I better post something. Anything. If I don’t then I might as well decommission this blog. The problem is that when you’ve taken such a long break from blogging you do feel as if you should have some earth shattering reason for not having posted for a while and I don’t.
So I’m posting something. This. It’s not much but it’ll do for a start.
Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a perfect me. I know that she’s in a parallel universe because our paths have never crossed and I know that she exists because she keeps her clothes in my wardrobe. But I know she isn’t me every time I see my reflection.
It’s not about beauty or body shape. The perfect me doesn’t have a better body than I do - or at least most of the time she does not - and her face is exactly the same. We could be twins. This wasn’t always the case. For a long time the perfect me didn’t look a bit like I did. She was shorter, taller, thinner, blonder, cut, pre-Raphaelite, Edwardian, edgy, post-punk, hippy, grungy, groomed, glamorous, manga, rock-chick, fifties pin-up poster girl, you name it - she looked it. Probably the only trend she ignored was Britpop but given the prerequisites necessary for any female attempting to join that particular gang – Radiohead, clumpy shoes, no make-up, short hair, acrylic jumpers, cold heart and air of insufferable superiority – you can’t really blame her for having too much sense for that. But over the years we’ve grown closer together until now if you stood us side by side, we’d look exactly the same. Except for one important detail. The perfect me is…well…perfect.
I don’t know how she does it but her hair is always shiny and her mascara never clumps. Her foundation never has that bit on the side of her nose which doesn’t rub in properly and her eyeliner is always straight.
The perfect me does not need to spend the day before she goes on holiday desperately trying to make up for the past eleven months of neglect by sitting with her feet submerged in a bucket of water, hair slathered in a vat of intensive conditioner, face buried beneath three different types of face mask and the rest of her basting in a foul smelling combination of hair removal cream and a moisturiser guaranteed to turn the clock back ten years. If she did these things - which she would not – then you can bet the bloody stuff would not react adversely against itself, the atmosphere and her skin, burning her legs to the blood and meaning that she hits the beach looking like a textbook picture of a skin disease. Neither would she get so sunburnt on the very first day of her holiday that for the next two weeks she looks like the caped crusader every time she takes her fucking sunglasses off. The perfect me packs her suitcase perfectly too. She doesn’t try to stuff her case with every item of clothing that she owns and then break the catch by jumping up and down on top of it in a fruitless and bad tempered attempt to get the damn lid to shut. Instead the perfect me has a capsule wardrobe which perfectly encapsulates every eventuality she may encounter and, what is more, it all fits into her hand luggage.
The perfect me is perfectly organised. When she takes off her green shoes, she polishes them, puts them back into their shoebox, puts the shoebox back onto the right hand side of the second shelf of the shoe cupboard and there they bloody well stay until the next time she wears them. She doesn’t look in the shoe cupboard, can’t find them, pull out and look in every box of the shoe cupboard and still can’t find them, get hit on the head by a shower of shoeboxes as she balances on a chair in order to peer into the boxes of the shoes she doesn’t often wear – a task made more difficult by the fact that even standing on a chair leaves her two foot below the tallest stack on the shelf – decide that she must have put them somewhere which is neither the shoe cupboard or the stack of shoes she doesn’t often wear and start the sort of search only usually carried out by forensics after a particularly puzzling crime.
Her search for an item will never turn into a philosophical exercise into the nature of reality. Not for her sitting on the bed in a trashed bedroom – all cupboard doors open, all drawers ransacked, shoeboxes and coat hangers spewing out their contents until the room resembles an art installation – wondering whether she ever actually bought a pair of green shoes, whether she just thought she bought a pair of green shoes and why it was she was so convinced of the fact that she’d not only bought a pair of green shoes but could distinctly remember that after the last time she wore them, she polished them, put them back into their shoebox and put the shoebox on the right hand side of the second shelf of the shoe cupboard.
