10

       Romancing the Chickpea

      For Slavoj Žižek, the falling in love is important. He makes love an event or an encounter. It isn’t just a being in love, but the moment of falling in love that matters, it changes the rest of your life. It is such an important event that not only is it a catalyst for everything that will follow in your life, but it feels like everything in your life has been leading up to that moment.

       Rilla’s notes

      The day after we met, I really thought I would never see Simon again. Maybe that was the unromantic side of me. I had had such a good evening that first night when he took me out to dinner, but I had convinced myself that it must have been a one-off, something not real. We had talked nonsense for three hours over our shared platter of injera (Simon had wanted to know if it made him a cannibal that he liked bread that felt so much like human skin), shiro, yellow split peas, red lentils and the house speciality, lamb stew. Over the enormous platter we discussed – well, everything. Victorian pocket-watches. Fondue and Simon’s complete abhorrence for liquid cheese. Rye crackers and how they were really hyped-up cardboard. Whether or not Liv Tyler looked like a Disney princess version of Steven Tyler. Whether or not the Steps reunion would reveal that members of that band had frozen their bodies back in the nineties and they had now re-emerged from the freezer. If concept art was actually art or just something produced by people who couldn’t paint. And whether Theresa May looked like Arrietty’s mum in the Studio Ghibli version of The Borrowers