ESSEX-ROME
Yesterday the man who works every day at the pier café in the Essex coastal town where I live told me his father sold the café behind his back (within 5 seconds of me walking in). I say Oh, how upsetting. He says, I’m alright, I won’t have anything to do with him now. I say Who is the new owner? Apparently, it’s the owner of the ferry service. The man says the buyer is keeping him on. I wonder if his dad asked for that, I wonder how long it will last. The man says the buyer wanted the café without any stock, so they are trying to run it down. This makes me curious: is the owner going to transform the menu? The man says he hopes not, as they do really well, they make good money.
Later that evening I walk past after closing and see the father with a large glass of red wine talking to the new owners, who are also drinking wine, as if toasting. I overhear the father say: we always used to be open evenings. It seems in retrospect as if the younger man himself had only just found out about the sale. Their food is not “posh”, they do greasy spoon style classic breakfasts then nice lunches with crab sandwiches using sliced bread. It would change the feel of the café if the menu changed. I note that the ferry recently raised their prices, to a level which is prohibitive for regular travel.
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Boys playing along the promenade; there is lengthy discussion of which bush in the town to hide their football in so that no one will find it. ‘No not that bush, the one next to —’. Then suddenly, they themselves jump into a large bush as part of some game. They are immediately invisible.
A woman at the café on the green saying someone’s daughter has been put on antidepressants by the doctor but that she really needs therapy, someone to talk to.
My grandmother, who has phoned me maybe once before in my life, rang me at 12.19 pm to tell me that she had heard a programme on the radio I might be interested in. It concerns a new translation of a recently discovered novel by Simone de Beauvoir, she says, who was a feminist.
Tomato blight is everywhere on the plot and on all the plots at the allotment site in this second plague summer. I look up the correct word for the supporting structure under a tomato leaf: petiole. Softening petioles are turning translucent; they cannot hold up the yellowing weakening leaves. Blackening stems, blackening fruits. I gather as many unaffected tomatoes as I can before I leave.
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Get up 4.29am and drive to Heathrow in the dark. No coffee, no food. Check in. I measured my bag in inches not centimetres so the bag is much bigger than it is supposed to be and I have to pay for it. I eat breakfast at ‘global’ food café Giraffe. Avocado on toast with a fine dice of tomato and pumpkin seeds and a white mug of black filter coffee. Very nice staff and energetic: unbelievably so for the hour. Bread not so good, but OK. Onboard the flight we are handed a NutriGrain bar without explanation. It is sickly sweet and soft like a biscuit gone stale, but I eat it. Man in front of me says when you’ve been in the armed forces you are good at waiting. Man behind me swearing a lot and being unpleasant to his partner, telling her to do things on her phone. When he has to wait a little to get off the plane, he is unpleasant to the flight attendants.
Share a taxi to the place where I have a residency with an artist who also has a residency, although hers does not begin until January. She is making this trip to drop off a statue of Venus that she took from her parents; it will be important for the work she wants to do. The artist teaches at a university and has not had time to make work for ten years. She refers to a Roman site in St Albans? Must look up. We eat food left for us from lunch when we arrive mid-afternoon: rice, yellow with small whole octopus, clams, and mussels and a selection of boiled vegetables: Romanesco cauliflower, green beans, sweet potato. A small, slightly dry roll with poppy seeds, then coffee.
I unpack and try to work and have a rest. Then a bell sounds and I see in the information booklet that they serve afternoon tea here. It is a peach iced tea in a jug (in fact two jugs – one with sugar, one without) – and not hot tea with milk. And a plate of biscuits. At tea I meet a researcher who is leaving the institution later in the week. She wants to write historical fiction and says she needs to go to Versailles to research it. She says in academic writing you don’t say how things smell and taste, do you? But in fiction that’s important. I think it’s a shame that is the case. I rest until the dinner bell sounds. I am reminded of hearing the lunch bell in a shoe factory in Northampton when I visited to buy discounted shoes. I think of Marx’s Capital which I have been reading this year: the realisation that the working day as something with (any) limits was an achievement of workers’ movements. The good sound of a bell that calls an end to work and acknowledges the need to eat, to rest.
Rebecca May Johnson is a writer. Her debut book of creative nonfiction Small Fires – A Culinary Epic will be published by Pushkin Press in Spring 2022. You can find her work here.