Julia and Frank come to dinner

Today Grant announces that he wants to go to the Borough Market.  I ask why and he says he wants to get some raw milk and he has a lead - the Borough Market - a historic market that has gone very gourmet. There is a new process that shoots milk through a filter to catch all the tubercular and other germs without the need for the insensitive heating process, which wreaks havoc with the savour of the milk.  Somehow I find I can’t care much and what I really want is a day without tourism or quests.  I want to lie on the big bed with a coffee and read a nice thriller.  I want a gentle lead in to cooking coq au vin for Frank and Julia who are coming to dinner tonight.  For simplicity’s sake I refer to them as my step-parents to our landlady who asks who is coming to dinner.  I realize then that it is probably quite a complex process to acquire two step-parents but what the hell – I love them both and the dinner has got to be nice, especially as Frank is almost always painting and when  he’s not he likes a quiet night at home.

Grant leaves and I start with the first part of my plan, an inventory of ingredients, quail eggs, smoked salmon, brandy for flambéing the chicken, a leek and bacon and a bottle of red wine which will turn the chicken purple. Nothing missing so I don’t need to go up the little gravel walkway past the Christadephian meeting hall and through the three locked iron gates to the wild world of the Blackstock Road.  Peace is mine and I make a cup of coffee and pile up the pillows.

As I might have mentioned before staying at Air B and B places is a different from staying in an impersonal hotel where the customer is just that. But its not quite like staying with friends who like you and can forgive any little peccadilloes.  Your  Air B and B hosts always greet you welcomingly but the smile is underpinned by wariness. Who are these people we are letting in to our nice place? We smile too and hope that we come up to scratch as guests.  There is a lot of smiling.

I go towards the bed and its spotless white quilt cover and some gremlin makes me trip and coffee goes over everything, quilt, pillows, the lot.  It’s awful, but at first I think confession is my best option. Nobody is in the big house so I resort to rinsing everything and draping the place with wet linen.  Not a cool look for the little bistro I hope to transform the studio into, in now,  less than three hours.  I have a go with the hair dryer but it’s hopeless.  I can’t leave and go to the launderette because Grant has the keys to all the gates and the front door.  I decide to ring him in my despair and do so.  His peculiar ring tone sounds and I think who the hell is ringing Grant at this particular moment until I realize with phones at either ear that of course it’s me and he’s left his phone behind.

Considering everything, the perverse induction cooktop that beeps and turns itself off from time to time, the peril of flambéing the chicken with the smoke alarm ready to go off and the need, mostly psychological, to have a go now and then at hair drying the linen, the chicken comes out nicely.  Grant comes home with the keys and is mellow from shopping and sympathetically takes the wretched quilt cover to the launderette to dry.

Then it’s as if the gods of travel think I have been punished enough for not padding about London in the proper way.  Frank and Julia arrive and are charmed by our little place and we have a really nice time.  We do our special family ritual involving aquavit and beer and looking each other in the eye twice over.  We all relax and relish the time and the place and the food and wine.  Frank tells us all about his early years working in a bakery and we all agree that Fortnum and Masons is no bloody good any more and I think what fun it is to be with them.

 I have a revelation.  Even though Frank is only fifteen years older than me he has always been a sort of father figure, and like any little girl I have wanted to please and impress.  Even up to this afternoon.  But now I realize that tonight we are all in the same age bracket called elderly.  Me and Grant in our seventies, Frank and Julia in their eighties.  We are collaborators in the war against deterioration of our minds and bodies.  We are all players in the comedy called Old Age and we are able to laugh.

The evening ends and we want to walk them to their car which is parked in their zone and not ours because of the complexity of the parking machine system in London these days.  They refuse but we insist. Its nice - me and Julia merrily arm in arm, Grant and Frank discussing life behind.  We hug goodbye and leave Julia to do her U turn.   I have a sense of change in myself.  It has taken me seventy years but I feel I have at last grown up and am not a nervous daughter any more.   Just an old friend.

And I did confess about the coffee in case there were any spots left. “These things happen,” said our landlady and all was well.