hello. As I write you it is 19:10 on a bank holiday monday. I think I might have sunburn, or I might have eaten too many salt and vinegar crisps, or maybe both. Either way my face is stinging. The sun is coming into the flat and hitting me in my right eye but I am comfortable on the sofa and I know that soon the sun will have set. Sam is currently at his parents house bookbinding as part of the in/open house1 series his family runs.
Today felt like a long Sunday. Partly because I worked from 08:30-19:20 on Saturday, and partly because I woke up hungover. After a long lie in bed watching youtube videos, drinking coffee and green juice (in separate cups), Sam cooked us my new favourite comfort food: rice with wok fried tomato and egg. I’m not sure if the dish has a name.
We washed up our plates and bodies and went to our local park to appreciate the sun. I had a 99 flake ice-cream from a van that isn’t usually around. We spent an hour or so laying in the grass and even with a hat I think my very fair skin has caught some colour.
On Thursday I attended my first ever Passover. Last year I was working on the Isle of Man and couldn’t make it. This year, in leafy north london, I found myself at the dinner table with an illuminated copy of the Haggadah, sight reading songs and asking questions. I learned about the orange on the Seder plate. Instead of four sons we had four children. During Magid a guest read a curation of Palestinian poetry. I don’t think anyone at the table has a very strong faith, but the importance of the night was clear.
There is something about the ancient and the future in Passover that re-calibrates a perspective on time. I’m very glad to have been invited.
On Sunday Sam made a pasta sauce using the last of the Passover lamb. I baked a lemon cake for Easter dinner. I didn’t go to mass but I did ring my catholic grandparents.
The sun has set now. I enjoy writing you. I had intended to write about the many different notebooks I currently keep, I even took a very curated photo of them all in the evening light, but that isn’t the text that came out of me. I leave you with a video I watched this morning. goodbye.
- “in/open house is a way to think about how families, households, homes, often characterised as archaic structures to be escaped, can also be re imagined and re worked as experimental forms for study, planning and repair.” ↩︎
Mortimer Drew ~ blog 