Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: hungry

  • a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet

    After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.

    The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.

    Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.

  • meat time

    I love how the cat comes and sits, not next to the fridge, just sort of within range… letting me know with infinite courtesy that, you know, no hurry or anything, but some people might say it’s high time for Meat Time. “Meat Time!” I say, finally noticing her where she folds like a furred god, immaculately footed. Her tail is wrapped around her legs, she is not getting in anybody else’s way, she doesn’t say a word – and not only because she has no words and little use for words, it’s because she is being polite. If I walk between her and the magic fridge, where, for all I know she knows, the meat actually grows, ready carved into fresh nibble-sized bleeding chunks, she almost falls over herself skipping to reach me – she does a little hop, like a twist, her backside and haunches still sitting on the ground while her eager front feet have set off in the opposite direction. She reminds me of comics in old movies who say, “They went… thaddaway!” pointing two fingers in two directions. I let the chunks of flesh fall into her bowl. I’ve given up moving the old hair elastic that is her beloved and her prey, which every day ends up dropped into her empty dish. I hadn’t given up wondering why she would drag it over there once she’s done chasing and torturing the poor thing, then one day it dawned on me: oh. This is her eating place, where she would drag the corpse of her intended supper if she weren’t a soft little domestic possum-murderer. That worn elastic is her prey.