Food for thought

Butternut squash, sweet potatoes, green and red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots: all are roasting in the oven. Wild rocket, spinach and watercress leaves sit in a salad bowl. Our son laughs with his mother in the bathroom. Our daughter watches a cooking programme on TV. The kettle boils, ready to accompany the rice on its eventual journey to our familial stomach. It is like a self-generating Grand Central Station in the kitchen. We went swimming today. On our way to the pool on the other side of the park - one of the lungs of the city as someone once put it - we stopped to watch the beginning of the race in which I thought my acquaintance from the war zone may be participating. If he was, I did not see him. In the pool, I noticed, we were pretty much the only people speaking our native tongue. There was many a consonant cluster used. At one point I lay on my customary back and stared up at the rusting beams as I floated like a leaf across the surface. In one arm our son was grinning away, safe therefore, and our daughter was tearing through the water in front doing the crawl. Unusually for her, the artist wasn't feeling up to a swim and I turned to watch her through the tall glass windows separating her from the pool. She was reading. Her head looked deep in thought and was part-obscured by the reflection of the people in the pool. It was like a bad collage made by a painfully bad artist. Most unbefitting. Anyway, I pulled our children across the pool again and listened to their laughter as I narrowly missed the other parents and children still caught up in their gushing waves of consonant clusters. These are precious moments, I was thinking. This is the peace zone. Here we make people welcome. And the gallerist returns tomorrow.