The woman behind me at the supermarket checkout had a little pile of five caramel bars, two gossip magazines of the trashiest kind, the ones with really flimsy rattling paper, and a tub of flavoured yoghurt. She saw me looking and her brow contracted. When I said, “I’m so happy for you,” which in German […]
I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?” “Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression […]
Och, my heart’s pounding! I just queued in the supermarket next to a man taller than me (rare) with whom I conceived one of those fleeting yet it stains your day – your weekend! – mutual desire curves founded in, apparently, mutual liking as well as pheromonal drift. Oh, I stood next to him and […]
On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. […]
I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted […]
Today my hair kept tangling in the buttons at the back of my coat. I spent a long time standing in doorways or under trees, thoughtfully fishing there with my fingers, dreamily, gingerly unwinding. I’ve been spending time in a cafe that was opened “ca. 1930” by the stout pretty dark-haired woman whose blurred photograph on […]
Went onto the market, transformed now with its leafiness half on the ground, and half overhead; I wanted parsley, and something else leafy, maybe spinach, and potatoes. So many types of potato, each ugly in its own precious way, it would be nice to buy one of each and label them with toothpicks (i, ii, […]
Switzerland: land of milk can honey. I am back and the milk from the Bioladen is fresh and sweet and creamy. Honey-coloured cattle browse along the path flicking fat mosquitoes with paint-brush tails. It’s all pretty: even the oversized Lego industrial landscapes. Life is orderly and a little prim. A church on every hillside: Catholic […]
Supermarkets turn me into a raging misanthrope. I am never more judgmental than when dodging slow-moving families in the aisles. Artificial food substitutes reach out like glistening fruit arranged on extremely symmetrical trees. There’s the couple towing two listless children who have not one fresh product in their cart. There’s the urge to tap them […]
Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into […]
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks. One was called Coia and […]
I realise it is an insufferable habit to peer into other people’s shopping trolleys and make guesses about their state of torpor and poor little stolid fat inactive kids as a result. And many people would see it as high-handed that I carry a thick black marker for amending signage that has missed its apostrophe. […]