impromptu barbecue
I shall start this entry as I start this day, and that is with breakfast.
Actually, that is a lie. I started this day by being woken up by my sister, who tells me that she was just going out for a run, and would come and wake me up again when she got home, which she duly does, and tells me that she's making breakfast, and she makes me an egg and some sauté potatoes. My sister is the win.
Following this, I bimble around for a while, and then phone my mother and ask her if there is anything that she needed, as I am going shopping. "That's very nice of you," she says; "There's a shopping list on the kitchen table that Dad wrote."
"Cool," I say, and grab helmet and bike and wallet and keys and head off into town. I haven't ridden for ages, and I'm ever-so-slightly worried that I'll have a flat or something but forget to check before I set off regardless, and luckily I don't. I cycle on the roads all the way to the park, and then go down and up the hill until I get to the Abbey, and I realise that I am not as fit as I was in the summer; anmd I also realise that I am driving the bike, not riding it, as if it were a car, controling my speed in the same way and thinking about the hazards and trying subconsciously to check my mirrors when in traffic. I go to Blockbuster's and grab the film I wanted (and pay off the residual charge on the card, and have exactly five pence more in my wallet than I needed), and then end up having to walk my bike all of the way down the hill because they didn't have a bag and I don't want to ride on a busy road with a DVD case tucked under one arm.
I whistle as I walk down the hill, a whistle which according to pleezpleezme is very irritating, as she told me that if it hadn't been for the fact that I caught up with her and she realised it was me she would have turned round and glared at me. She looks very cool in her leather jacket and shades and her top with all the badges, and I say, "Ah, excelent, Liz! I needed someone to help me carry the shopping!" and off we go to Sainsbury's.
We carreer around the supermarket buying things and trying to find tomatoes and sausages and veggie sausages and various other things that were on the list and weren't, and are ambushed by Joe, who is also wearing shades, and together they look like a mismatched pair of bodyguards.
(An asside, here: I am not wearing my sunglasses. I am wearing jeans and a shirt which is too large for me by far that my father and I bought from a waiter in a restaurant in Austria and has a monkey on the back, and a beard , because I haven't shaved for a couple of weeks and a while ago I realised that I'd passed the point at which I looked appropriately scruffy and deshabille and had graduated to looking like I was living on the streets or had lost my razor or was simply fuzzy around the edges and blurrily out of focus, so I removed most of it. I now look like a stereotypical humanities or arts student, or a wannabe evil genius, rather than looking as I did previously, which was - whilst wearing my leather jacket and shades - "bizzarely like Jared Leto".)
We pay at the checkout, after much humourous cavorting and conversation and pleezpleezme's realisation that I would be much easier if I came "with steering" we went to the checkout and I paid with the "fresh" money that I had obtained wrom the cash machine, and then we walked home, picking up stripyglove and Bucky on the way.
Then we had a very lesiurely and really rather lovely barbecue.
This is something that I do in the holidays, when the weather is good enough: I simply decide that life is lovely and I would like to see lots of my friends, and phone people up and ask them what they're doing on a certain date and whether they would like to come to a barbecue. Usually this date is the next day, but Joe's initial reaction to my declaration of "Just to be stereotypical, I'm organising a spontanious barbecue again" of "When, tonight?" was not quite as far-fetched as it seems, as I once organised one about two hours before people arrived. As most people were just going to be doing revision anyway, a suprising number were able to come - Lucia had been at the house for a while by the time we got there, as, due to Robbie's inability to attend and the subsequent necessity of my trip to Blockbuster, I was late to my own party.
I cook sausages and burgers and peppers, and burn them to a suitable degree and have to rescue the peppers when Joe manages to knock them into the barbecue and amuse Lucia with the curvy glasses and Bucky with the dented china plastic cup and I just generally had a lot of fun, and I hope that they did too.
I finish cooking - think of it as a cross between caveman food-tenderising and some kind of Frankenstinian endeavour with gothic caricatures of shining silver surgical instruments - and we go and watch Pan's Labyrinth, which is very good. We comment subversively, although it's such a good film that we don't really need to make huge numbers of silly comments; the only criticisms I can really make are that everyone dies slowly, and that Blockbuster's had classified it as Horror, which it wasn't, despite the creepiness and the violence; it was simply a very very good fantasy film, and the fact that it was spoken in a language that I couldn't understand somehow made it even better.
During the film we are subversive and wowed, and theorise and eat ice-cream (toffee & vanilla and mango & passionfruit) and the chocolate Dalek that Joe brought with him.
I shall write that again, for any of you who read that and blinked and had to reread it a second time to make sure that it was true: we ate the chocolate Dalek that Joe brought with him.
It is a Dalek. It is made of chocolate. And it has a little speaker that says 'Exterminate' in an authentically mechanical voice.
It is also very, very tasty.
After the film we end up back in the kitchen-cum-living-area, and we natter and look at photos and end up discussing my play that I am writing and the logistics of the lighting and whether school will let me use their studio theatre for it and when to stage it, and Bucky pledges himself to do the tech if it gets off the ground and Lucia says that she'd like to be in it and people make me very happy. Eventually, however, they all have to leave and I have to work, and I end up hastening the departure of the final trio by bribing them with chocolate as a last resort because I need to do some work.
It is a wonderful day, and I manage to disconnect the barbecue from the gas all by myself and fix half of the garage door and tidy up and revise and at some point end up putting on my hat so that I look like I should be in some kind of jazz musical or something.
