Bastille Day

Chris obligingly providing a sense of scale for Mr Ryman's painting...We trotted through two floors of MoMA as well as the Serra exhibition, spent some time in the garden looking at people and discussing Chris' newly-discovered mean streak, and discussed the nature of art for five minutes before ostentatiously avoiding the subject for the rest of the day.

The Near Upper West Side is a wasteland. In search of places French, we had to resort to Fiorello's for the drinks we needed - but Chris loved the bar, one of my favourite places from Back In the Day (BITD?)...


Vernaccio di San Gimignano and....hm, Modelo beer?

Fava Beans

For Jay: food.

I wish the other three people on the planet who like these things would write to me so we can start a support group. I buy a big bagful from Mr Lee on Atlantic Avenue, shell them into a pan, add some water, a bunch of mint, and some dill if I have it, squeeze a lime over and clap a lid on. Bring them to the boil, lower the heat and simmer till tender. Then I add salt and pepper. And a slosh of olive oil. I take the beans out, and reduce the liquid that is left until is quite creamy, then pour over. My idea of green heaven. And I LIKE the skins. When I was little, and my mother grew rows of them in Bloemfontein, I would eat them with my fingers at table and pop them out of their skins into my mouth, then eat the skins separately. I was not a well child.

Rosa "Abraham Derby"

After yesterday's white-hot complaints, I emerged from the Bergen Street subway (having descended into the 2nd Avenue stop - hotter than hell is ever likely to be: it's the worst in the city - under a suspiciously chlorotic but promisingly apocalyptic sky), into an unrestrained, perfectly vertical deluge. I walked round the corner to Los Amigos, picked up some baby back ribs, went out again, took off my flip flops and walked home barefoot, past people cowering in doorways and one small child jumping in puddles, through clear streams of rushing water. By the time I got home my dress was sopping, clinging to me, my feet were very clean, and I was happy. The ribs were dry. This morning the air is cool, Abraham Derby has opened on the terrace, and Things Are Looking Up. The Mexican guy who was working on the front of the building yesterday (they have ropes over my terrace to hold a platform), had replaced the fig he had moved (the Polish guys who trashed my terrace two years ago would never have done that), and birds were actually flying, not slumped over, panting on branches.

The cat woke me at 5 am scratching his chin which is healing from an ulcer, prompting me to take him to the bathroom to clip his claws, usually a painless procedure for both of us. This time I put some disinfectant in the basin to wipe his back claws with (cat claws= dirty=infection in possible wound on chin). Oh, he realized, smelling the Dettol, I am at the VET: shit! And howled like a banshee. The neighbours now know the truth. The woman with red hair is a sadist and skins cats in the wee hours. One pissed off cat. One wide awake woman. So, I took pictures on the terrace and waited for my stupid stovetop espresso maker to spit out its coffee. I need a new espresso pot.

Ayvalik

Looking through my photo folders on my computer I found these pictures, taken last year in Turkey. Perhaps because the season in New York is white hot, the sky white, the air white, I want to leave. I am homesick for this place I have visited only twice but where I have felt I belonged. I dream of Istanbul, and of Cape Town, and sometimes they are a hybrid, a place I know only in dreams, peopled by long legged, spotted cats, steep sepia streets and neighbourhoods that exist nowhere else. So to pacify my homesickness and my itchy feet, I've made a little retrospective:

Above is the house Bevan restored and the garden he designed for friends in Ayvelik on the Aegean, where we stayed for a few days. Mulberry, loquat, lemon trees; grapes, and the pervading scent of this jasmine arbour. The white mulberries were swept into heaps every morning by the gardener. We had breakfast under the jasmine in the mornings: rings of bread from the market, Turkish coffee, and fruit.


A window in one of the hot stone alleys behind the house, whose cool garden was the exception in town.


An un-photoshopped sunset from a little restaurant on a lagoon some miles past town. Bevan, his friend Lale and I drank raki and ate from plates piled with little deep-fried rouget. Lale sprayed my legs with mosquito stuff to keep me safe.


Lunch at Lale's. Her tiny kitchen gives mine a run for its money. Under another jasmine bower we ate spring peas with dill, little hot sausages, lettuce salad and drank quantities of white wine and beer. Peaches for dessert. She looks after the local khedis (cats), and looks like a khedi herself - broad, high cheekbones and pale green cat-eyes. This is one of the best lunches I have ever eaten. It typifies what I have found in Turkey, and what Bevan first showed me: an innate grace, sense of perfection and inherent generosity, with an unerring and perhaps unconscious eye for what is Proper.


Postcard boats on water like silk - so clear the green seaweed and fish swimming through it could be seen from our table. I was sitting at the table when I took this. A restaurant on a small island over from Ayvelik, reached by a causeway. Lesbos in the background. More raki, a delicous, fennel-y drink, more fish. Fresh, simple, impeccable fish. Raki is wonderful - it's never given me a hangover. You become very funny drinking it, and feel wonderful.

Taste

In Turkey, at the markets, on the streets, all produce is beautiful.

You want to eat everything.

Especially the köfte, meatballs.

And anything that swims, because the fish is the freshest I have ever seen.

We ate many lunches...

Of the sort that Mustafa (above) and Bevan had introduced me to years before, at their restaurant, Anatoli.

I have never eaten as well, anywhere. 

Consider the Little Things

These are all double-duty: purple basil is for eating, naturally, but it's pretty, too. I should add that in a fit of optimism (one must nail the feeling for the two seconds that it lasts), I ripped out the purple clematis that had taken over the pot. Again, on the subject of roots. It flowers once a year, for which I wait with huge excitement, and for the rest of the year it just sits there. That would be OK, except that its ROOTS take over and squeeze everyone out, like an incredibly self-involved friend's might. Hence my brilliance at bridge burning. Now my edges are bleeding into myspace, where I've ventured recently. It's a whooole other world. I'm spreading myself too thinly. If I can't handle anything but tight friendships, what am I do soliciting Aquaintae???



Bronze fennel, also very pretty and frothy, and good in mushrooms a la Grecque.


This is Estorbito's lawn under a chair, all self seeded from a couple of grassheads last year.

Nemesias and the popular little euphorbia Diamond Frost.

Cabin Fever

This, children, is a potbound plant. Fig, to be precise. This is what happens when we stay in our apartments, are stuck in our ruts, for longer than is healthy. Our roots wrap around our necks and choke us even though on the outside everything looks fine. Until thing start to drop off. Or until we lose the proverbial It. What we need is to be bodily hauled squealing from our snug spots, have some painful but quick, sharp-bladed snipping of our bonds, and then a kind return to a space refreshed with some new, nutritious soil all around.

Yes, I am fine. And the fig feels better. It's having flank steak on the bbq for dinner.