let me tell you about my day - i don’t actually say this but I will tell - it’s nice to have someone to tell this to - i like coming home and there’s someone waiting and i tell him about my day - it’s a monologue of course – i tend to do that with conversations – i have so much to say – i go into minute detail – it’s unnecessary but he listens – patiently – you though i’ll tell you about my yesterday – it was a sunday – sundays – sundays i dislike – i stagnate on a sunday – they’re so dull and lifeless like the hair in adverts before shampoo – i sit sometimes and stare out my window – an artist’s hand could have drawn the tree i see out there – some of the branches stand up straight – scraggy apple tree leaves adorn them – the rest stick out with controlled randomness – i’ve not eaten any of its apples – its our neighbours tree really – she went crazy and the police took her away – we watched from the window as she lashed out at the fluorescent-vested officers – i suppose these things happen all the time – somewhere at least – my grandmother went crazy and the police took her away – she lives in a home now – never can remember my name any more – i had a coconut the other day – surprisingly difficult to eat – well to get into i mean – so hard-shelled – i couldn’t smash it inside – and apparently we don’t own a hammer – i tried a spanner but it didn’t work – so i took it outside – the coconut – and dropped it on the concrete a few times – that did the trick – split it apart – i brought it inside – worked at it – pulling apart the fissures in its shell – white flesh inside – and coconut water – there would’ve been but i already emptied that out into a shot glass – i tried it – it was bitter – it looked like semen – half-gelatinous – little white flecks of coconut floating around – i left it out on the table in that shotglass – for my housemates to find – they could draw their own conclusions – haha – i went out after and when i returned later the shot glass was gone – it wasn’t mentioned until a few days later – yeah – they thought it was semen – haha – i told them it was coconut water – i’d forgotten how good fresh coconut tastes – you mash it up in your teeth and its sort of creamy-milky – its nicer than a Bounty – yeah – i like Bountys – i don’t think a lot of people do – sure - some do – but i remember a couple of years ago when i was doing a-level english – we had this young teacher – thought she was down with the kids – well, she kind of was – but however much we liked her – she wasn’t a great teacher – she came up with this idea – a few years before our class – that once a week a lesson would be set aside for coursework – but to kind of take away the bitter taste of coursework one person from the class each week would bring in sweets for the whole class – well often as not it would be a box of celebrations – y’know those Mars celebrations – can you still get those – i suppose you only really notice them at christmas – but they’d all get shared out – and no one would want the Bountys – and we’d get a few picks each – and the Bountys were always left – so i’d always end up with like three or four Bountys and one of two other chocolates – the Snickers too – they were always left – but i’m not such a fan of snickers so i just used to take the bountys – i finished the last of my coconut yesterday – it sat in my fridge for a few days – the innards at least – i threw the shell – the pieces of the shell away straight away – well - the pieces i could detach – coconuts kind of have two shells – a sort of outer and an inner one – it’s easy enough to get the outer part off – and you can usually get the whole thing off if you jiggle about a sharp knife deftly enough – but sometimes the inside shell sticks to the flesh and you kind of have to gnaw the flesh away – scraping it against your teeth to fill your mouth with that creamy flaky mush – i suppose it’s like an orange – how that has the peel and then the pith – the pith always annoys me – i mean it’s edible – but it doesn’t really taste of anything and so it just detracts from the whole thing – and its a real bastard to get off – well sometimes it comes off in little sheets or strips – and then it’s okay – satisfying almost – like when you used to get PVA glue on your arms as a kid and then you could spend ages just peeling it off – there’s a bit of the coconut shell left though – its the top bit or maybe the bottom bit – it looks a kind of like a wooden skull cap – i’m not really sure why i kept that bit but it looks like it could come in useful sometime – maybe – i might buy another coconut sometime – they’re interesting – well for a nut – cos they’re not really like any other nut – they’re so big for a start – and then they’re apparently quite fatty – much more fatty than peanuts – not that i have to worry about that – but also they’ve got a lot more protein than any other nut – or fruit for that matter – and also less sugars – so i guess they’re pretty healthy – ha – you burn off enough calories just getting into the damn things to make them a healthy snack – i was going to make some gingerbread men yesterday – i haven’t made gingerbread men in ages – i used to make them with my mother before i went to university – we used to spend hours baking them up and decorating them – then eating them – i love gingerbread men – so i rang up my mother – well – i mean – she rang up me after i texted her because – well – i guess it’s kind of cheap but i don’t like spending money on phone credit – cos it’s not like you’re really getting anything – nothing physical i mean – so she rang me up and i got her to tell me the recipe and i wrote it down – then she started telling me about my step-dad and he’d gone out the night before – cos he plays gigs – hes a musician – and he plays these punk gigs all up and down the country – and he’d played this gig this night before and he’d stayed over at a mate’s house - and he hadn’t