Scrubbing meat trays on a Monday morning

I love Rosamund Lehmann. A friend who also loves her, and who thinks Rosamund writes the insides of girls' heads (thus mine and my friend's head) in a spot on, pitch-perfect stream of consciousness despite us now being twenty-two and twenty-three years old, tracked down the sequel to the beloved Invitation to the Waltz in a second-hand bookshop. I got a text from her the other day saying 'the weather in the streets is brilliant but sad'. It was pouring with rain at the time, the worst my uncle from New Zealand had ever seen in London. I thought at first my friend was being deep and poetic in regards to the state of the weather. Of course she was actually referring to the novel The Weather in the Streets. I am now taking longer, more meandering bus routes in order to read the novel as much as possible. The term 'sparkling dialogue' gets bandied around far too often. But the dialogue...it really does sparkle.

And so I turn from the cerebral to the flesh. We have so much meat in our freezer. Absolutely stuffed, barely room for peas. It is all from a Sussex farm, animals reared by flatmate's parents. It is not long until we have to move out, so we must eat the meat. And I am a vegetarian. Kelis sang 'My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard' on the radio as pork cooked in our oven. 

We had a roast last night, with yoghurty minted peas, green beans in mustard vinaigrette, rich potato dauphinoise, pillow squares of Yorkshire pudding and red wine. I'd bought Cava, which we drank with strawberries fizzing in glasses (a Smarties mug for me as we've broken one too many wine glasses...) alongside our dessert of burnt butter sponge cake with strawberries, jam, butter icing and melted white chocolate drizzled over the whole summer cake mountain. Our kitchen is small so we filled it with extra chairs, the heat of the oven, music, the smell of  garlic and pork, and our best 'grown-up talk'. We drank to the chef, summer and us. Though, awfully, in hindsight, we should have drank to Norway, to Somalia, to the end of all this weekend's horrors.