Blue Dot

The Obsessive Diary

Easter was B at the farm for a fortnight and me coming and going for the first week but for the second, a whole week together, was a gentle delight. Just me and them doesn’t happen often what with friends and them being at uni and so I’m impelled to write, to mention it, our time together cohesive and easy, a dance of meals and backgammon, walks and conversations about how we would make this world function with equity. That is where B and I meet, academically but also with our hearts. A basic living wage for all, artists recognised for their vital part in the health of a nation by being state supported to create, and how to tie income to cost of living so that no one grows rich on another’s struggle. We dream of an ecology where the CEO’s pay packet is in percentage cohort with the cleaner’s, and disagree on the place of capitalism. We dissect private land ownership and unpack communism. We ask if competitiveness exists where resources are unlimited. I wonder what field B will make their working home once uni is over and perhaps they’ve done a masters and maybe a PHD. I feel optimistic that their social conscience is shared amongst their friends.

And we walked and we talked and we went to the stones. When the AGA blew up we got in the car, practically in our pyjamas like the Tiger Who Came To Tea, and went to Cranleigh for supper. There, a woman flouted all preconceived notions of Surrey women, and coming up to our table said how hard she tries to get these modern linguistics, they, them around her middle-aged tongue and she has gay sons and all that matters is love. She continued to get it wrong even as she stood there being human and funny and trying and isn’t that what Angie Browne and I talked about? Risk getting it wrong, and when she returned to her own table of two couples and white wine we loved her for her open-heart and joy in saying hello.

This week I’m in London with J who today flies off to Sri Lanka. After my LIVE with the wonderful letter-writing Fiona Melrose we skipped out the door and onto the tube, still thrilled by the ease of the city. To Tottenham Court Road and there we were in Soho, on our way to Barafina via Trisha’s, a speakeasy basement dive of the these don’t exist anymore kind, yet they do if you look hard enough. Down stained and trodden green carpet stairs, the stench of ancient cigarettes pulling us into a room of two person tables and plastic red cloths, a wood chip bar and two men, hair combed over, stools to fall off. The walls a festivity of nights photographed at their height of whisky and high balls, forgotten friends loved madly, the floor sticky, the lighting scant. £25 a year for membership, eat your heart out Soho House. This is what all other clubs try for and fail at, their desire for clean mess a falsehood where Trisha’s never tries, it just is.

Dinner at Barafina (exquisite) and a walk down darkened Portobello, mistaking the lights in the sky for the moon. Did you see the Artemis photos? Wouldn’t it be great if this perspective on our blue dot brought sense.

The lights turned out to be lasers from Wembley or some such, but for a moment there we considered the moon in her glory or even aliens.

Eleanor