Read Part One

Queue long in the supermarket, was lunchtime though, and it’s sunny. Supermarkets always so much busier when it’s sunny, don’t people eat when it’s cloudy? Felt bad letting Sam pay for everything, but he insisted, he’s sweet like that. How much was it though? Twenty-something, most of that was the Malibu. I said “get the cheap one,” but “no,” he said, “the cheap one’s nasty.” What else? French sticks, yes, and olives and Greek cheese, well he likes those more than I do, beef jerky too, I’ve never had it so I don’t know, but he likes that, said he hadn’t had it since he went to America with his dad years ago. Think he misses his dad sometimes, especially the way things often are between him and Jake, and the other house-mate never around, always out or working or sleeping, I’ve only spoken to him about twice. Still, he’s got me. Squeeze his arm, there. He’s smiling at me. It always seems to be sunny when I’m with you.

Yes, there’s the park, at the end of this road. The food’s in Sam’s backpack, the blanket and the Malibu are in mine. Not a blanket: the cover from the sofa in the living room. Jake was sitting on it when we got in, playing Nintendo games, but when we started making the picnic in the kitchen next door, talking and laughing, he disappeared. There were no blankets: we stole the cover. Mm. This is happiness, this, the park, the picnic in our backpacks. What else? Coca Cola to mix with the Malibu, and plastic cups to mix it in, cheese and pineapple on sticks, picked up a whole pineapple at first, that’s what gave me the idea, then saw a tin of chunks and remembered the last time I tried to carve a pineapple, that was back, when?, November, me and the girls not long moved in, like a fruity murder scene Lou had said, so I left it in the bread aisle. It looked ridiculous, all leafy and ridgy in amongst the Hovis and the Warburtons, had to laugh, and then one of the staff was looking at me so I ran away.

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Sunlight red in my eyes, like a flame to a photograph, first rainbow then brown, burning away the colours, but quick! Before the image goes, what is it? A lake, yes, in a forest. The water’s silver, bright!, but I know it’s warm, like a bath, a bed, a hug, a sofa, a womb. Beckoning it beckons me, my PJs falling away as I walk, nearly there, nearly there, but then, then I fall, fingers outreaching. I touch the water. Why fall? A crooked root in the leaves. All?

All.

Awake now, open eyes, bright!, scrunch into warmy pillow. What’s that against my ankle? His leg, all hairy and bony. Still asleep? In this light? Not facing it like I am though. Cotton all blurry in my eye, seeming to stretch out for miles before it reaches him. Is he dreaming? So peaceful. He always looks so serious when awake, even when he’s not, but now he looks carefree, like a little boy. Little cherub. Was that a frown? I’ll kiss him. Oh, his hands are in the way, stuck out in front of him, one on top of the other, like he’s praying, or pleading. They’re warm. I can reach his neck now. There; where he’s tender, between his Adam’s apple and his tendons. Felt the cartilage of it against my lips, and his stubble against my nose. Hope he shaves today, otherwise he’s all scratchy when we kiss. He hasn’t moved. Is he dreaming? Wonder why he sleeps like that; foetal position: I like to stretch out. Oh, he wrapped around me in the night, I wonder if he remembers. Don’t think he woke up, but he certainly woke me. Thought I was being crushed! One arm around my neck and the other across my chest. Had to prise him off. Perhaps he was in a dream.

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Four days into my week of cheap food, I’m starting to run out of ideas and am left with little more than rice, pasta, potatoes and eggs, apart from the leftovers of the cheap curry from a couple of nights ago. So I thought, maybe some sort of omelette with a side of potatoes? Before embarking on this I typed ‘potatoes and eggs’ into google, which lead me here. Apparently, you can combine the two; it’s called a Spanish omelette.

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I had the second of my cheap meals yesterday as part of this exciting ‘living on ten pounds for a week’ blogging venture, and it actually wasn’t that bad, at least in comparison to the previous night’s pasta. It was a chicken curry with sauce analogous to the curry sauce you get in chip shops, only with sultanas. It reminded me a lot of something similar we used to have for school dinner at primary school sometimes, back when they were like proper old-fashioned school dinners in metal trays on proper plates, before the school changed catering contractors and started serving turkey drummers on plastic trays.

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I ate last night the first of my cheap meals, Penne pasta with Sainsbury’s Basics Pasta Sauce. I added mushrooms and cheese for a little more flavour and protein. Unfortunately the attempt proved futile: that was possibly the worst meal I have had in my life. Worse than flavourlessly bland, it had a lingering cloying flavour that only faintly evoked either tomato or basil, the two primary ingredients of many such sauces. I began to wonder if the sauce had ever seen a tomato, much less been graced with the inclusion of one.

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Yesterday, Sunday, instilled with a sense of boyish novelty and studentish irony, I set out with my housemate Luke McNeil to Sainsbury’s, single ten-pound-note folded expectantly in my wallet. Owing to a lack of organisation, we arrived at the shop twenty-five minutes before closing-time and were obliged to rush our shopping more than I would have liked, denying me the opportunity to stand and pedantically weigh up the benefits of each product over another.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ’sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

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I worked out other day that after I’ve paid my rent for the next two months, with the money I have left over from my student loan and if I don’t get a job, withdraw from my savings, scrounge money from my parents or come by funds some other way, I would have about £10 per week to live on.

I’m sure I’ll be fine for money, if it gets dire I can always go back home for a few weeks and eat all the food there until September and the next installment of my student loan (which, thinking about it, I should probably sort out), and I’m still optimistic of getting a job, ideally making money blogging but otherwise in a shop somewhere.

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I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.

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Keen-eyed visitors may have noticed a few minor changes to the site in the last couple of days, the most prominent of which is the new ’share’ button accompanying every post, this in addition to the ’stumble’ button I already had and the ‘delicious’ button I added at the same time. This, I am hoping, will drive some more traffic to my site.

My other additions to the site include a flavicon, which is the little logo you should now be able to see next to the URL at the top of the screen, or in the title bar of the tab this site’s open in, if you’re using tabbed browsing, and a simple line break to separate posts in place of the rather obtrusive borders I had before. Also, I re-enabled comments on all posts, so you should all feel free to tell me what you think about anything.

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I got bored of animé for a while, but now I like it again, and part of the reason I like it again is that I rewatched Makoto Shinkai’s works She and Her Cat (which you can watch here), Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (aka. Beyond the Clouds), five, thirty, and ninety minutes long respectively.

There are several aspects common to all of these, such as a relationship between a boy (or a cat) and a girl, a theme of separation and longing and getting on with life in spite of them, and a sort of intangible sentiment along the lines of “I am here / awake / alive” or, rather nicely put at the end of She and Her Cat, “this world… I think we like it.” There is also this incredible purity of vision in each of them that comes from the fact that, the first two at least, were almost exclusively the work of Shinkai who wrote, drew, animated, and voiced She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star himself, with his wife providing additional voices and his friend composing the music.

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