Boiled Eggs #5
What I did and thought about from the 11-14th July 2026
11th July
Stayed up too late and drank too much wine at book club. Felt almost euphoric talking around the table as night fell. Talked about whether humans would keep making art if there was no struggle, then fell into a tangent about what even counts as ‘struggle.’ One of those winey conversations. K said she thought of herself as being ‘raised on diet coke’ which made me laugh so much for some reason. R showed up and I could tell E was happy to see him after ten days of dissertation hell and monk-like living conditions. Looked at pictures of R’s boujee bathroom. He’s renovated the whole flat with his dad’s help which I find so impressive bc I still mostly think of him someone who sleeps all day and orders milkshakes for breakfast even though that was eight (!) years ago now. Hard 2 grow up in the minds of friends! Though E says he still sleeps a lot. I wonder if he still has that lilac leavers hoodie that we used to make fun of.
Past midnight the conversation took on a confessional slant. Body image and weight and what a waste of time the whole thing is. K said she’d won awards for her work so why did her appearance still matter to her? Girls are good at these roundtable discussions – M said later he would never talk like that with his friends - though of course there’s a flip-side. Women (or at least me) get so bogged down in thinking that it’s hard to do anything … Werner Herzog, who is anti-therapy or as old people call it psychoanalysis, said:
“If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’”
M and I say that quote all the time (mostly because it’s fun to do impressions of Werner Herzog) but now I feel like I’ve repeated it so many times I half-agree. I find my self-therapising tendencies very irritating but it’s nice to feel the camaraderie of women and the sense that solving each others problems is not only possible but a group effort.
12th July
Dancing in the kitchen with M and I try to rile him up by saying that Pinegrove have two perfect songs but the rest are lame. It works – he takes Mega Umbrage and starts angrily counting out good Pinegrove songs on his fingers. I concede defeat but still feel like I’ve won somehow.
Had coffee and K’s hangover biscuits. M took a pic of a skin thing on his leg, but the pic made it look like a pic of his butt crack. I thought it was probably ringworm but google said eczema. Watched a video about the making of boiled sweets and genuinely found it interesting… what does all of this say about my life?
13th July
Packing for holidays and getting the flat ready for E and R to pet-sit Ted and Pinky. Made way too much pasta salad for book club and finishing it before we leave has become a millstone around my neck. M won’t eat the tuna kind but willingly finished the pesto. I hate wasting food to an extent that is irritating to other people. In the lakes I’m always making famous five-ish packed lunches the morning we leave; boiled eggs and cheese sandwiches etc. and E is like… ok but when are you going to clean the bathroom.
Told R that he’s not allowed to talk shit about my shower (needs regrouting so looks dirty) and he immediately replies that if he had known in advance, he would have been happy to re-grout it for me. He is so un-gossipy and useful as opposed to me, a huge bitch who doesn’t know how to do anything except make pasta salad.
Dad picked us up from the station because we’re flying early next morning. He wants to watch an old Jack Ryan film to prove they’re good after we decreed the John Krasinski remake charmless and uncompelling. JK (whose name I instinctively spell Kaczynski in homage to my brief but all-consuming obsession with the Unabomber) is unconvincing as an intellectual and Sienna Miller pissed me off by smoking fags in an unrealistic way. Patriot Games with Harrison Ford p. good.
14th July
Davy Small (West Linton’s best and only taxi driver) picked us up at 3am. SB once got a lift back from town with Davy after the rugby and drunk-texted G ‘I’m in Davy’s smallest taxi’ so that’s how we refer to the taxi which is actually huge. Had breakfast in All Bar One and Pie cried because she wanted fish and chips at 4am but had to settle for yoghurt and fruit.
On the plane the literal pilot budged in front of me in the bathroom queue. I was surprised he was using the pleb bathroom with the rest of us but don’t know what the alternative would be. Maybe peeing in bottles in the cockpit but that wouldn’t work for everyone.
Dad drove us to an apartment in Gialova in the hot hot car. Brown brush and dead grass and row after row of olive trees that shimmered in the heat. Looked for a corner shop to get supplies and ended finding a supermarket/coffee shop/boulangerie/beachwear supplier/booze and jeg wonderland called Martin’s ( immediately misremembered/rechristened as Marvin’s).
Man stacking water laughed at me in a leery way and I felt grumpy (tired and hungry) despite the wonder of Marvin’s. M and I ditched the rest of the fam to drink beer and swim. Both of us on the verge of being enraptured by good books (me Cormac McCarthy and him Hilary Mantel).
Out for dinner and walked past a bar playing the build of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead – she looks like the real thing - and felt imbued with feeling!!
At dinner explained that some words that have more than one meaning to Pie after M said he was a fan of her fan. She thought for a second and said, ‘bare like my bottom and also a bear’ which was clever although her bottom was, mercifully, covered in the restaurant.
Ate salty pistachio ice cream and played a game walking back to the hotel in the dark where we came up with rhyming couplets. Mum said ‘we’re going back to Thanos Village (name of apartments) to rape and pillage’ which was good but inappropriate for small ears.
R texted me cute pics of Pinky including one captioned ‘diplodocus mode’. He said E didn’t know what a diplodocus was and I texted back ‘women’ with a rolling eyes emoji and then immediately asked M what a diplodocus was.
