Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: pizza

  • pizzagram

    Woman at the next table films her third slow sweep of the entire restaurant. I am stuffing long reins of mozzarella in my mouth. I wipe my face and go over.

    ‘Hi. So sorry to intrude. I just really don’t like being background scenery in your panoramic videos, I just want to eat my messy pizza without ending up on your Instagram. Could you please not do that?’ I have broken the fourth wall. She looks stunned. The couple at the next table roll their eyes and purse their mouths.

    Everyone else in the room including half the waiters is staring down into their phones, apart from one man seated at a large table who has met my gaze and grinned sadly, as though we are the only two left awake. Suspending conversation in favour of objects is objectionable. Objecting to being rendered an object is human. It seems to me as we turn this corner we are normalising all the wrong things.

  • today

    Today in Berlin I found a hand-blown wine bottle so beautiful I had to pick it up to carry home. I saw an elder descending the stairs from a sushi bar painfully and slowly. He crossed the pavement, leaning on his stick. To my surprise he came up to a bicycle and dropped his satchel in its basket. His hands must have been trembling as it took him some time to thread the walking stick diagonally through the carrier at the back. He set off walking, slowly and painfully, pushing his bike and I thought: ah. Perhaps he uses that as a kind of walker, perhaps he’s not willing to face yet that he needs support. But I was absolutely wrong. At the roadside he stepped gingerly over the crossbar and set off, turning uphill within a few yards and pedalling slowly but steadily home.

    I saw a busker on the markets who had attracted a little, attentive crowd. He sang Rocket Man and people clapped. Then he said, This next song is one of my own, and that’s when everybody began to disperse and turn away. In the crowd was a man in his seventies huge in a wheelchair who was wearing a kind of childhood dress-up box version of a Native American feathered headdress. He was tapping his scaly, swollen foot. Riding home I passed a bride, in her ivory tower of gown, sitting at a trestle table on the roadside with three blokes casually dressed in black. The four of them were laughing and opening two flat boxes of pizza. I saw a biker couple lounging over beers and she had the heel of her cuban heeled boot raked up at shoulder height on the railing.