She will never need to abandon her search, completely change her outfit, realise that her belief that she bought a pair of green shoes was nothing more than a false memory symptomatic of her diminishing mental capacity and go to pull her brown boots of the cupboard only to discover, when she opens the cupboard door, that there on the right hand side of the second shelf down are her bloody green shoes and that her brown boots have now disappeared into the ether.
Even though we wear the same clothes she doesn’t seem to have the same problems with them that I do. She never finds herself sitting at the dinner table wondering at exactly which point in the past hour she suddenly lost the three stone in weight which made her trousers not just hipsters but kneesters and thanking God that the chair she’s sitting on has a solid back to it because that’s all that’s between her and a full moon. Nor would she ever need to question by which magic (at the same dinner table) her cardigan miraculously shrank two sizes leaving a gap of flesh which no amount of surreptitious hitching and stretching (even if she was able to move her arms which would be difficult given the shrinkage of her cardigan) was going to cover. No, the perfect me has a perfect outfit for every occasion and more to the point they stay perfect throughout the whole occasion. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they weren’t my clothes she wears.
She borrows my brain without asking too and never gives it back when she is done, leaving me to struggle on with an echoing space between my ears and only a vague remembrance of thoughts I might have had. Because of her, I am left to fill in the blanks with the desperation of someone being asked to complete - against the clock and if my life was dependant upon the outcome – a crossword in a foreign language, with no clues and only black spaces making up the grid. To make it worse, the perfect me is able to articulate my opinions and ideas with an eloquence and flair and does so whenever I have left the room.
Hostess or guest, in social situations the perfect me is always in control. She does not sit and shake, hands trembling so hard it takes both of them to raise her glass. The distance between plate and mouth does not seem so insurmountable to her, her spatial awareness does not disappear. Her fork is not transformed into some complicated machine with an instruction book she has not read, she can remember the basic mechanics of how to chew and swallow. She does not sit with ashes in her mouth, terrified that all have noticed how she froze. She does not need to repeat a million times within her head, “These people are my friends, now breathe”.
The perfect me has a knack of letting people like and her doesn’t give a damn if they don’t. She has a stream of small talk guaranteed to put the most nervous at their ease, her jokes are not strung along the gibbet of a silent room; there are no awkward moments, no silences dropping upon the carpet with a crash. The perfect me can converse intelligently and with charm upon any given subject, the right questions fall readily from her lips. The right answers too, the perfect me does not wake in cold sweats with curling toes, rerunning a lifetimes worth of words and situations long since past.
The perfect me believed her godmother when she said, “This pumpkin is your coach”. She does not anticipate the fraud of her existence being revealed; she can love and be loved, laugh and exist without the fear of midnight chiming the joke on her because she knows that when the slipper breaks, she will not fall upon her ass but fly.
Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a perfect me. I know that she’s in a parallel universe because at no point have our paths ever crossed and I know that she exists because she keeps her clothes in my wardrobe. But I know she isn’t me every time I see my reflection.
F’s mum (G) says that she is not a good cook. She says this, as she draws from the oven a large clear dish, shallow and oval and filled to the brim with potatoes, courgettes, tomatoes and artichoke hearts, each item whole and stuffed with a mixture of forcemeat, herbs de Provence, egg, fresh basil and breadcrumbs. She cooks old fashioned things, she says, things her mother cooked, traditional things, quick things to make, not complicated. She cannot, she says as she sets the dish on the tiled kitchen table, think of what to make. She has, she says, as she tips fresh bread into a wicker basket, unwraps the cheeses on their blue glass plate, sets down two bottles of misty chilled water, unfurls napkins and moves the salt, lost the envy to cook.
We’ve been here nineteen days now. Take off seven days for the time we spent at N’s, discount breakfast and snacks. Count two meals a day, three courses each meal without cheese or dessert. That’s twelve times two times three, some seventy-two meals if my arithmetic is right, and not once have we eaten the same thing twice.
