Le Weekend

 Saturday -  on our way to a cafe brunch.......walking along a river bank I spot  this pussy cat perched on someone's garden fence.

 He lets me take his photo....but his expression

reminds me of the old saying that,

Dogs have owners

but cats have staff.

My orange zesty tart tatin just before the caramel caught on the bottom of the pan - the colour of the marmalade pussy cat.

It still turned out sweet and sticky and appley and orangey... dolloped with Greek yogurt - sweetened with honey and vanilla - Yogurt Chantilly I suppose....

 Tiverton Canal

on a drizzly, dank Sunday afternoon,

crunching on hundreds of acorns underfoot.

Snapshots of our weekend. On Saturday night we went to see Le Weekend a Hanif Kureshi film - a middle aged couple on their anniversary in Paris -  with Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent. Afterwards I asked my husband if he understood it - he said not all the conversations but enough to be moved by them. I found their performances riveting but it left me feeling sad and somehow unsettled by the careless unkindness in some of their exchanges....the poison of mis-directed hurt....

My husband says he'd love to go back to Paris.....it reminded him of our four days there a few years ago..... before, before....

I read an article in the Saturday Guardian by Eleanor Catton who won the Man Booker Prize last week for her very long novel The Luminaries. She grew up in New Zealand and she writes about the inadequacy of language to describe sublime natural beauty.

'The language of description is always a matter of equivalence (a word equals the thing it describes) and so cannot contend with the sublime.....words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning that it is felt..."

I wonder what it must be like for my husband to have no other word for his view of the sky except extraordinary.....but if  Eleanor is right, words can't say it anyway.  I see how beauty touches him  all the time -  fountains of stars rushing through his heart.... 

Maybe it's better to stay in the slipstream of that galaxy rather than in the muddy regret and irritation I feel sometimes when we walk under the relentless clouds together.....

Tonight while my husband is singing in his choir I eat my supper, standing at the kitchen counter. I'm not really hungry but I hoick out the steaming length of line-caught haddock in its horrible greasy coating ( won't buy those again - Waitrose Fish Fingers - not sure what possessed me) and stab my fork into last night's (cold) garlicky broccoli spears, dipping them into my homemade gluggy mustard mayonnaise. 

From the sublime.....