If I pick a moment to savour it's often coffee. There are
other things, other colours, textures, scents, flavours, sounds that draw
emotive pictures all over every level of my brain and soul. But often, it's
coffee.
This morning somehow the flask, the dinky pink crackled
flask brimming with cold perky coffee for optimum morning alertness, is left on
the kitchen worktop.
Thoughts of it standing by the red plastic kettle and the
crumby white toaster, waiting, have to suffice.
In the supermarket there is something I am supposed to buy
yet forget: the lure of bargains, perhaps the thought of biscuit dunked, the
classic bitter sweet: anyway, the self-serve checkout beeps through two organic
chocolatey packets: it fritters away a mere pound sterling.
At home, an old friend arrives, all the way from France,
unexpected: how lovely then, to have biscuits!
And post arrives, in a box.
A box of Vietnamese coffee.
A thick brew at lunchtime accompanies a retrospective:
though our caller prefers tea: all the things that once were and how they move
on and what is important and how splendid if we could reciprocate the visit and
there isn't much we lack but more travel, how we would like that. How we have
liked where we have been: crossing the road in Hanoi: we mime it for him: the
diminutive lady, white haired, leading us through the moped sea.
We wave him goodbye; in his hired car; send him with fine
wishes.
It is not, I think, that the coffee is better than
anything else, but that it represents the moments where I stitch all these
pictures together.
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