I Still Haven't Read Moby Dick
I got home a couple of hours ago, and opened the back door to a kitchen full of the smells of roast dinner, and an unfolding scene of mayhem in the kitchen as my other half battled to cook and wash up while the children got in the way. I had called home when I left the office, and got an abrupt “why do you always call when I'm busy?”.
Can I be brutally honest? As much as I like eating roast dinner, the preparation and washing up time are not worth it. I feel like that about a lot of meals – and know all my “foodie” friends would recoil in horror at such a thought. When I found myself unexpectedly home-alone on Saturday I made myself baked beans on toast with grated cheddar cheese on top. When my other half first knew me, it was the first thing she changed about me – it had been my staple diet for some time. She also forced me to buy house plants and candles in order to “brighten the place up”.
I'm not sure I've ever written about my apartment – the one I bought while I was still single. It was on the first floor of a condominium – a relatively new building on the edge of an estate that had been built perhaps twenty years previously. The entire place was decorated with flat primary colours. I filled it with black ash flat-pack furniture, and similarly stark soft furnishings. For months I couldn't afford a couch, so sat on the floor to watch TV.
A young couple lived below me – their first place too. I could never figure them out – she was beautiful, and seemingly always annoyed with the world. He was friendly enough, and wore enormously thick spectacles. I sometimes wondered how they ended up together.
I only lived there for about six months – I moved in during the summer with very little belongings. I can still remember boiling water in a saucepan on the first night because I had no kettle. I remember shopping for mugs, glasses, tableware and so on in a discount store in town – some of the coffee mugs survived until very recently.
The one thing I did have was books. My first major purchase was free standing wooden bookshelves from a shop in town. We still have them now – they will no doubt be handed down through the family for generations. I filled them with the colossal collection of books I had amassed throughout my life. I've always had problems letting go of books – I'm not sure why. I can't walk past a bookshop either – particularly a second hand bookshop.
When my future father-in-law came to visit, he stopped at the bookshelves and pointed out “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville.
“I've tried to read that several times, and never finished it”.
“Me too”.