come back yet – and so my mum was kind of pissed because he hadn’t called – and he seemed to have started drinking again – i mean not like heavy drinking – like an alcoholic – but a while back he gave up drinking altogether – cos he had like these headaches and the doctor had given these blood pressure tablets which he’d refused to take – but he had stopped drinking – so now he was like a proper lightweight – and he always became more irritable when he was drunk – so my mother was annoyed – so then we talked about some other stuff and she asked if i’d remembered my step-sister’s birthdays – and i hadn’t – well i had – but i didn’t have their numbers – or at least up-to-date ones – because i’d not really needed to contact them – and they never went on facebook or anything – but i’d told my step-dad to pass on my many happy returns from me – so he probably would have done – so then we said bye – and i went down to the supermarket because there were some ingredients i’d forgotten to buy the day before – and it was raining – so i watched the rain – well i walked through the rain as well – but i watched it because it rained pretty much all day – and i thought about the miniature railway in the park – because it was the last day it would be running – because in this park near my house there’s this miniature steam railway where you can pay 50p and you can sit on the trains as they go round – and these old hobbyists run it each sunday and drive the trains – and they all have white mustaches – and some of them wear those old fashioned train driver flat caps – and they do this every sunday from april to the end of september – and this was the last sunday it was supposed to be running until they stored the engines away for the winter – but now that it was raining they wouldn’t be running it – and i thought that was kind of sad – because what if some little kids had been really looking forward to going on it one last time until the spring – they’d be disappointed – and life is really just full of disappointments – and especially when you’re a kid you feel them so much more strongly – well i suppose it’s a learning experience because everyone needs to learn to deal with disappointment – but still you kind of just want children to be happy because being a kid’s so great that nothing should ruin it for you – well i feel that way anyway – and also i was kind of disappointed because my friends were coming over that day – well they were supposed to be – and i was going to perhaps suggest we went down to the park – cos it’s only two minutes walk away – and i guess no one but me would have wanted to actually go on one of the trains – but we could have watched – and i like parks anyway – and i like taking walks in parks with people – and also i haven’t been on the trains yet – and i know i’d enjoy it – and i definitely would have when i was a kid – like i used to go on these trains at this park in Derby – but they were bigger trains – like you sat inside the carriages rather than on a long kind of bench – and it took you right to the other end of the park – i went on it last summer as well with my friend who was my girlfriend at the time – i still have the ticket somewhere – i think i put it in this book i have - for safe keeping and i’ll probably pick up the book sometime and it’ll fall out and remind me of that train – but i wouldn’t have anything from this train because i hadn’t been on it and i don’t think they give you a ticket anyway – still – maybe i’ll go on it in the spring – certainly not before – but even if it had been running today – i wouldn’t have gone up to the park on my own – and i doubt any of my housemates are particularly interested in going on it – and that’s the only way i could have gone on it – because my friends didn’t turn up in the end because their boiler broke down or something – well these things happen – like the other day my bike was stolen – and you never really think about these things – but they’re always happening – and sometimes it seems too much – y’know – because it can kind of bring you down – y’know – when there’s like another thing to do or to sort out – and a lot of the time you just want an easy life - like you just want things to work and you just want to pay the bills you owe and buy the things you want with the money you have left over – but things break and go wrong and then you have to fix them – and i suppose life would be boring otherwise and it’s kind of worth it for all the things we have – but still i was kind of disappointed – cos i was looking forward to them coming over cos they hadn’t seen our new house yet – and that was why i was going to bake the gingerbread men – but it wasn’t really anyone’s fault and i’d see them probably the next day anyway – or if not then then sometime soon – but still it was a disappointment – and then i didn’t end up making any gingerbread men – because - i like them – but where’s the fun in baking them up and decorating them all nicely and then no one’s there to appreciate them – so i kind of left the ingredients and went off to do something else – and my housemate was asleep most of the day because he’d had toothache the day before and he’d taken these painkillers – like two in the morning – because he always stays up late – and they’d pretty much knocked him out – but really he sleeps that late usually anyway – so i guess he just wanted an excuse – and he came into my room and i was sitting looking out of the window and thinking – and he asked when our friends were coming and i said they weren’t and he asked why and i said their boiler had broken or something and he was disappointed too and he went for a shower but before he went he asked if i still wanted to make gingerbread men and i said i didn’t because we’d save them for another day.

Tags: friends, Gingerbread, James Joyce, Modernism, Monologue, Sunday, Ulysses, visiting

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