de beauvoir arms
today, walking in the mist in mexico city, i wanted to go to the pub in london, near where i stayed with t that one time
it's called, what's it called, de beauvoir arms. i don't remember why it's called that, you can probably find out by googling it. actually lately i've been using duckduckgo, i'm trying to remove myself from google but i'm not sure what to do about maps
when you duckduckgo it you'll see photos as well. i won't look now, i'll describe from memory, from late december 2023 and early january 2024. t's birthday is late december and mine is early january and i thought, why not, so i went to london in the cold and the rain and the wind. the first place i had reserved on airbnb was an actual simulacrum, the image of a homey, comfy modern apartment. i took a vaguely racy photo there that i later posted on insta for my birthday
the cupboards were empty. when i arrived after a 14 hour flight i noticed a roach as i set down my yoga mat to stretch my body out. i thought, whatever. i went to meet t at work and when we came back and turned on the kitchen light there was the sound of dozens of roaches scurrying away. i texted the hosts and they said, oh we didn't know about that until the last person and i was like wtf you knew about this? and booked somewhere else, in a totally different neighborhood, a few blocks away from the de beauvoir arms. she had gotten a sudden cancellation and was thrilled to rent her place to me. she said, roaches, ew
later on my birthday we saw the philip guston retrospective at the tate. i loved it, i wish i had bought the book, and walking across the footbridge to have a beer - it's important to have a drink after looking at art, it's like a digestif, it's like a tea or a coffee, it's like tia kofi, you can just have tea i mean i like to drink but if you don't that's great. when i lived in new york i would go to the moma or the met or whatever and have a slice of pizza after
anyway walking across the footbridge there were these catastrophic winds, we took pictures of each other practically blowing away as we were leaving the museum, and as we walked across the footbridge t braced himself awkwardly against me and twisted his knee. by the time we got to the pub to have our pints of guinness and split a nonspectacular order of fish and chips, he could barely walk. we made it via public transit, he insisted, to the vietnamese restaurant where i don't remember what we had, i think we split chicken wings and had something else, something particular, was it duck? did we have duck and not chicken? we took an uber home which he insisted would be too expensive but it wasn't, it was like £9
at the pub, where we had already been a couple of times, there's a wide u-shaped area, more like a cantaloupe slice. where there are heavy wooden tables of various sizes. in the nook of the cantaloupe slice sits the bar, where there are a large number of beers on offer including flat, room-temperature, delicious ales, and wine. above the bar is the typical booze display and the menu. it's the kind of menu that makes you say to your friend, let's order a bottle of wine it'll be cheaper that way, but everywhere in london is like that as far as i could tell. i mean, the kind of place where you realize you're already spending more than you can so why not spend more
what did we eat? i don't remember, this was like 18 months ago. i think there was a fennel salad, fronds and bulbs, with some kind of crumbly cheese and something bright and pink, maybe pomegranate seeds or beets which i do recognize are two completely different textures and flavors. let's say pomegranate seeds because that sounds better. some kind of fish on toast with dill maybe. the last day i was in london, after t had hobbled off to work and i had a couple of hours to kill before taking a long uber ride to the airport, i had some kind of pasta that was pretty good. i think the food maybe didn't matter
what did matter was the heavy wooden tables. there were old friends, elderly couples, young couples, babies, foreigners like me. some people stayed for a beer and some people were there when i arrived and were there when i left. some people were eating, some people were drinking, some people were nursing their drinks while they worked on something or had a meeting or read a book. that's where i wanted to go today, to pass the rainy afternoon nursing a beer and dreaming into my notebook