Love as attention

A beautiful anniversary day that didn’t quite deliver the connection of our kitchen table

Five o’clock, and the room was already filled with expectation and intention. Another couple sat close by, also marking their anniversary, we were all seated for the earlier, lighter tasting menu and we both got a card wishing us best wishes from the chef.

Carl had managed to get us a table at an unprecedentedly high-end restaurant, and it felt very special to celebrate at Gauthier Soho, eating beautiful food created by a chef whose ethics we’ve long admired. We were presented with seven courses, mostly tiny, four with the option to pair with an alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink. I chose non-alcoholic, Carl had beer. I considered the wine but was entranced by the thought and creativity that had evidently gone into the homemade non-alcoholic options, designed to complement the food with a movie’s worth of thought on what would best combine with what and be experienced when. It didn’t disappoint.

Excuse the shadows on the drinks menu photo above!

The drinks were fascinating and delicious to taste, although, along with the savoury lolly ice to start, added a touch of froideur to an already well air-conditioned room. We had bustled up the stairs to the dining room feeling excited and hot from our walk but I grew a little chilly as the meal progressed, in temperature only. The staff remained approachable and warmly attentive throughout, more than making up for my not having an extra layer to hand. Our table was small enough that we were seated side by side rather than opposite one another – an accident of space rather than design; whoever sat with their back to the room would have been in the servers’ way. But it meant we both faced forward rather than each other, watching the plates arrive and the small and very welcome performance built into each course. We talked less than usual, perhaps because our table had arranged that our primary attention was paid to the meal and the servers. Or perhaps it was just that we were a little in awe of the creativity and deliciousness of the offerings.

Our date, tentatively hatched a week before and arranged by Carl was part of this year’s intent to build space and connection for ourselves as a couple outside of parenting.

Earlier that day, we had walked from Waterloo to Piccadilly and it had been an a hot walk in heavy human traffic and sensory overload. The usual route closed, we crossed the pedestrian bridge. Finding the internal route at the other end also blocked, we funnelled into narrow diversions made worse by further refurbishment, extensive and simultaneous work on properties and roads, and fellow travellers’ impatience, barging past in both directions. Carl commented as we walked, noting how much the area had changed, how alienating it now felt, the lack of consideration given to people navigating the barriers and seemingly random obstacles created by buildings and roads, all in mid-repair, the pavement never quite where it should be.

The most challenging bit, however, was Trafalgar Square – St George’s flag-waving evangelists preaching over booming speakers on one side, and on the other a protest with a row of nooses, representing the unbearable weight of lives lost under a foreign regime. We flinched as we hurried by. When we finally made it to the museum – hot, flustered and decidedly overstimulated, we were keen to retreat from the heat.

We both felt the stark contrast from the bright sunshine outside to the cool, cave-like low lighting of the exhibition itself where light shined only on each treasure in an otherwise almost gloomy, low-lit room. Seeing the exhibition in person, we understood The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke painting’s true size.

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke – so much better in real life than in this photo

We’d seen it in our book at home plenty of times but it was only in person that we realised how small the painting is. That the daisies are life-size and the fairies so genuinely tiny, makes their exquisite detail and the apparent weight of their fully-fleshed beings living their lives unseen all the more magical.

Visiting the Richard Dadd, Beyond Bedlam exhibition at the RA was also Carl’s idea. He had already gifted me Dadd well over a decade ago. Reading an early draft of my novel – a magical realist world where fairytale creatures and subjects from my protagonist’s art tangled up with reality in her mental unravelling – he made the association and told me about him. I was inspired, making my protagonist a devotee of his work, looking up to him the way you look up to someone who can guide where you’re heading, albeit blind to the threat. It fit. It might have been a bit on the nose that his name was Dadd and coincidentally she was estranged from her father, but I wasn’t going to be swayed against it for that.

Back outside the museum, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was reproduced to a vast banner size. I commented on how size reduced its magic, losing what made the real picture extraordinary. I turned to Carl as I spoke but he’d left my side, gaining ground ahead.

A little further on stood a building on the other side of the road whose beauty I don’t remember properly clocking before – ornate stonework, sculpted figures, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours.

Source: Oxyman

I’d been coming to the Royal Academy since childhood, and more recently for the Rose Wylie exhibition with a friend and co-facilitator. I drew Carl’s attention as I was amazed at the artistry and money that had funded that building. It’s unlikely that its equivalent would be made again. I couldn’t get his attention and asked if we could slow down, walk together rather than apart. He turned on me – not loudly, but sharp, already defending himself before I’d finished asking. Later he’d explain he felt responsible, the one meant to know this part of London, adjusting in real time to how much of it he no longer recognised. In the moment, I didn’t intuit the context, I just felt him pull away, and felt something in me pull away in turn – feel less connected, a little sad and a smidge resentful, trailing him through the crowd like a stalker rather than a date. Carl later said he at times felt the same, when I veered away from him.

Later, seated at our restaurant table, we turned our attention from the loving detail in the Still-life with Gooseberries, Raspberries, Red Currants, Spring Onions, a Gherkin and Foliage (geez, what a title! Sounds more like a shopping list but it takes nothing away from the magic of the artwork itself) to the exquisitely crafted menu before us.

Gooseberries, Raspberries, Red Currants, Spring Onions, a Gherkin and Foliage

Reflecting on our day, we both want to visit more galleries together and spend time making food to delight ourselves that we can enjoy with presence around the table. But in terms of connection and closeness, our anniversary date fell a little short of the shared fun at our own kitchen table just the week before when we trialled the arts-based prompts for the forthcoming week’s Wednesday Write Together. It had started out a bit bumpy with Carl wanting the structure held exactly as promised, no shifting the prompts partway – needing to know where he stood before he could let go into it. Tricky when this was my trial process and was still working it out. Once he got in flow, painting his mother, then writing from it, he arrived somewhere unguarded – memories surfacing he hadn’t expected. And I had a very scrappy expressive sketch of my whirling dervish of a daughter with the following accompanying poem:

Ten minutes, done in fits and starts between explaining the exercise to the group, checking in,
coming back to my own page — the painting makes sense to no one but me.

She’s a whirlwind, her drive, her passion, the hunger to learn

exploring multiple paths – who she is, what she believes

part of her wants to know the end of the story before she writes it

a romantic seeker, she embraces each moment

Exploring multiple paths – who she is, what she believes

in nature, getting to know her own, and others’

a romantic seeker, she embraces each moment

nestled among mountains of books, she likes to collect, read and re-read

In nature, getting to know her own, and others’

part of her wants to know the end of the story before she writes it

nestled among mountains of books, she likes to collect, read and re-read

she’s a whirlwind, her drive, her passion, the hunger to learn

We had laughed when caught playing with paint and writing for fun in the kitchen that morning, by the very same daughter I’d been writing about. And we both cried a little too – me when I read my daughter the poem, Carl when he read his about his mum.

We felt close then, heard by each other, connected and happily fulfilled at creating art – in the loosest possible terms, for our wellbeing.

Good intentions can often bear fruit but not always as perfectly as Dadd’s berries and Gauthier’s dishes. More reliably, it’s the quality of attention and attunement – to ourselves and each other – that seems to make the real difference. We'd found it the week before, at our own kitchen table – more than the one we'd planned for – and we'll find it again, hopefully today.