What I ate for lunch

[squirmelia]

Spring was late that year and a walk around Southampton's Old Cemetery revealed feral, promiscuous and umbelliferous plants, according to the guide. I did not taste any solomon's seal, green alkamet, or lords and ladies, but I did taste sorrel and three-edged leek.

The day after that, I picnicked on food that was black and white, after reading about Oliver Sack's Case of the Colour-blind Painter. (The Colour-blind Painter, Mr I, apparently lost his sense of colour and decided to only eat food that was black or white.) Olives, yoghurt, wild rice, black turtle beans, squirty cream. Black food was trickier than white, since it tended to turn brown after cooking, where as some food that I had previously thought was white, suddenly looked too yellowy.

A few people wearing suits sat around a small table outside West Quay shopping centre, drinking glasses of wine, as part of the EAT Southampton festival. I had hoped they would be literally eating Southampton, chewing off pieces of buildings, chomping at the clocktower, but they were not eating anything, not even biscuit letters spelling out "Southampton" as had been previously advertised. Perhaps they were not hungry.

In West Quay itself, I saw the "moving plastic bag sculpture", which actually seemed to be a woman carrying a lot of plastic bags and sometimes hiding underneath them, so that only her legs were visible. She lept up from underneath the plastic bags after a teenage girl stamped on her foot and wandered around the shopping centre aimlessly, probably intending to shop no longer.

Comments

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I dunno - would they eat all of Southampton? What would you do after they ate your flat? After they'd finished would they go on to eat Eastleigh?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Would it just be all the buildings that they would eat? Or everyone and everything too, if they were that hungry?

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

If they're eating people, they might eat each other as well. In fact, could that be what happened? It would explain the lack of visible eating.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

There were a few empty seats, it's true. Obviously the people were so full up after eating each other that they could not manage to eat the buildings also.

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

Sophie Calle, following a prompt from Paul Auster, had a week when each day's food was entirely of one particular colour.