i’m all worded out.

these days the kid says, “tell me a story, from your mouth.” and sometimes the story that emerges sucks, and she kind of breaks eye contact for a second as if to spare me any embarrassment, and then asks for another. sometimes, the story is a tale of a bunny who goes up to the moon in a paper box rocket, and the moon is made of red jelly, and the bunny scoops some into a bowl and has it with the ice cream from the freezer on his rocketship, and the man in the moon comes out from behind his moon mountain and says that if everyone came and scooped up bowls of moon there would be no moon left, and the bunny feels bad and fetches a tub of pink yoghurt from his fridge and fills in the hole, and the moon man spends the rest of his days sitting in his comfy deck chair looking out at his little pink puddle, and the bunny decides he has had enough of an adventure and rockets back to earth to see his mum. and when the story is a success, i get to tell it maybe three or four times a day, two days in a row so far.

by two-thirty this afternoon, naptime, the quiet refuge i sought was at circle cafe. on a saturday. in the rain. so, silly me, circle was packed with a raucous late lunch crowd, which i mostly managed to tune out by reading david sedaris in the new yorker food issue — three great things rolled into one, no?

i had really wanted a bowl of soup, for the rain, and circle tends to do interesting soup, like chestnut, or french onion, instead of pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin. however, the interesting thing today was that there was no soup on the menu. so i had a mushroom, spinach and gruyere crepe, which arrived covering half the plate, a fat pillow with a lovely, frilly golden edge. the filling was different to what i expected, which was sharp, salty gruyere. instead, it was tempered by rather a lot of bechamel sauce, which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of mushroom-riddled stodge you want on a cold, rainy day. so yay. on the other half of the plate lay a salad of leaves, tomato, onion and olives, so perfectly dressed that it must have been tossed by hand, with love.

as i ate, the room gradually emptied, and by the time i was done, i was finally surrounded by silence.