Dancing on My Table

There’s always an egg. But that is solitary, reflective. Think I’ll make the effort and do the eggplant. Remo grew it, and he was born with an eggplant in his mouth, well nearly, (he’s Sicilian), and he’s hungering for it, but he’s not here. I can’t let it rot.

There’s just the sound of the fan now, not the whirring of an overhead fan, which I would quite like- it’s electric – but a sound like some big tank farm engine warming up. Like what you hear outside a fish mart, with a thousand freezers heating up the atmosphere, but on a smaller scale. If you listen, it’s deafening, if you don’t listen, you don’t hear it. Sizzling eggplant will suffocate it. Or music. I’ll just turn something on in my head, and, really, it’ll go.

You’ve got to be hungry to cook for yourself, otherwise why bother?

You may as well just have a glass of wine and stare into the sunset until the cold, or dive-bombing mosquitoes, make you come inside. The fire in winter does the same thing. You just stare into it until your eyelids close, then totter off to bed. The food will still be there in the morning. Uncooked. That’s the irony of it, the food doesn’t need to be eaten. It’s you who have the need.

I’ll have to eat the eggplant. We only grow 5-6 a year. Actually, that’s a grandiose statement. I think the most edible specimens we’ve harvested count to, well, two and they were small. But anyway, do I want to mess up the hob top with frying splatters? Fill the room with charred offerings? There’s so much to consider apart from hunger, satiation. Perhaps I’ll pick it and cook it tomorrow.

I’ll have to decide whether I am going to eat the eggplant with the small brown streak in it or not. I’m not sure I’m feeling like eggplant, as much as I love it. But I’ve just cleaned my teeth to get rid of the peanuts, which were just slightly past their best. Well, I’m fussy. I eat more peanuts than anyone I know. I was annoyed when they got taken off aircraft cos I loved those little snack packs of them. I always asked for extras, then, alone in some hotel room somewhere, as an aperitif with a glass of shoddy plonk from the room fridge, I’d sit, feet up on whatever bit of furniture I could stretch too, nibbling the peanuts, one by one, savouring each salty crunchy little bite. They were always good, always fresh, because, stuffed into small packets, there was not much air. The packets I buy now, with enough for a week of solid solitary munching, are often, well, to a peanut afficionado, not quite there.