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Was out last night. Met up with the speed-dater at Hu Tong Dumpling Bar. Had a wonderful meal. Chinese dumplings are a wonder of God, though with the seed of something deliciously decadent in them. I can't eat a dumpling without thinking of sex in some way. It's the slippery, sticky dumpling slicked with sauce that explodes with tasty sensation in your mouth. More, more you think, yes, yes, as your chopsticks slip and slide trying to grip the moist parcel of pure delight.
So, the dumplings were good - especially the chicken dumplings in chilli sauce. Then we had beef with chilli sauce, which arrived in a large bowl full to the brim much too much for two people. Chilli seeds floated in the oily residue in which chunks of beef were visible, stained a deep red by the chilli. The SD later claimed it was the hottest dish she had ever eaten. I wouldn't say the same, but it was warm. My mistake was to not drain the oli off before transferring to my bowl. The oil was fiery. It was enjoyable though.
We had a couple of glasses of wine before deciding a Tsing Tao was a good option to accompany the beef - as well as some water. We talked throughout, haltingly sometimes - she is a little shy - but more fluent as the evening went on.
I suggested a night-cap afterwards and so off we toddled to the Gin Palace for a gin sitting in one of the comfortably upholstered chairs. The conversation opened up here. The alcohol had loosened the SD up and relaxed her inhibitions. The conversation took off in pleasantly unpredictable directions, just as it should when two people become comfortable and familiar with each other.
Getting to know someone there is almost always a starchy formality to begin with as each advances along predictable and socially accepted avenues. There is question and answer and the conversation runs in a linear direction. It is only when you feel more relaxed that the conversation opens up.
So sitting in the Gin Palace the conversation opened up. It was fun. It was good to see her like that. As always I remained unffected by what I had drunk - it takes a lot more than that to get me tiddly - but it was fun to sit back and let the conversation flow and to watch her settle into her role.
We parted a little after 11. I got home with the familiar preference of staying up. I flicked the TV on and sat on the couch. Rigby, glad to have me home again, climbed up to take his regular position beside me, his head in my lap. I watched the end of the cricket and then flicked over to watch the tail end of Henry and June.
This was the right movie for the moment. The earthiness of their desires was refreshing and stimulating. I understood the need to express the keen edge of feeling in the sensual act, whether it be teasing restraint or out and out dirty rooting. This was the stuff of life, the stuff that Henry Miller lived by, wrote about, the stuff he scandalised the world with in his time by writing about the act and the undying desire that led to it as if no-one ever had before. Few had actually, though pretty well everyone with any life in them knows what it feels like. It just wasn't written about - until Henry.
I read his books in my early twenties. There's a whole bunch of literature that almst cliche for the young man 'finding himself' as I was, and many do, in the years not long out of school. Sartre and Camus are classics of that young man genre, but so to is Henry Miller. Between the lot of them they encompass the mind and soul, they explore the existential pangs of anyone looking to find their feet and provoke reaction and thought. And of course the body is not forgottten, nor the slow ache of sensual longing, nor indeed the more raucous demands of sexual desire - all familiar, like it or not, to a man in his first quarter century. Not much has change really, except the fire has diminished from a roaring blaze that consumed everything in its path to a warm and everpresent glow of red hot embers in the bed of the expired fire.
Watching I felt myself stir at the sight of the petite and demure actress who played Anais Nin, she with a fire burning inside of her. Well, I wanted a piece of that. That's a good part of life - why would you deny it? I felt that and watched and found myself looking at Paris in the thirties as if it were a place I could never know - which is true. Paris I love, and much of what was depicted on screen was familiar in some way; but likewise there was such particularity of moments that equally it seemed a place I could only peer in at as if my TV was a window to another time and place. The cloudy pernod, the rain tumbling down, the thick French coffee poured into a bowl, the heavy woollen suits and beat-up hats. If only I could travel back and be part of it I thought. Not to be, and so I went to bed.
