Feeling the fear

Dressing semi-respectably for a biomedical ethics workshop all afternoon. My style of dressing is very much ‘shabby chic’. My managing director once said to me in despair: ‘Your little black number dates back 12 years and is GREY. ‘ In my next life I am coming back as Anna Wintour of Vogue. Not that personality, just the dress sense.

My housemate is brave and phlegmatic about her knee replacement operation. I have the usual alcoholic terror of complete apocalytic annihilation. Feeling the fears for others comes with the territory. If I imagine and agonize over the worst possible scenario, she need not go through it — that kind of thinking?  Fortunately, in sobriety I am able to keep my mouth shut.

I am making a supper dish requested by the housemate. She wants  an old-fashioned green bean bredie, very simple, an Afrikaner farm stew.  I layer a cast-iron pot with braised onions, a little cubed lamb, more onions, potato, more green beans. And one or two cloves and a little garlic. I sneak in a little homemade chicken stock and black pepper. The green beans are organic and wonderful.

I have been revising various fiction pieces, written a few months ago. Some are good, most are not good enough.

I write a poem, then I place it in a drawer. There it stays for months before I visit it again. If I found that it resembled me then, I consider that I have not done much. If I felt as if someone else had written it, when it strikes me as an Other’s poetry, I tell myself, that I have accomplished something.

Mahmoud Darwich

Tomorrow I shall be having supper with my former art teacher, imperious and unforgiving. The breach between us needs to be healed. But it is not up to me and my amends may fall on deaf ears. Sigh.

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