miso happy

Many thanks to the kind and clever friend who suggested I might be able to eat miso soup. To celebrate the seventh day of this awful gastric flu,* I had decided to test my land legs with a little hobble down the hill to Church Street - source of, among other things, my dry cleaning and the new skirt I was having altered (so that when I do go back to work, provided they haven't moved away by that time, I'll have something to put on). It was remarkable: in one of those rare confluences of timing and - well - timing, my friend made this suggestion of miso soup before I went down the hill.

Clearly a Fresh & Wild job. Miso soup. Not in Morrisons. Too tired and, frankly, winded to go round the Turkish shops looking for bits of spring onion, I bought what I wanted in one easy (I say easy, I mean except for the ordeal of shopping with a fellow clientele who all clearly feel entitled to a Perfect Experience; everyone in there seems to think that by walking through the door they've somehow rented aisle space for themselves and their enormous buggies/spoiled children/need to take up six-foot stretches of shelf while they make some earth-shatteringly painstaking choice/aggressively laidback boyfriends who stare at you openly if you say 'excuse me' and go past them/long sips on their carrot-&-wheatgrass smoothies; but stop me before I go into my rant, because they clearly MUST be as cool as they think they are just for living in Stoke Newington - right???)** stop. Here is what I got:
organic miso £2.79
organic tofu £1.59
organic jasmine rice (yay! another kind of rice!) £1.99
organic spring onions £1.29
eight organic brown field mushrooms 42p
organic ginger (Chinese) 31p
Yogi 'Stomach Ease' tea £1.89
total organic cost: I'm too tired to add up but you get the picture.

Picked up the dry cleaning. As I stood there panting slightly and 'glowing' with the effort of leaning against his counter, he cheerfully told me they don't worry about when people collect their cleaning. Anyway, he and his family haven't been quite right, what with bugs and sinus infections, etc, ever since they went on holiday back on September 22nd. I paid £39 for my suit, 2pr trousers, top, jacket, and shortened skirt.

Got on the next available bus, with various stubbled old men in stained track suits, elderly black ladies clutching walking sticks with their arthritic hands, and teenage mothers with scraped-back hair, who have never rented aisle space anywhere, and rode home feeling like a total ponce.

However, I have now had one bowl of jasmine rice, one bowl of miso soup with tofu, ginger, spring onions and mushroom slices floating in it, and one little extra bowl of jasmine rice with miso soup poured over it. I am so happy. We'll see how I go with the spring onion. (They're only little.)

* in retrospect, actually the gall stones. Note to self and others: if you keep getting sick all the time, go see the doctor!

** I think it shows, that I haven't set foot out of Baroque Mansions in a week - right?