The journey home from my new office is extremely dangerous.
I have to go through Victoria station, which has not one, but two Burger Kings that I have to walk past without going in and buying chili cheese bites. After a week at my new job, I am unhappy to report that I have failed at this task over 50% of the time. I can hear them calling out to me as soon as the clock starts inching towards 5.30 p.m., so much so that I can’t concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing. I need to buy blinders or something. And since I’m now getting paid (‘paid’) hourly, it’s impossible for me to not divide every expense into how many minutes of work it costs. Suffice to say it takes me much longer to work off six chili cheese bites than it does for me to consume them (top speed of 90 seconds).
It’s funny how your habits change when you live in a different place. Over the last month I’ve realized that when I live in England, it is apparently impossible for me to have a meal that doesn’t end with some kind of chocolate – excluding, of course, breakfast, because I’m not a psychopath. Except in December, because who cares what happens in December. At the Co-op near my house (also, sadly, on my way home) they have those chocolate puddings that everyone else aged out of when they were 12, the ones with chocolate yoghurt on one side and little pieces of Flake on the other, and they’re 3 for 2, perennially, forever and ever. Say less.
I didn’t do this in New York. Partly because they don’t sell this kind of pudding (and one encounter with Swiss Miss’ attempt at chocolate pudding was more than enough), but I didn’t replace it with anything. I just… stopped doing it. And then as soon as I got back to London, almost without even realizing, I started buying them every day. On my old London commute, when I lived in Finsbury Park, I one day started buying a tiny carton of pineapple juice, which I would inhale before the train had even pulled into the station. Why did I drink the pineapple juice? What void was it filling in my life? And what now fills that void, now there is no pineapple juice? The chili cheese bites and chocolate pudding are a vice that belongs to a whole different time of day, so it’s not that. Cigarettes? Probably.
It makes me wonder what other dormant habits are going to reveal themselves as I settle back into my London life, somewhat changed but the same in a lot of ways. I can only hope they’ll be as innocuous as Burger King, but I fear they probably won’t be.
I think I’m a different person in London than I am in New York. Unfortunately I don’t have a control group of people who can confirm or deny this, as my friends have only seen me in one or the other. In New York I think I was more reckless, louder, more annoying, probably, and more given to gigantic swings in temperament, from soaring highs to plunging lows. Here, everything is just kind of fine. I feel calm. I go swimming and I feel calm. I go to the pub and I feel calm. I eat my chocolate puddings and I feel calm. The performance switch in my brain has been switched off, maybe permanently. I almost miss her, that bawdy, boisterous girl who would drink a bottle of wine a night and shout at people on street corners. Where did her spirit go? Is she buried somewhere? Will she only show her face again once I touch down at JFK (please god someday soon). Ha, I almost went back and capitalized the word god then, before realizing that implies that I believe in the concept. See, how much more afraid I am here of causing offence? Word hasn’t put a red squiggly line under it though. Did you know Word is an atheist? Word can have a capital letter.
I always criticize my Dad (not to his face, obviously) for being weak because he turned into a completely different person once he divorced my Mum and married my ghoul of a stepmother. But is it weakness, or adaptability? Am I weak for allowing my surroundings and the people that populate them to change how I behave, even in ways that are only perceptible to me? I remember I could always tell who my Mum was on the phone to by how quickly she would switch into her Scottish accent when she heard who was on the other end. It would go out like a light the second she hung up and she would speak in what I considered her ‘normal’ voice again. Does that mean she wasn’t being herself around us? Or was the broad Scots where she was performing? And which one am I? How will I ever find out?
Maybe I need to go somewhere between the two and see what happens. What’s between London and New York? Oh right, the ocean. Lol.
One good thing:
This didn’t happen this week, but since the topic of chili cheese bites has come up, and since I hope it never darkens this newsletter again, I’m going to tell my favourite story that concerns them. Because there is, actually, more than one happy story that involves them. But this one is better.
I was on my way home from a ski trip in New Hampshire with some friends and we decided to hit Burger King partway through the seven-hour journey. I had recently introduced most of them to chili cheese bites (possibly on the journey to New Hampshire, I don’t remember) and they were all as obsessed as I was. Except my one friend who I think was just playing along. I didn’t think it would require a Brit to introduce an American to deep fried cheese, but whatever.
We went to the drive-thru and went around the car announcing our orders, the driver relaying it one item at a time to the speaker box. Something like:
‘Okay so we want a number one… a large Coke, and six – no eight chili cheese bites – right? Right, then two number sevens with fries and eight chili cheese bites, then we want six chili cheese bites, then a Whopper with fries and four chili cheese bites, then another eight chili cheese bites…’
Etcetera. The kinder thing to do, especially since the Burger King in this remote stretch of New Hampshire was fucking popping off, and there was a huge line of cars behind us, would have been to collate how many chili cheese bites we wanted, and announce the final tally. That unenviable task fell to the speaker box, which said, at the end:
‘Okay, so y’all want – 42 chili cheese bites?’
The driver did a head count.
‘No, 48.’
After what seemed like hours, our gargantuan order was ready. We parceled out the food, but realized we were down one bag of bites. We debated whether or not to question it – the speaker box had seemed pretty harried – but no-one was willing to give theirs up, so my then-boyfriend went inside to report the issue. On his re-telling, what he found was two middle-aged women running the whole Burger King by themselves, one woman on the till, and the other standing in a knee-deep pile of swept-up French fries, screaming, ‘Christine! We can’t go on like this forever!’
One bad thing:
All three of my housemates have Covid, while I continue to dodge it like a ninja. So not a bad thing, I guess. Okay also the kitchen sink broke so we’re washing dishes in the bath, with masks on, trying not to breathe on each other. That’ll do.