As a child, I was taught that when the Roman senate chose to name August after the emperor, Caesar Augustus decided to sweeten the honour by robbing a day out of February and sticking it on to the end of his new month. Like many compelling historical details, this fact turns out to be nonsense. The extra day was added long before that, for accounting purposes. It had to go somewhere, and August must have seemed a good idea at the time.
But with our holidays behind us, August is now beginning to feel at least a couple of days too long. Someone appears to have appropriated a bit of weather from February to pad out the month, too. Whenever I go abroad for an extended period, on my return to England I’m reminded that I am myself a foreigner, never entirely at home in this land of left-handed roundabouts and cold August rains. For the first few days after we get back, I always feel a strange sense of dislocation, of being too lightly tacked to the earth. I wander from room to room, restless and enervated at once.
“What are you doing?” my wife says, on my fourth visit to the kitchen.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What do you want to do?” she says.
“Don’t ask me things like that,” I say.
“I have an idea,” she says, sliding the cooking supplement out of the middle of the newspaper. “I could pick something at random from here, and you could go out and buy all the ingredients, and then make it for me for lunch.”
“I already don’t like this game,” I say.
“Coconut prawns,” she says, pointing. “Yes, please. And this to go with it.”
I scan down the list of ingredients for both her chosen recipes.
“No way,” I say. “Too hard.”
“Well, what else are you going to do?” my wife asks.
She leaves the room, and I start making a list on the back of some wrapping paper.
I get the middle one to accompany me to the supermarket, in exchange for as much junk food as he can fit in the trolley, to mitigate my sense of dislocation. I don’t mention that I’m feeling too lightly tacked to the earth, because I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you want to hear from your driver.
An hour later, I’m back home trying to grate a whole coconut, a task I find intensely irritating. The concave chunks don’t lend themselves to grating at all; it would be so much easier if the flesh were on the outside. I grate off a little bit of my finger. I knock a plate off the worktop, and it smashes. I burn the garlic. I make two lots of rice, having ruined the first.
The swearing and smashing noises coming from the kitchen keep everyone away. For three hours, no one comes down to the ground floor, not even when the smoke alarm goes off. There will be no help.
Finally, at 4.30pm, lunch is served.
“This is delicious,” my wife says. “Well worth the wait.”
“It’s not bad,” I say. “But it was also not, in any sense, worth it.”
This is not entirely true: my sense of dislocation has been eradicated by the ordeal of the coconut prawns.
“There’s an awful lot of clearing up to do, isn’t there?” my wife says, turning to survey the full sink, the stacks of dripping bowls, the turmeric-enchanced stain sprayed across the cupboards.
“Yes,” I say. “There is.”
She raises her eyebrows in a manner suggesting that a good cook is a tidy cook, that the task of producing a meal is not complete until the kitchen is returned to its former state. Yeah, right, I think: when August freezes over.