Soft haricot verts clad in mustard sauce. Palm hearts pale and sweet. Eggs mimosa, their hollowed whites filled with crumbed yolk and home made mayonnaise. Steak hache; icy pink inside, with soft poached eggs. Courgette gratin (the smallest are the best says G), buried under crispy cheese which pulls in strands when the knife goes in. Pan fried salmon; coral pink, unmussed by seasoning or oil. Aioli with each measured drop, painstaking ground with garlic and with salt. Spaghetti sauce, with olives (green) and chunks of veal, rosemary flecked, or a bolognaise of ground up beef, all lush with herbs and sweet tomato sauce. Goat’s cheese, warmed, over summer leaves. Rough chopped tomatoes mixed with equal parts of mozzarella, sun and basil leaves, drenched in oil and left to soak Broccoli pureed with more crème fraiche. Asparagus spears, white and fine as grass, with vinaigrette. Tabboleh mixed with melon, anchovies and ham. Egg custards baked with caramelised apples and fresh figs, marron glaces, chocolate coffee creams … the list goes on.
F’s favourite; which I have absolutely no idea at all how to spell, is a particularly finicky thing to put together. Thin steaks of veal are laid out flat, a thick slice of ham is placed on the top of each one and then a mozzarella placed on top of that. It’s then rolled up, sewn together so that it doesn’t fall apart and baked in a thick tomato sauce with gruyere cheese liberally grated over the top. For me; my stay would not be the same without this piled up dish of Farcie, the making of which G has kept a deadly secret, the kitchen door shut tight for the hour it takes to prepare.
Toulon has changed and yet remains the same. One thing I love about this town is its resolute refusal to become candy cote d’azured into a pale copy of Cannes or Nice. Despite the hanging baskets perilously strung between the lurching streets, the jasmine perfume poured into the narrow tunnels of Napoleons wall, or cloud white yachts tethered by thick ropes of cash, it remains a place where people live, not a town where people stay. Destroyers berth like exploded airfix kits in the walled off port, or hover on the horizon ice grey against the hot blue sky, their scale reduced to something we can understand.
The air raid sirens sing in the first Wednesday of every month, falling on the Arab quarters shuttered shops. From the balcony where I stand, burning my tongue on star anise, I can see the seven skyscrapers which hide the sea, the twinkling lights of speeding cars disappear into tunnels whisking traffic through the town. I’ve been through once. They are too long to play the game of hold your breath until you reappear, you dive and dive and bend and then, just at that point when you know you will never reascend, you see the light. Sun sleepy in the orange glare, I did not need my dreams disturbed by this mirrored concrete metaphor.
The port of the Mourillon still holds its faded boats of blue and grey, bobbing against the gentle waves just as they did in Dantes day. Though faded fifties flats crowd the narrow space between sea and land, a standing testament to the paper bags of bribes which caused their build, this place would not be strange to him today. Inside the port; weathered men throw silver boules across the yard, swap shouted spells to cause the fish to catch, leave the scattered runes of engines trailed across the ground, tell stories each one taller than the last, or sit in faded cafes with Tarot cards clutched tight beside their glass of little yellow.
* A little yellow= un petit jaune = 1 Pernod.
In the south of France…busy swimming and sunning and sleeping and eating (because everything here revolves around food) and thinking. Will write more later if I can bear to drag myself away from the beach, the bed and the dinner table.
Herebemonsters is six again today. It’s not often I’m nice to (or indeed about) him but seeing as how its his birthday and seeing as how I didn’t send him a card (still working on it bro) I suppose that I can justify breaking the big sister code and saying something nice about him.
He is wonderful. He hasn’t got a clue just how wonderful he really is (which is probably a blessing because he’d be quite unliveable with if he did) but that just adds to his charm. He’s amazing, he’s fantastic, whenever there is danger he is there… oh hang on that’s dangermouse. Anyway I love him to bits, more than I’d ever tell him but no more than he deserves. To cut a long story short - I think that he is the best brother any sister could ever have. If I ever had to pick a brother out - then he would be the brother I would pick.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEREBEMONSTERS! may this be the year that all your dreams come true and all your nightmares vanish with the dawn
Hxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ps. Mum says the same thing - except obviously she means son instead of brother!
