The Fly In The Ointment. 30th May 2008

My brothers come for supper. 

Jay comes with his wife Kitty.

We all play croquet with Maisie. Maisie is offered a head-start but refuses and beats us all anyway. 

Kitty vows to come to my parents house every day after work and practice her moves so that next time she won’t come last.

Giles is very tired becaus he has broken up with Olivia again and can’t sleep at night. 

Kitty is Maisie’s god-mother and is very pleased to see Maisie. Maisie is very pleased to see her too.

My mother has made quiche. She has baked potatoes and grated cheese. My father has picked lettuce from his vegetable patch and we have a salad. Maisie has chosen strawberries and Cornish clotted cream for pudding. 

At supper we talk about asylum seekers. We talk about Muslims and I say I like living where I do because it’s so mixed. 

Giles says he hates asylum seekers.

I say ‘Have you ever met one?’

Giles is very cross. 

‘I don’t need to meet one.’ He says.

‘I hate mono-cultures.’ I say.

‘I think we should nuke Iraq.’ says Giles. My mother crashes dishes about in the sink and my father rolls his eyes.

I picture the Cradle of Civilisation reduced to a quintessence of dust. 

I imagine cool palm-shaded terraces, a climbing bouganvillia against a white wall. I see a child with huge dark eyes beneath a mop of blue black curls playing in shaft of pale sunlight, a woman’s slim brown hands pouring tea from a silver pot in a cool shadowed courtyard and the sound of the Adhan in a pale pink dawn.  

‘I’m going to vote National Front.’ says Giles.

‘You’re going to vote Nazi Party.’ I say.

‘Can we change the subject?’ says Jay.

Next morning George The Gardener arrives. My mother helps him move some pots. She piles echiums in a wheel barrow and wheels it down the garden to the compost heap. 

George watches admiringly.

“Works like a darkie, do ‘er.’ He says ‘Works just like a darkie.’

Friday 30th May 2008.

St Just

Racism aside, I decide I love Cornwall. 

I decide to buy a cottage and never to return to London. I believe life should be lived without a chest pain and to this end I scour ‘The Cornishman’ and short-list two houses in St Just.

It transpires that one is too small to swing a cat and the other is in the process of sliding gracefully into an old tin mine. 

‘It hasn’t shifted at all in the last ten years.’ says the Estate Agent. ‘Chances are, it’ll stay put for the next hundred but you’ll not get a mortgage on it.’ He adds gloomily.

‘How long as it been on the market?’ I ask.

‘Couple of year now.’ says the agent ‘Last people who were interested were killed in a mororbike accident before they could complete.’

O well.