Catherine Ormell

If a clock can be a household’s totem then we remain hopeful ours will show us an accurate blue moon before too long. In the meantime, we’re quite used to people asking (ineptly) What’s with its arrythmia and beaten-tortoise air? The much-polished answer is: uncertain timekeeping is remarkably soothing for the under-twenties, disposed to fantastical lie-ins, while visitors can’t help but declare themselves, either, leaping up horribly at its misdirection or, mildly trusting to its idiosyncratic version of the now. In or above the fray, our clock clucks on plying a number of desirable timezones with its deft black hands as oars.

She was considered the cleverest girl in the school, and deservedly so, and as such started the lower sixth with no trepidation, so who could not feel for her when she stretched back in her chair, casually, in a lesson-break on an autumnal afternoon, remarking, ‘Live long and prosper… that was Horace, right?’ There was a brief outbreak of disbelief then the boys’ eyes curled; they were on hand, forever after, chevaliers, free with the sign of the vulcan.

I don’t know why it’s become important to me: the idea of a theatre supper at home? Maybe it’s a methodology for life that after decades of practice we can make it what we wish it to be: modest yet appetising, practical yet with an element of excitement pending? After so many supermarket visits made on foot or online, when the whole scene palls, and there are queues at the local eatery and we feel we are just jades pecking at the window… then our new-found theatre supper gives us a clue via an authentic half-bottle and Jansson’s Temptation. We might actually go to the theatre this time. Or not. But at least we’d be homely, sitting in the kitchen, dazed by our handiwork, speculating on our next project.

I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob to his fly? His silence counts each snowflake; he is as secret as Switzerland. His strength gathers itself, cracks open his shoes, skitters through his jacket’s seams. Only his hands furl, last token of infancy, these he bunkers in his pockets.

An English peculiar, the -ish feeling comes from arriving at eightish, peckish, giving one’s hostess a warm kiss, at home among Leticia’s crowd, sardonic, lusty and brisk. Between the lettuce and the liquorice, I talk to an egyptologist who dabbles in hypnosis; intrigued, I let her practice, and see my parents farming radishes on a precipice... out of the mist I emerge ...then pish! my boyhood vanishes, my new friend’s turned to someone in financial services – do you know, they both summer in villas in the Tamarisk? Raptly they discuss the likelihood of a zombocalypse... my napkin slips away, I languish, familiar with the interstice between the skating plates, the pause before a conversational hit or miss, the heat and sweat of sheepishness.