End of the summer holidays. Norman F***ing Rockwell, as Lana del Rey would say. Huge shoes and empty crisp packets everywhere. Wet towels on the floor, beds which never get made, sheets tangled in such a way that you can’t even imagine how they got slept in. All the good real estate on the sofa, stolen. Excessively long feet blocking the tv and a dog grab – but not ever when it comes to walks. The bomb that hits the kitchen between 11pm and 6am. Never enough milk in the fridge, too many hopeful vegetables, uneaten. And then they do something genius and completely unexpected like caramelise bananas for breakfast
It has been just so lovely having them around, these teens. Amidst the chaos and the piles of washing, glorious D&Ms, touching regressions (seriously, Minions, again?), unexpected fears shared. You cannot pin them down. Like twisters, they slip from your grasp, dancing up dust clouds in front of you
And then, the junk food. Never has food - or rather ‘food’ - been so accessible (and I write this in full awareness that in many parts of the world it is desperately beyond reach) for most of us, at least in this country. Grabbable, affordable, irresistibly crinkly bags of scran. Not real food, pretend food that is designed by Big Food to addict. I had intended not to allow it into our lives. But it sneaks in, doesn’t it?
I could, if I didn’t have to ever leave the kitchen, do better. I could roast yesterday’s pitta with rosemary and garlic, and toast seeds in soy. I could smash out crepes to order, and popcorn from scratch, dusting it with chilli-sugar-salt. What I can no longer do is pretend that an apple is more appealing than a packet of crisps. How do you fight it? The best I have been able to do this summer is everything on (really good) bread: torn bread roasted on rosemary whips, plums roasted with butter and sugar on bread, dates and peanut butter on toast – and still, far too many crisps.
Tomorrow, the house will be too quiet again, the fridge will fill again with lentils, and I will miss them, all the time.