) and whose narration alone elevates it above any childrens film I can think of. James Cromwell was robbed of that Oscar.
“The pig and the farmer regarded each other, and for a fleeting moment, something passed between them. A faint sense of some common destiny.”
Happily, Babe is on Netflix, so everybody who is watching it is simultaneously not watching whatever that currently much-plugged grotesquerie about gay redneck tigers is and therefore doing the universe a favour. And I still have the far more slapsticky but still eminently worthwhile Babe 2: Pig In The City waiting in the wings for later!
Saturday afternoon saw another highlight; having stationed myself in the spare room for a spot of inventory-updating and stock rotation I was delighted to find a forgotten Betty Crocker Devil’s Food Cake mix that had slipped down behind a prized case of yellow cornmeal (bloody murder to get hold of, but every sweet and grainy wedge of cornbread is worth it), and despite it requiring three precious eggs and most of my chocolate stash for frosting, I was all over it like a cheap suit. This unfortunately meant the result wasn’t a pretty sight (waiting for a cake to cool down properly before un-tinning it, sandwiching it together and covering it with chocolate ganache is strongly advised for a reason, it turns out), but in the time it took me to cut half into neat slices to go on a baking sheet for the freezer and then wolf half of what remained while standing over the kitchen sink, appearances barely even registered. Classy.
With homemade cake on board and since the weather conditions were amenable I decided to put on my oldest fit-to-be-worn-in-public outfit and take my criminally neglected Pokémons out for a spot of fresh air and some exercise after a full three weeks of barely going outside, and headed for the newly reopened cliffside paths and gardens, first establishing that nobody else was on them (or at least nobody walking in the facing direction) and that my headphones were charged – an easily done but soul destroying mistake when they haven’t been used in a couple of weeks.
A decent stroll in the sunshine, several Pokémon battles and even a bonus bit of birdwatching and bluebell-spotting later I came back feeling enlivened and even a little celebratory, not least because I had reason to wear outdoor clothes for more than an hour. One of these days I’ll get the running gear on, but I suspect it’ll wait until I get back to EC3 – one thing I can really do without is a trip to A&E with a broken ankle after sticking my foot in a pothole or tripping over a tree root, and I daresay they wouldn’t be too thrilled to see me either. Wide, flat, and above all empty pavements are the way forward.
Song of the Week follows, and has provided recourse to exercise several times without my so much as having to lace a heel lock. Assuming that jumping up and down in my pyjamas counts as exercise.
Anybody who can track it down would do well to check out the Bad Brains cover with Henry Rollins (try the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack, if you can find it). Top notch stuff.
More soon! And this was quite soon, wasn’t it?
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