artistic practice, travel

London Notes #1

I’m doing something I despaired of ever being able to do again: sitting in my, albeit temporary, garden (see header image for the view from this table) typing, and smoking a fag. A parakeet squeaks, like a wonky teddy-bear, in a nearby tree.

We arrived last night, plunging into the middle of a family preparing for a complicated long distance trip, to be shown how the house and its contents’ function (I’ve already forgotten how to switch the oven on); told the best/easiest/nearest places to buy food (farmers market on Sunday; supermarket across the main road); be fed (Nepalese take-away); and woke this morning (at six!) to hear them all leaving. The house is now ours for the next three and a bit weeks. I feel like Virginia Woolf.*

London Garden
The view from the kitchen window, beyond the bushes at the very end of the garden is a brick summerhouse/shed I could set up home in, easily.

Today’s Observation

Like any coffee obsessive I brought my coffee and pot with me. I’m currently on my second cup, and my observation for today: London presents an entirely distinct flavour.  The exact same coffee, prepared in the exact same way tastes radically different here, no better or worse, but noticeably altered. Yet I know this bouquet, it reminds me of a past life. I’ll try and find out whose.

*Or maybe Anna Wulf, though my notebook isn’t golden.

5 thoughts on “London Notes #1”

  1. I ‘ve often noticed how familiar tastes seem changed in different locales. I used to assume it was “something to do with the water” But now…I wonder if, perhaps, we slip into a different skin blending the familiar with the different to create a new?

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  2. I think it is the water though. It has a distinct flavour in the South East.
    I would love to smoke a fag again. I have started fantasising about it. Vaping is not the same.
    Sx

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    1. Is it different in the south west, the water that is? I remember when I first moved to Scotland I couldn’t drink tea, it tasted too odd, and for years I only drank it when I visited my sister in Kent.
      I’ve given up trying to give up smoking, and have resigned myself to always being a bit smelly. X

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