LJ Idol - Break Week: Kummerspeck
This is an entry for the
therealljidol. If you'd like to read any of the other entries added during this Break Week, you can do so here!
Being the sort of person I am, I was writing something for this prompt directly in the LJ posting window.
Bad idea.
The Internet crashed and my laptop restarted and I watched the window containing the story close with the sort of high-pitched dying groan a bagpipe might emit.
Now my lovely little spy-slash-con artists-on-holiday story is somewhere in the ether, never to be recreated equally again, and I am sitting with the laptop in front of the television, half-watching an episode of NCIS, drinking a comforting cup of ginger tea and contemplating a slice of panettone.
It was going to be a good story too.
There was an Italian grifter lady who only cooked her nostalgic comfort food once a year, while remembering and paying her respects to the teammates she had lost in the journey so far. She's completely transformed from the usual ruthlessly competent closer she is into something softer and warmer and more homely. She spends the day eating pandoro and cappuccino, sausages and lentils (traditional New Year's day fare - lentils are lucky, the more you eat the richer you'll be in the coming year), ice cream, cake... It's her kitchen in a way it isn't for the rest of the year.
Then there's her maybe-husband, who was Anglophone but not regional, and observed this once-a-year quirk with fondness and a bittersweet smile, also reflecting upon the year they had had, and the people they had met, and sometimes lost, along the way. But his job is mainly to make sure she can keep going.
They have afternoon visitors, a small revolving cast of Italian people based not-too-loosely on my own family members and people in my village. Wide smiles, compliments, grandmothers who bring you 20 eggs ( du ovi, "just a few, just a couple") or a whole frozen chicken or a box of biscuits (che com'i nostri nun li trovi su!, "because you won't find any like ours up there [in London]").
It was going to be a lovely little day in the life, interspersed with slices of cons and spy stories.
Ah well.
Comfort food indeed. I need a plate of pasta.