I was in a bookshop the other day, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words I will never read and great areas of thought I’m not destined to tangle with.
My head was spinning: biographies, autobiographies, classics, modern classics, fiction, nonfiction, travel, psychology, sociology, anthropology, mindfulness (shelves groaning under the delicate weight of mindfulness), poetry, plays, anthologies, anthologies of anthologies, more mindfulness, illustrated mindfulness, pocket-edition mindfulness, don’t-mind-me mindfulness, diet books, yoga books, Pilates books, cookbooks.
Then there were the three-for-twos and the two-for-ones. And, finally, the one I had come in for: a great big tome, a doorstep of a thing, a book that most certainly weighs more than Calista Flockhart but would possibly look a little bit silly in a halter-neck.
I was about to pick it up (with two hands and a shovel) when it occurred to me that I didn’t actually have the stomach for an elemental, irreducible, dark and disturbing postmodernist moral universe in which spiritual salvation does not exist. It hadn’t been that long since breakfast.
I wanted to slink out of the bookshop, with my splintered resolve and my unspent euro, and nip next door to indulge a sudden and ferocious impulse to buy a tub of unbleached coconut oil instead of the critics’ choice. Coconut oil, I reasoned with myself, would transform my life in ways that near-hypnotic, hyper-realistic literature possibly might not.
Coconut oil is all the rage (or at least it was – I’m a bit tardy when it comes to rages). As instructed on the tub, I’m going to cook with it, spread it on my toast, comb it through my hair, rub it into my knees and feed it to the cat. I may even spoon dollops of it into the grimy bath.
Cold-pressed coconuts
You think skinny Calista is the only one around here who can look alarmingly waif-like? Just wait until you see me after a month on those cold-pressed coconuts. Pungent maybe, but positively lissom.
Anyway, I was just about to walk out the bookshop door when I heard a woman call: “Oh, Piglet, let’s buy this, will we?”
Piglet? Who’s she calling Piglet? She wasn’t talking to me, was she? Having spent the summer with my decidedly unlissom ass in a chair, crouched over a steaming keyboard, snacking on lumps of dry granola and anything else requiring zero preparation that I could mindlessly swallow, I am feeling a little . . . uncomfortable, sure. But Piglet?
I sidled, a tad ungracefully, over to see what the young woman thought Piglet should purchase, to see what slim volume she had plucked from the shelves.
Transforming tome
It turned out to be a book of gin recipes. “Chicken with gin and junipers,” I read over her handsome shoulders. “Gin and egg sauce. Duck in gin and lavender.” This little book could transform one’s outlook in ways that an entire bunch of coconuts never could.
“Piglet?” she inquired again, looking past me at a vaguely handsome man (if that preppy, pink-polo-shirt-and-loafers kind of look is your thing).
To be fair to the man, he didn’t look at all like a piglet. He looked solvent. He looked like someone who had a drawer full of tennis whites and at least one wetsuit. He looked like a man whose mother tasted the Sunday gravy, in a nicely ironed apron, while he uncorked the claret, adding just a splash before she poured it into the gravy boat. He looked like a man who knew that life was for living, and that opportunities were for grasping, and that girlfriends who called you Piglet were jolly, reliable creatures, good sports.
In short, he looked like a man who wouldn’t waste his valuable, well-oxygenated time on irreducible narratives and tubs of ethically sourced monkey food.
Predictably, Piglet thought the gin book was a lot of fun, and the couple trotted up to the till with it. I watched them depart, watched their easy confidence, his tanned hand on her broad, well-dressed beam.
I wonder why he’s nicknamed Piglet. Maybe he snorts. Maybe he has a cute little curly tail under his chinos. Maybe her nickname is Wolf, and they met through a dating app for people who like to enact woodland scenes from fairy tales. Maybe she blows his house down.
Sod the coconut oil. I picked up one of the mindfulness manuals. You will be pleased to hear I’m going to clear my head of dross. Quiet the mind.