As Uncle Wally is fond of reminding us, all our actions and non-actions have their consequences, and if you push him he’ll give you to understand in extremely blunt terms, there is no such thing as uncomplicated anything, let alone “screwing”. When you come to think about it what better berg-werk is there! We plough the fields and scatter. We long for consequences. We long not to be left alone, penniless and forlorn.
‘Good,’ he says, ‘very good’, satisfaction adding light to his heavy features. Mind you, I can hardly see him in my myopic dream. I know he’s here somewhere, guiding, prodding, and maybe it’s that I imagine his satisfaction. At moments like this I have to feel myself into a blurred world – into and through – there’s food, I know that much, but most of it’s gone and a car I’m in is accelerating madly out of a roundabout which seems crazy to me because the next roundabout is only a hundred meters ahead.
And do you know the pasta is rarely perfect; perfection is merely an accident in the spectrum of overcooked and undercooked. As she never tires of telling me, she’s got better things to think about, if you want perfect pasta, cook it yourself. The glint in those black eyes of hers dulls as she sees through the misty myopia of the present into a future that I’ve no intention of checking whether or not includes me.
After all, I say to myself, there’s work to be done.