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Sit down next to me
To Leeds: finished Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn on the train as the leaky window spat at me. I wish I had diacritical marks in my surname.
Everyone in The Angel was on fine form. She made a hit of an entrance, dancing into the room in her tight jeans, high-heeled boots refusing the angry weather, the man next to me making a gallant show of moving up for her, both of us glad to be next to her. Someone opposite was surreptitiously eating roast chicken and corn on the cob, ducking under the table to rip mouthfuls of flesh. I produced a couple of mini pork pies for me and Kim, all three of us righting ourselves with studied innocence when the barman came round for the glasses. I can become emotionally close to someone, or physically, she said. I find it difficult doing both.
She went to the loo, upon which I dropped a 20p piece in her beer. "Don't tell her about this," I said to the man next to me, and I fished it out. "It's your glass eye, you've dropped your glass eye!" shouted someone from the next table.
There was a bit of a railway timetable confusion and we ended up with some time on our hands. She suggested we go back to hers to stroke her cat, but we decided to postpone that to a time when less drink had been taken. We wound up the evening with Cumberland Sausage and Mash in the Scarborough Hotel, which felt like a citadel of moneyed respectability after the Angel: the painstaking hairstyles and facemasks of salaried women, the perfectly weighted vivacity of men.
But now it's time once again to iron my swimming trunks and to gather together those novels which are straightforward enough to be comprehensible during afternoons of hazy cider and mild child neglect. Grímsvötn permitting, I'm off to Brittany early tomorrow with Kirsty and the girls. The following will be true shortly.
4 comments
Since I enjoy travel so much and since I am unable to actually go anywhere anytime soon, I’ll live vicariously through your trip. Hope we have a nice time.
I wish I had diacritical marks in my surname.
I wouldn’t if I were you: The Observer would just remove them. Also, Brooklyn is on my to-read shelf, so please don’t give anything away in future posts. Thank you kindly, yours sincerely, etc.
Have a lovely Brittany: do remember to drink some cider on my behalf. I mention that otherwise you might forget to drink any cider.
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