Words

©  2007  Rose George

I finished reading yesterday. I started writing. I wrote 2000 words. I will when I get round to reading them again probably dislike most of them but that doesn’t matter. tomdr made me feel better yesterday by saying that he had read David Halberstam’s introduction to his The Best and the Brightest in which Halberstam says he put off starting to write for so long because journalists usually love to get on with the writing, but he didn’t want to because he was so fascinated by his subject, he wanted to keep on researching and on and on.

OK there is a bit of that, but also I procrastinate. Also there’s fear. Also an inability to put big important ideas (not usually mine) on a page in clear and prescient prose.

So anyway those words made me feel like I deserved a treat. (See how I procrastinate?) I decided to go out for dinner, for only the third time in 2.5 months here. We went to a little restaurant called Joug (yoke). It had a lot of yokes on the wall. Please no-one make jokes about yokes. I was looking forward to eating food that I hadn’t cooked. The waitress took an hour to take our order. She said, when she finally arrived, “Sorry for the delay but you said there were two of you and then you said there were five, and that threw everything out of kilter and that’s why there has been a delay.”

Everyone nodded and smiled except me. I said, “HUH?” I understand that three extra people (who were no surprise because I’d phoned to tell her half an hour before we arrived) could derail a carefully planned set meal. But in a restaurant with several menus, before the food has been ordered?

I don’t understand that. Pas du tout.

The food was good. We missed the village cake competition. Apparently the cake-fish (not fish-cake) won.

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