As usual yesterday I went swimming. Since I have my phone on nearly 24 hours a day, sometimes it's a relief to turn it off for an hour or so while I go swimming. Maybe it's an ego thing, I can imagine people are wanting to get in touch with me. I don't know.
Anyway, the mood I was in before I went swimming had more or less lifted by the time I had got out of the pool. I turned my phone on to a message from San telling me that her friend Kris was over, along with some people called Eric and Mo, and I should come over. I then got an almost identical message from her a second time (she probably couldn't remember if she sent it the first time, since she got no reply) and when I answered her she told me again to come over.
It turned out Eric and Mo were her friend Maureen and her boyfriend Eric, who we had met briefly before one time. I remember that we had been meant to go out with them for a drink, but they opted to stay in and get stoned instead so we gave it a miss.
San was bugging me that they were hungry and wanted to go eat, and since I wasn't sure how long I would be getting back (I had to wait for a bus) I told her to go on without me and I would catch up with them later. I figured I'd just spend the evening on my own. But the bus arrived, and they waited for me, and we all headed out to a Mexican restaurant in the city center.
It must have been a good restaurant, because they had no tables. So we went to a Tapas restaurant, who told us it would be an hour and a half before we could get a table. But as we stood outside in the cold discussing what other options were open to us, the manager came out and told us if we still wanted a table one was just leaving and we could have it.
It felt like being on holiday.
The restaurant was of course dark and mostly lit by candles in wine bottles on the tables, and as we talked I imagined that the traditional Spanish music was being played by a real band and we were in a Mediterranean country. I told San how good it would be, there would be windsurfing and rock climbing and hiking and snorkelling -- even if she didn't like the sound of any of those things.
Kris, San's friend, had given us each pictures. These pictures are hard to describe, but they were roughly hashed images of messy lines and we were to write whatever we wanted from the pictures. So I wrote descriptions of what I saw -- a man fighting with a demon, a bride standing over her dead groom, a couple waltzing like in Jack Vettriano's painting "The Singing Butler", but since they had no feet they seemed insubstantial as ghosts.
Me and San would swap pictures and read each others interpretations -- what she saw as a soldier walking home along a mountain path I saw as a prostitute walking along a deserted road.
It was a night to forget yourself. To forget that tomorrow morning I am missing classes in shorthand and public affairs to meet up with a mediation service in hope of getting a story for Tuesday's news page.
It's now a cold and grey Sunday afternoon. I should perhaps go home and get a fresh towel and dry shorts to go swimming again today, maybe then I can kick these blues.
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