Thursday 20 September 2012

Five things I like (and a bonus)


1) Ethnic supermarkets 

The ones you wander round in a happy bemusement of childish glee, picking up products and wondering what they are.

There will be packets covered in a language you do not speak, with pictures that seem to have no relation to food at all - or which you hope don’t. A small child may feature, or a cartoon panda. Or a small child dressed up as a cartoon panda. Is it panda flavoured? Small child flavoured? How do they know what small children taste like?

You will buy it and it will sit in the cupboard until you unearth it again and learn from the one piece of information you can understand, the sell by date, that whatever the child-panda food is it is now sadly past its prime. It doesn’t matter. You have consumed all the possibilities it contained. You can throw it away now.


2) Proper second hand bookshops

It should have nooks and crannies and precarious, avalanche ready piles of paperbacks leaning against the one shelf you are trying to get to. It should have the smell of books; their yellowed pages and crumbling, Penguin-orange spines and the dry, faintly-vanilla dust scent of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of much loved words.

It should have at least one cat and if possible the owner should have a beard. Even if they’re female.


3) Snow

Or the moment, first thing in the morning, when you step into freshly fallen snow.

Or the moment right before you step into the snow, the moment just before your foot places down.

The virgin moment just before you raise your foot and take that first explorer’s step.


4) Reading something new

Reading a poem or piece of prose and coming across the first, startling line or turn of phrase that hits right underneath your heart and makes you want to gasp. That makes you want to stroke the page and lift your fingertips to your mouth afterwards as if you could taste the words.

They would taste dark and roughly sweet.

They would taste clean and fresh and prickle your tongue with their lightness.

You want to find someone now and press your mouth to theirs and open up so they can lick the tang of the words from your tongue and savour your amazement with you.


5) Inspiration

The flash when inspiration strikes and the words start filling your head and you hurry home, cupping the words carefully, in dry-throated terror that they will spill and trickle out from between your fingers and leak away before you can capture them safely.

All the way back you are holding back part of your breath and the people on the bus only see your far-away look and don’t realise that you are a tightrope walker, a circus act; balancing wonder and performing miracles above their heads.


And a bonus 6) You

I like you.

(Keep it secret, but really you are my favourite.)

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