Curling Up At Home

Winter is breaking in like the first waves of a tempest over a berm, and it is cold enough in the mornings for frost to form. The trees have lost most of their leaves, but because of the rainy and temperate autumn there are a few happy exceptions amongst the oaks and the linden trees. A day or two ago there was a deep fog in the street, which was picturesque in its turn-of-the-century London Thames-side way, but also seemed to help the icy air to permeate into the apartment. We're firing the coal stoves at the two poles of our apartment again — although my room feels like a third, North pole because I refuse to heat it...

The workload has been pretty light the past two days, and it feels as if we had prepared well for Black Friday after all. This afternoon I left early because I felt sickly. But although I still have a bit of a headache and other unalarming symptoms, imbibing 40-proof liqueur, sleeping for two hours, and then knitting a wool scarf in the corner room while watching the city and national evening news with Mama was enough to feel better. So they were as piffling as I expected. I only regret having missed the birthday celebrations of a colleague, which took place after work.

Lunch was a yellowy-orange-coloured curry — bell peppers, orange pumpkin, what tasted like buckets of coconut milk, and tender chicken pieces in the meat-eater's serving — and, interestingly in accompaniment, gnocchi. As my uncle studied Italian, he informed us how to say the latter — there was apparently a debate about it at the lunch table in the largest room. 'Apparently,' because I wasn't present at this debate, having retired to eat lunch in the room where I work, because I don't want to 'hog' room at the communal tables. Afterward I ate a tootsie pop, which a colleague brought over from the States as a remnant of a Halloween candy trove, for dessert. This profusion of detail is not wildly interesting, probably; but if Pepys could describe his dinners, so can I.

At home I made porridge for dinner: oats, chia seeds, a red winter apple, milk, powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, and caramelized crunchy granola. It was tasty and the acme of comfort food, if not terribly virtuous.

Anyway, I hope tomorrow I can return to the fray, symptom-free. By the way, I am still reading the physics book about stars, and the book about Middle Eastern governments in Turkey, Iran and Egypt in the 'modern era,' and am rereading Candide. It's not a terribly escapist book, because you can read versions of its sensational scenes in the newspapers almost every day, and sadly they're not imaginary and disquietingly they're not taking place almost 300 years ago. At least the annotations are nice to read and don't heap up new tales of horror...