18 July 2010

Weekending

We buy our first ever lottery tickets together - he gets frisked for ID - and we both choose 15. The one number we get right.

I feel like a teenager, a fifteen-year-old, all weekend. Sitting in attic rooms, talking of old love affairs, watching a lovely sex film about humans and humour and fragility and frigging, telling jokes about Spaniards who sleep with goats, making CDs late into the night, eating greasy Chinese takeout, laughing at cartoons before bed, rummaging through charity shop treasures, learning how to fold paper into envelopes for future correspondence, having his mum make us a yummy dinner like I was going round for tea...

Beach hut vibes and seagull song and cries from the three-legged cat poke through my regression blanket, and I pose by Hardy's statue, wax lyrical over peaches (T.S. Eliot and Keats), discover an old black&white photograph of a quaint family with funny facial expressions, eat a sugar-crusted Eccles cake from a warm slab of wood for a bakery-breakfast, sticky flaky sweet, flaking and sticking to my chin and cheek. I drink apple juice from local apples and pink tea that smells of rose gardens. I want to pet the wicker pig whilst I read in the conservatory. I borrow the electric-blue toy accordion and make grand plans of sound in my head. I find a Murder She Wrote board game at the car boot sale and photograph Angela Lansbury because the idea makes me laugh. I am still fifteen. I hang out, I am a teenager. This is what weekending should be. Taking time out from my twenties, and going back to the best of teen years.

On the train back to my twenties, there is a cow on the track that halts my journey. The cow is absurd. I like it. I like that it pauses smooth progress. And that it makes me smile on my way home.

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