M does tea time under the sea

My kitchen is L shaped and I sit on a child's blue chair (remnant from the sky blue study table my brother and I used to have) and read Ahad Soueif's "The Map of Love" while the pan boils a concotion of milk and water for tea. Kitchens are very therapeutic (which has inadvertently become the word of the year for me) and so are tea times. Kettles are average fare but panning tea gives the whole rite a flavour and aftertaste that makes you want to dust off your dreams and think about that book you are on the brink of writing.

I hit the Director my company today, yes the hot hyphenated one, when we were arguing about de-schooling. Rolled up the Liberty subscription form and smacked him hard on the thigh while we were arguing. He said "haan beta maro" (beta, imagine that, I die I die) and continued arguing. I hope they don't decide to block my tea supply. I hunted for trade unions but I think in the development sector you just pulpit about them, because honestly unions are so like last season, we are Pulpiteers hence M is screwed.

There is no point thinking, tongue probing, disguising, maneuvering mentally about concerns that I'm not going to move on or take a stance on in the next 12 hours. Needlessly draining time that I could spend watching sunsets or the moon shimmering through the vent in the kitchen. It makes me feel like my house is under water and suddenly boiling a pot of tea for tea time on the seabed makes up for a lot of things.

A true sign of my identity as a 'missionary child' is that my love for Christmas is equivalent to my love for the choti Eid and definitely surpasses anything I feel for bari Eid (not exactly the most favourite time of the year). I remember all carols, I loved Christmas parties and going to Mass and decorating trees and garlands of holly all over. St. Patrick's cathedral is quite beautiful, for the longest time I used to think I would not be allowed inside because I was a Muslim but then I started playing netball with the community over there one summer (and I became wildly fantastic at it, we were trained with six feet guys and by the time I went back to school clawing everyone out of my way was mere piffle) and I started visiting it. Echoed with sunbeams and oak. I haven't visited it since I graduated. I feel acutely uncomforable returning to my childhood and teenage haunts as if they judge me, may have something to do with the reinvention I posted about below.I think every child has this obsession with wanting to confess their sins to the Father and I used to try and do it, only Father was never there when I knocked else I may have been a pious chick today. Okay that's a lie, I would still be an air drill but I wouldn't feel guilty about it.

Please read Sherwood Anderson childun, I love his Winesberog, Ohio although I historically hate short stories. His writing style just smacks of techniques just speak for themselves, inspiringly, and you don't even have to constipate yourself into producing a literary critique to see it in Winesberg, Ohio and it is easy to see why he's marked out as the key catalyst for Hemingway's style.

This is an extract from his story "The Grotesques"
"All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful...
There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful...It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concern- ing the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."