Tomato, fennel, lentil and rosemary soup

Rottenly cold again today and without wanting to I ended up covering 45km on my bike, most of it dead flat but the south wind blew tiny daggers of ice through whatever pieces of cloth I bandaged myself inside of. At work today I rounded up all the stray scarves and jumpers I have stashed around the building and selected the warmest for immediate deployment. It was still bitingly cold once the sun set, and I had to go from work to Collingwood (the doctor is back) then to another appointment in Carlton then 15km west to where I'm spending the night. Somewhere in there I needed to eat, and I thought it was probably going to have to be a stodgy vegie burger in a pub or something equally indigestible somewhere equally uncongenial, so I almost wept with relief when the Tin Pot cafe was open, quiet, dark, and able to provide me with a gently crackling open fire and a steaming bowl of the most perfectly nourishing, tangy, fragrant soup. Soup helps most things, helps quite a lot actually.

A little while ago I wrote about a dredged up-memory, from my first or second year at university, of feeling completely bewildered by the seemingly effortless cleanliness and polish of men and women on the Collins Street tram in their navy and black business attire. What I didn't describe was how I used to clothe myself. I think it's relevant. My hands were always grimy from charcoal and I wore an assortment of old black evening dresses from the op-shop, white patent leather boots, old man cardigans, and when it was as cold as it has been today I had this patchwork knitted blanket that I would roll around myself like a towel - tucked up under my arms, the bottom edge just trailed on the ground - and over that I wore a brown leather belt with a brass buckle. This was all perfectly fine and unremarkable in North Fitzroy and also in the studio. Those several blocks in between where it wasn't were usually traversed in just a few minutes. Well, anyhow, I wished for that blanket today. I could remember the nice wooly smell it had and I could feel how good it was at making me feel like I had not gotten out of my bed, which I suppose I hadn't really. (My bed at that point was a single mattress on the floor of the worst room in a very bad double-storey terrace, although that room did indeed have an open fireplace, which I used, and right now that seems the absolute height of luxury and pleasure, to go sleep in a room with an open fire.)

I did want to have a go at writing some more about Stanley Cavell, but it's not going to happen, not in this month or year, anyhow. What did happen is this: I remembered that the only substantial piece of work I managed to parlay Cavell into was a co-authored essay on film and television versions of Pride and Prejudice, and I reread some of this and felt unspeakably depressed about it all on numbers of levels - the essay itself, which doesn't work, the circumstances under which it was written and the decline of my relationship with the other author, and the subject matter of the essay and the views expressed in it - and I just don't have the resources to revisit any of that material. Well, here's that essay anyhow. Rain and wind is forecast for tomorrow.