last week, mother was down, so i did spend some good time with her, shmying round the bookshop in the hideous o2 centre. in the music section, a wonderful book of early photos of the smiths, many taken in the abandoned and ruined manchester central station, before it's renovation as gmex. another book was a full-colour history of simply red, including a cv written on notepaper headed with my father's late holiday company logo, which shell claimed to have helped him write. sharon osbourne's _second_ autobiography (why doesn't she just keep a blog like the rest of us? surely she'd make more from the ad revenue). we had sushi, with some bloody great aubergine dish. it made me miss dimitri's though; everything would be so much bigger. tapas, sushi, thali, call it what you like, little plates of everything rock. we went to waitrose, and spent a gigantic amount on some fairly rudimentry ingredients for tea, a nutritionaly complete pasta dish. we should do that more.in the end, what with leslie being in india, it was uncle neil, cousin georgie, brother dan, mother shell, and i.
the night after, i came round again, where shell and georgie were watching the dance x final together, shell describing to georgie the difference between the good and bad routines ('feet like kippers,' she'd say), polished off some left overs, then went round rachel's, where james was already. in this way, by living off other people, i mananged to make it through the week on only ten pounds (plus travel &c.). i confessed to her how i'd had a hankering for her to pretend we weren't going out, so i could relive the thrill of unrequited love. that's what 'circumcised' means in the context of the forthcoming song.
on friday i had a quiet word with my boss, and in the tamest way i could manage, asked whether she thought it possible if i could maybe just have a little more money in my pay? i felt so small, and afterwards like bashing my head into the wall. but at least the concern is there. from there, i was having a shit night, my aparrent lack of concern towards rachel coming to a head in a painfully protacted phone call when i should have been on the train to london bridge to see girls girls (ed was ill so it was just the two of them), with andy and sarah, plus andy's lovely friend who's doing a pro-tools course. which reminds me, that french drummer who i met the previous friday at the george never got back to me. why don't people like what i do? why is it so difficult to find anyone here? by the end of the evening i felt pretty good (drunk), got back home and shared the wild garlic tofu fillets i'd bought for tea with adrian, then stayed up til 2 on command and conquer. i can only worry that my regenerated computer games habit is connected to my lack of concern for my suffering girlfriend.
so saturday we went out for lunch in soho. we stopped outside govinda's, with looked great and will be taken on one day, but soldiered on because, frankly, i really was in the mood for falafel. we went to maoz, despite the chain-iness of it, because it's great, and she'd not been. after that, we brazed the cambridge circus crowds to get to a cash point, and had coffee and cake at the curzon, because it's where all the cool people hang out. for the first time of the weekend, we played 'polity chicken', the person who can't divide the remaining portion of food in half and pass it back being the loser. then we had a good nosey poke around the really wonderful shops in soho - that brilliant little coffee shop (she bought thank-you chocolates for her comedy dad), we must have stood half an hour outside the vodka shop window (bought a minuture snow queen and full size boston waltz), anne summers (i've never been! i seemed to worry rachel by knowing what everything was _for_), the sweet shoppe (cinder toffee and butterscotch, but _no moffatt toffee_), then into the glasshouse stores for a swift half and finally the tube back home. phew.
saturday night, then, and it's the great dinner party. sarah and andrew came over, ed made some french apple/cream/mushroom recipe (with prawns for everyone but me) which was very good indeed. there was so much wine we never got to the vodka. we listened to some of ed's good jazz, as is apt, then in rainbows, making andy slowly capitulate because it's actually quite good, the new girls girls girls album in the agreed order, from there into remixes and comdey and stuff. by the time andy and sarah were leaving, we'd missed the pub, so we just sat outside with candle and guitars and wine.
on sunday, upon rising about midday and leaving about half one, we thought it would be nice to get a curry and eat it in queen's park. on the way, there was a farmer's market just closing, where we started fressing on homemade chilli preserves, even a little too obviously hungry. it's a lovely area, but all skirt and no knickers; despite so many lovely places there was nowhere that actually sold anything we actually wanted to eat. eventually we found ourselves back on kilburn high road, and _still_ no curry. finally, we were almost back at small and beautiful near the station, so went to a nice italian for a 16" pizza to share. i dropped her at the train and came home. did a little music, played a little computer, relaxed into my sunday evening.
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