Menus

On Sunday I was taken to lunch at the hippest eating place in Brighton. The menu offered cauliflower with house egg and pangritata I was keen to see the size of a house egg.


turned out to be the sort of thing a dolls house might lay



Later I walked up the promenade past the marina where a lady serves hot drinks from a small wooden shed. Pinned askew at the hatch is a scratchy notice on a piece of cardboard that I didn't dare photograph:

WE DON'T SERVE SKINNY FATTY LATTIES
WE DON'T PUT CINNAMON, COCO POWDER, GOLD DUST OR FAIRY DUST ON TOP
WE DONT DO ANY KIND OF CHINO OR SYRUP
NOR DO HAVE LITTLE MARSHMALLOWS OR SPRINKLES

WE HAVE GOLD BLEND INSTANT COFFEE AND PG TIPS TEA BAGS AND JUST MILK AND SUGAR

THAT IS ALL!!

Visiting the Young Ones

The man with the cool black dog and his teenage son live in a medium-size house in Brighton. The man is half Labrador half teenager and the three of them live together in a house ripe with the smell of dog, adolescent boy, fried things, unwashed bedlinen and the poo that lies in wait in the lavatory. Cables trail along hallways  and down the stairs converging in the centre of the living room. Walls are hung with guitars and bikes and the supermarket shop stays in it's bags on the table until the ice cream leak becomes conspicuous.

They are very happy in their boy fug letting me stay in the spare room with it’s duvet made of soggy cardboard and yellowed pillow with permanent head dent.

We scrunched together on the sofa watching scifi and adventure films interfering with the plot and who had been in which films before and eating pizza and then meringue and cream mixed with a little bit of fruit so we could say – YES THERE WERE VEGETABLES

William Ralston Sheddon Ralston M.A

We visited a church near the sea, a small church it's ceiling painted with a pattern of doves and olive branches densely like a tapestry.

There were memorial tablets on the walls.

I hope that William Ralston Sheddon Ralston named his son Patrick William Ralston Sheddon Ralston Sheddon

A Walk in the Park

We took the black labrador to a large park outside Brighton she immediately produced and ate a poo then found a headless baby rabbit and tried to gulp it down but my friend caught her and tried to stop this ingestion - there was a wrestling match which the dog won.

We walked on and the dog ran off and caught up with us again - now with a thick layer of another animal's excrement on her back.

Did you get a black dog so the dirt wouldn't show?

No I just thought black was cooler

Hair Watching in Brighton

glossy auberginenearlyblack hair cropped all over except for a thin curtain around the edges - like a bed valance

basic number 2 clip around the main part of head silky bantam plume across the top - over-ear hair cut to resemble bushy eyebrows

Correspondence III

I’ve just been in the glory hole and pulled out an old portfolio where there is a painting I made when Bob was briefly married to Lara, it is a portrait of Lara holding a squirming child

Before Lara, Bob shared his flat with Pete who only appeared occasionally, always stoned and always complaining at length about his girlfriend and the over-intimate relationship she had with her dog:

Bob wrote:

blahblahblah ... do you remember pete who i used to share the flat with before the great era of mistake - he moved down to your part of the world in france that is with his lady and 2 kids - but unfortunately has since taken a fatal fall off a cliff one night at a party and he wasnt even drunk - tragic - he was loving it down there too . so watch your step. we spent a year in italy as it goes and that was really fab although i  was quite pleased to get back in certain respects.

will bang on about italy next time. gotta go busy with a patio redesign that never should have happened and is costing me dear.
 

oh yeah but the recipe especially is the one with the pasta and the chorizo and the parsley butter oil black pepper jarlsberg or emmental no too thinly sliced and cooked on the hob together in a kind of bain marie and then egg yolk at the very last minute. – bob jr’s absolute favourite and i have promised to introduce you to him when he is old enough to learn!!

And I wrote:

blahblahblah ... poor pete! (didn’t he date that girl with the jack russell that always licked his bollocks when they were in bed?) good luck with that patio!

I've just heard from Bob - I'm going to give him that painting when I see him 

Correspondence II

Today's Future as read by Miranda July  

I see lots of Bs in your life. Could be people whose name begin with B, or Boston, or a bee. Or maybe you need to let it BE.

good luck,
Miranda

So here I am in Bristol planning a trip to Brighton and reviewing the last correspondence I had with a long lost friend called Bob who used to teach maths and was really good at fixing stuff.

in 2008 Bob found me through email and asked me to fill him in with my news 

I said
Blahblahblah

I'm living in France...

Blahblahblah

… you still got that goatee? wearing the leathers? still the coolest maths teacher?

He said

Blahblahblah

… clean shaven no leather trousers although ive still got them as i was thinking of chucking them yesterday- and couldnt ...glad to be out of the teaching actually although it had its great moments - wasnt really the kids more the wanker staff who were more childish than the kids...that life is gone...coming to France

I said 

Blahblahblah come and visit…

My place in France (doesn't that sound great?) is an hour's drive south  of Toulouse.… looks very grand as you drive up to it … and even when you first go inside you might think it's  impressive it takes a while for the shortcomings to become apparent mainly the running damp, and some people don't like mice also we don't have doorknobs and it's always 5 degrees colder inside than out

Here's a link to one of my posts about mice 

Correspondence I

 

The day I moved to Brighton a guy turned up to fix something in the house. Looking like he’d walked out of a Jim Jarmusch movie six foot six and skinny as a vanilla pod in his leather biker jacket, razor sharp side burns and weirdly cool shades he was immediately rude and funny and we became the best of friends. 
 

He got married, I moved to Bristol, we lost touch.

In 2008 - Just before I started this blog there was an email

hello - are you Lulu that used to live in brighton - get back to me if you are, otherwise apologies

and I said

Yes it's me - how are you?

him
fuck me that was a long shot - i am good kiddo. we are celebrating 15 years of wedded bliss or something like that and are inviting everyone from the wedding to our house … would love to see you whether you can come or not. havent seen you in ages but I still cook your dishes and they are the family favourites.

i hope you are well - fill me in

Digging Around

Sunny afternoon in the community garden forking manure over the raised beds followed by orange cake and E. Coli.

this is just in case there are no future posts you'll know what happened to me


The birds have just changed their melodic evening song to a repetitive chuckchuckchuck response to the cat that has invaded the garden

Sun, spring and bird song have made me yearn for the coast, I've decided to go soon and visit Brighton, a town where I went to art college and then liked it so much that I stayed on for another five years.

In those days I paddled a canoe in the sea a lot. Every evening I'd start at the marina and head for Worthing (but never got further than Hove).

Last time I visited Brighton it was to attend the funeral of a friend who used to live two streets away from my house, we saw each other nearly every day for seven years then one day she stopped talking to me and I couldn't find out why - many years later we met and she told me and it seemed such a strange thing to be so upset about for so long that despite efforts to mend this great friendship it was too broken and next time I heard about her it was to hear that she was so ill.