23-26 June 23, Friday to Monday
This morning (the 27th) I wake up having had two items ticked off my bucket list over the weekend when I didn’t even realise I had a bucket list. My land-lady and best friend, Tracey, gave me a lift to Cornwall. No small matter. I had a last-hurrah! weekend planned for my pre-treatment summer, she decided she wanted to come too.
It was the thirtieth anniversary of the Tate Modern opening its cultural doors in St Ives. I’d never been to St Ives. I’d never been to a Tate (there are four of them). I’ve bought a few pantings from the Tate to mark different milestones in my Academic journey, so bought membership, thus the exhibition was free.
It feels like something inside me has changed. Something fundamental, important and deep. I booked accommodation. I’d take the train, my first journey on public transport on my own since 2014. My first ‘holiday’ since March 2015. In retrospect, I would have had no chance. The idea was ludicrous.
Trace, infinitely more sensible than me, suggests we stay in Padstow which makes the journey back an hour less. She has in mind somewhere she’d like to eat — no, she has in mind somewhere she thinks I’d like to eat — in Padstow. In a previous life I’d been to Rick Stein’s cookery school four, maybe five times. I’d stayed in his hotel and eaten in his restaurant, his chip shop, his cafe and of course the cookery school. I didn’t want to eat in Rick Stein’s.
‘It’s not Rick Stein’s.’
I cried.
I’ve never cried because I was eating food before. Maybe the atmosphere had something to do with it. Maybe because I was eating with Trace and it felt a bit like a relationship we don’t have but I wish we did and I miss. Maybe the overcoming difficulties both physical and mental to get here — and the heat. Maybe all those things contributed.
But it was the food.
This wasn’t just food I was putting in my mouth, this was an experience. You know how they say there are things you don’t know you are missing until you’ve tried it and the enormity of what you’ve been missing then hits you? Do they say that? Let’s pretend so.
I remember the line fromTop Gun, skirting copyright about Maverick’s ego making promises that his body couldn’t live up to (writing cheques). Well, I could get a taste, excuse the pun, for eating in Michelin Stared restaurants that my income — State benefits — can’t cash. Which, I think, is part of the make up of why I was crying. In circumstances like this — I’m no expert in the physiology of crying, other then to clean the eyeballs — crying comes about from a trigger, but the ammunition is a deep-down conglomerate of emotions. The hardest one to explain in these circumstances, the circumstances of restaurant experience and the writing about it, the hardest one to explain accurately and without misinterpretations, is related to cancer.
I’ve said a number of times out loud when talking about cancer, my reaction to cancer, to other people is that it is important to have long-term goals set because long-term goals implicitly imply I’ll be alive to see them to resolution. But, I suspect, these goals have to be set in some sort of belief system, not an intellectual exercise imposing thoughts onto a process. Thoughts don’t get enough into the me of me, into the process that is part the entropy of life, part of the resisting that inevitable entropy for as long as possible. The ‘thoughts’, beliefs, have to be as deep within me, way way below the surface level of thoughts, as deep as the existence of the cancer itself.
And here’s the thing. The deeper, sub-surface thing. This is the point of Ainsworth’s restaurant’s food. And not to just the food. Sitting here with this woman, this friend. On this weekend. Surrounded by restaurant staff, Alice, Jasper, Leon, Chelsea, Liam, Josh, who care. Who transgress the professional into the personal while knowing boundaries, who have knowledge, technique and experience and who tool these qualities as if they are natural. All this stuff, this stuff of life, is worth living for.
I like numbers. Ainsworth’s Number Six is now high, high up there.