Actually, that is a lie. I started this day by being woken up by my sister, who tells me that she was just going out for a run, and would come and wake me up again when she got home, which she duly does, and tells me that she's making breakfast, and she makes me an egg and some sauté potatoes. My sister is the win.
Following this, I bimble around for a while, and then phone my mother and ask her if there is anything that she needed, as I am going shopping. "That's very nice of you," she says; "There's a shopping list on the kitchen table that Dad wrote."
"Cool," I say, and grab helmet and bike and wallet and keys and head off into town. I haven't ridden for ages, and I'm ever-so-slightly worried that I'll have a flat or something but forget to check before I set off regardless, and luckily I don't. I cycle on the roads all the way to the park, and then go down and up the hill until I get to the Abbey, and I realise that I am not as fit as I was in the summer; anmd I also realise that I am driving the bike, not riding it, as if it were a car, controling my speed in the same way and thinking about the hazards and trying subconsciously to check my mirrors when in traffic. I go to Blockbuster's and grab the film I wanted (and pay off the residual charge on the card, and have exactly five pence more in my wallet than I needed), and then end up having to walk my bike all of the way down the hill because they didn't have a bag and I don't want to ride on a busy road with a DVD case tucked under one arm.
I whistle as I walk down the hill, a whistle which according to pleezpleezme is very irritating, as she told me that if it hadn't been for the fact that I caught up with her and she realised it was me she would have turned round and glared at me. She looks very cool in her leather jacket and shades and her top with all the badges, and I say, "Ah, excelent, Liz! I needed someone to help me carry the shopping!" and off we go to Sainsbury's.
We carreer around the supermarket buying things and trying to find tomatoes and sausages and veggie sausages and various other things that were on the list and weren't, and are ambushed by Joe, who is also wearing shades, and together they look like a mismatched pair of bodyguards.
(An asside, here: I am not wearing my sunglasses. I am wearing jeans and a shirt which is too large for me by far that my father and I bought from a waiter in a restaurant in Austria and has a monkey on the back, and a beard , because I haven't shaved for a couple of weeks and a while ago I realised that I'd passed the point at which I looked appropriately scruffy and deshabille and had graduated to looking like I was living on the streets or had lost my razor or was simply fuzzy around the edges and blurrily out of focus, so I removed most of it. I now look like a stereotypical humanities or arts student, or a wannabe evil genius, rather than looking as I did previously, which was - whilst wearing my leather jacket and shades - "bizzarely like Jared Leto".)
We pay at the checkout, after much humourous cavorting and conversation and pleezpleezme's realisation that I would be much easier if I came "with steering" we went to the checkout and I paid with the "fresh" money that I had obtained wrom the cash machine, and then we walked home, picking up stripyglove and Bucky on the way.
Then we had a very lesiurely and really rather lovely barbecue.
This is something that I do in the holidays, when the weather is good enough: I simply decide that life is lovely and I would like to see lots of my friends, and phone people up and ask them what they're doing on a certain date and whether they would like to come to a barbecue. Usually this date is the next day, but Joe's initial reaction to my declaration of "Just to be stereotypical, I'm organising a spontanious barbecue again" of "When, tonight?" was not quite as far-fetched as it seems, as I once organised one about two hours before people arrived. As most people were just going to be doing revision anyway, a suprising number were able to come - Lucia had been at the house for a while by the time we got there, as, due to Robbie's inability to attend and the subsequent necessity of my trip to Blockbuster, I was late to my own party.
I cook sausages and burgers and peppers, and burn them to a suitable degree and have to rescue the peppers when Joe manages to knock them into the barbecue and amuse Lucia with the curvy glasses and Bucky with the dented china plastic cup and I just generally had a lot of fun, and I hope that they did too.
I finish cooking - think of it as a cross between caveman food-tenderising and some kind of Frankenstinian endeavour with gothic caricatures of shining silver surgical instruments - and we go and watch Pan's Labyrinth, which is very good. We comment subversively, although it's such a good film that we don't really need to make huge numbers of silly comments; the only criticisms I can really make are that everyone dies slowly, and that Blockbuster's had classified it as Horror, which it wasn't, despite the creepiness and the violence; it was simply a very very good fantasy film, and the fact that it was spoken in a language that I couldn't understand somehow made it even better.
During the film we are subversive and wowed, and theorise and eat ice-cream (toffee & vanilla and mango & passionfruit) and the chocolate Dalek that Joe brought with him.
I shall write that again, for any of you who read that and blinked and had to reread it a second time to make sure that it was true: we ate the chocolate Dalek that Joe brought with him.
It is a Dalek. It is made of chocolate. And it has a little speaker that says 'Exterminate' in an authentically mechanical voice.
It is also very, very tasty.
After the film we end up back in the kitchen-cum-living-area, and we natter and look at photos and end up discussing my play that I am writing and the logistics of the lighting and whether school will let me use their studio theatre for it and when to stage it, and Bucky pledges himself to do the tech if it gets off the ground and Lucia says that she'd like to be in it and people make me very happy. Eventually, however, they all have to leave and I have to work, and I end up hastening the departure of the final trio by bribing them with chocolate as a last resort because I need to do some work.
It is a wonderful day, and I manage to disconnect the barbecue from the gas all by myself and fix half of the garage door and tidy up and revise and at some point end up putting on my hat so that I look like I should be in some kind of jazz musical or something.