Midnight Feast
Last night we had a midnight feast…
We didn’t set out to have it, unlike Kasia’s birthday which we celebrated a week after Jan’s, and unlike the dinner we’ve planned for Sunday week for no other reason than it seems like a good idea - and Gail and Jan have been nagging about it.
Since Kasia’s birthday, she’s been to Belgium to visit her parents (her Dad works there and her Mum had gone for a holiday), Jan went home with Leti to receive his Degree, and Gint went home for nine days to Latvia. It was this latter event which serependitiously triggered our midnight feast last night.
Gint arrived home late last Monday night and had to go straight to work on Tuesday morning. By last night he was so tired that he went straight to bed and only woke up at midnight to get something to eat. I had gone to my bedroom around 10pm to work on e-mails for the flood campaign, and came out to check that everything was locked up for the night when I discovered Gint in the kitchen. I had hardly seen him since his holiday so sat down to hear about his travels and, of course, he insisted that we try a bottle of something that was balsamic and herbal and 45% alcohol. I had enough sense – or cowardice – to say ‘no’ to this but instead started grazing my way through the chocolate sweets filled with liqueurs that he had also brought back from his trip.
Then Jan arrived in and joined Gint at the drink – just to be sociable – with the occasional foray into the chocolates – just to be sociable. He was swiftly followed by Kasia, finishing her late shift at the hotel, who spat out the balsamic drink saying it reminded her of medicine her mother used give them when they were small, but was easily tempted by the chocolates.
By then it seemed like an awful pity that Alba had come in and gone to bed before Gint’s emergence from his slumbers so Jan and Gint went up and woke her to come down and join us. She was on antibiotics, she announced, and couldn’t drink, but the chocolates…
At two o’clock in the morning we finally all went back to bed, having decided it was just a little too early for breakfast. I’ve still only the vaguest notion of what Gint did on his holidays, but the bit I heard was interesting enough to make me want to hear more. He visited someplace that was sacred to the Druids, if I got it correctly, and I think it was in the middle of a forest where the birds didn’t sing, and there was something in there about hollows lined with stones, and as soon as I get to sit down with him over a mug of tea I might get it right yet…
It will have to be soon. Kasia’s going home to Poland on Sunday for a few days – where she’ll again see her parents – and Alba is finally getting to go home to Spain for her holiday at the end of September. And on Sunday I spent the evening in my niece’s home in Ashford at a family get-together. They had just returned from a holiday in the Appennines in Italy, and we saw slides of the most fabulous scenery imaginable.
All their stories of their travels are being woven in my head against the background to a wonderful book I read last week, which was set in Nova Scotia and is called ‘The Birth House’, and through the descriptions of Jenni Diski travels in Antartica (and in her head), which I’m totally absorbed in at the moment. These two books – and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Fr. Brown’ stories, which I was re-reading in the middle – formed another kind of midnight feast for me, this time for my imagination.
Sometimes, though, I think it needs to go on a diet just as much as my body. Does anyone know how you can tell when your imagination has become obese?.