things move around

“The Polynesians are different - they do everything with pineapples.”

There are few pleasures more exquisite than spending a balmy summer afternoon nude in the kitchen, cutting limes for gin drinks and preparing onions, lamb and spices for curry.

                         Breton Tune 

          Farewell to the land
       The waves start to swell
          Farewell to the land
               Farewell
Blue is the sky and blue the swell
               Farewell

Next to the house the vine grows tall
The flowers show gold above the wall

          Goodbye to the land
       The wood, fields and sky
          Goodbye to the land
               Goodbye

Goodbye to the girl who wears your ring
The sky is black, the salt winds sting

          Farewell to the land
       To the girls you knew well
          Farewell to the land
               Farewell
Blue was the sky and blue the swell
               Farewell

Grief for the future dims our eye
The dark sea leads to a darker sky

       I’ll pray for the land
          With all my heart
          Loving it well
          As I depart
       Farewell to the land
          Farewell

————————————————-

at sea, 1 August 1852

Victor Hugo
Translation: Harry Guest

There’s a bloke at work called Larry (say) Au-Yeung. ‘Au-Yeung’ is pronounced ‘Ow-Yung’, so it’s really no leap at all to get from there to a pun so painfully obvious that even I wouldn’t normally bother. However, I’ve not given up hope of penetrating the forcefield of literalism by which Grent isolates himself from the rest of the world, so this morning I thought I’d try the sledgehammer where the stiletto had failed:

Me: Grent. ‘Ow young d’you think Larry Au-Yeung is?
Grent: How young is Larry?
Me: Yeah. ‘Ow young is Au-Yeung?
Grent: I don’t know, I’d say around 45.
Me [despondently]: Really? I thought he looked younger.

It’s not just that he doesn’t get my bad puns. The man is a phenomenon. He’s 100% left-brain - a left-brain on legs. Imagine a man possessed of limitless creativity, perceiving the world in forms inconceivable to ordinary minds (since do so would melt them) yet lacking any appreciation of conventional form and stricture, entirely divorced in his mind from logic and process, unable to communicate his revelatory vision. Sort of like the late-period Roky Erickson I suppose. Grent is that man’s diametric opposite.

UPDATE: I should clarify that the above pun was made for purely experimental purposes. It was a terrible pun in conception and execution and not at all the sort of pun I would inflict on an ordinary, sensitive human being.

Morning: men climb wearily into their trucks, or wait on the roadside for rides, intermittently sipping from their thermugs, while the sun rises like a cloud of demolition-site brickdust.

Grent is liasing with a man by the name of Winsor, down on the fourth floor. I keep making my little joke about Grent visiting the house of Winsor, but I don’t think he knows who or what the house of Windsor is. He just says “err, yeah”. You can see him thinking “house of Winsor? What? I’m going to his office, not his house”.

At lunchtime I read out a couple of crossword clues.

Me: California vet may make a bloomer, seven and six. It’s an anagram. A kind of flower. Any ideas?
Grent: It’s what kind of flower?
Me: That’s the question. What kind of flower is it? An anagram of ‘California vet’.
Grent: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Me: Rearrange the letters of ‘California vet’ to make a kind of flower. Two words, seven and six.
Grent: I don’t know.
Brant: African violet.
Me: Thanks!
Grent: African violet?! What is that? You have to be on crack to do those crosswords.

It crosses my mind that Brant is some kind of anagramming idiot-savant, like the denizens of ‘Dictionary Corner’ on the TV show ‘Countdown’, so I toss a few more in his direction. These meet with no success, but he could be dissimulating - nervous of revealing further inspiration in the totemic presence of the obdurately linear Grent. I am sure that deep within Brant there is a kernel of genius, dormant but alive beneath sediment-layers of literalism, whereas at Grent’s core there is nothing but a gelid vacuum, dark and baleful, devouring ingenuity and fancy as a black hole devours light itself.

“fruit = swollen ovary of a flower”

- written in orange on meeting-room whiteboard at work.

It was pretty warm this weekend, and Kate was on top form, fighting fire with fire by opening her spice draw to concoct a divine chicken vindaloo on Friday and a lamb dopiaza on Saturday. One thing I love about a lovingly-pestled Indian curry paste is this: when I shave afterwards, the heat draws a minuscule but intense bouquet of spices out of the pores above my top lip, and, especially if eaten in humid conditions, I can taste it there, lingering very faintly, for a couple of days after. Sensational.

Logan Villa’s hair is torniqued in a truncated ponytail. His locks have been conditioned so meticulously, and tied so tightly, that the bob shines like an orb of onyx.

Logan’s orb follows him as he parks his car illegally and trots into the office tower with his delivery. His radiant olive complexion illuminates the mirrored elevator in which he ascends to the 15th floor. What kind of a name is Chelsea Square, anyway? Sounds more like a place than a person.

Logan hands the flowers to the girl, whose lips barely flicker as she thanks him and whose eyes are full of a faraway love, but not before failing to make sense of the accompanying message, which is one of the wackier ones he’s seen today:

My love for you is unalloyed
and swells within me like a mantle plume;
but yours for me?
Illusory,
or so I must assume.

Me (reading paper): look at this. Ford are tanking because no-one’s buying their SUV’s any more.
Grunt: yeah, all those US car companies are in the shit, GM are the same. It costs a hundred fifty bucks to fill up a Hummer these days.
Me: Have you seen the new Hummer ads? ‘Restore your manhood’? They’ve just come right out and said that Hummers are for guys with weeny dicks! But I guess that’s exactly what their target market wants to hear, because they actually do have small dicks. Potential Hummer drivers are oblivious to the 98% of people who look at them and just think “weeny man”.
Brunt: I dunno, I’d still buy a Hummer.
Grunt: Me too.
Me: Come on! It’s no different from walking down the street covered in ridiculous bling!
Grunt and Brunt: Yeah!