Fresh starts

"'Girls, girls, inestimably foreign (un-American / complex), Japanese girls'

So ran my line of thought having first arrived in Japan. I was dining out with friends in what I later came to know as a yakitori-ya, but to me at the time was simply a low-ceiling, smoky chicken-stick frying joint, beneath the tracks."


In a preface to a collection of his earlier work, John Cheevers remarks that his favourite stories of his own were, 'those that were written in less than a week and that were often composed aloud.' He remembers exclaiming, "'My name is Johnny Hake!'", following up, "This was in the hallway of a house in Nantucket that we had been able to rent cheaply because of the delayed probating of a will."

And why not compose aloud? And why not?

Everything starts small and grows.

So it was that I exclaimed, 'Girls, girls, inestimably foreign...' That's as far as I got. I had the beginnings of a beginning line and for me that was enough to be muttering into the early spring air.

This was walking back from Sainsbury's towards home with loose thoughts to make an apple chutney, to eat with a baked potato some day.