I have been stuck in somewhat of a rut recently. Not jumping off a bridge bad, but the kind of repeated grind-you-down tedium of everyday life that I used to think was solely induced by living in a dark country with shit weather. Sadly, I've come to realise that it's just life. The symptoms are often the same - listlessness, general lack of motivation and a difficulty of taking joy in things which once made you happy. We have all been there. Even those annoyingly chirpy people who you occasionally want to slap in the face when they seem to sail unwittingly past life's many and constant frustrations. They have been there too. But the light will return. It always does. Sometimes it just comes in little glimpses, like light cautiously flickering through overhanging trees, and sometimes it floods in all at once like brilliant sunlight as you open your hotel room curtains.
It may have occurred to you reading this blog from time to time that I enjoy food. I really enjoy food. I'm not a spectacular cook or a gifted food photographer. I don't necessarily like food because of what I bring to it. I enjoy what it brings to me and those around me. Sometimes it brings comfort, like wolfing down macaroni and cheese on a rainy cold winter's night. Occasionally it provides the centrepiece for a night of revelry and camaraderie, where hours fly by like minutes and you are constantly, incessantly laughing while your mate hands out cold beers from behind a sizzling barbeque. Sometimes a meal, however small, insignificant or poorly prepared, is the one bright spot in an otherwise totally fucking shit day. Sometimes, for me, it is the chink of light in a rainforest canopy, or the first sign of dawn breaking over the horizon.
Having had a few totally fucking shit days recently, I was expecting little from my visit to Alvy's, an Americanised neighbourhood-style pizza restaurant in Kennedy Town. At most, I was expecting a couple of slices of reasonable pizza, a sweaty stroll around my old neighbourhood and a quick return home for a standard post-lunch Saturday nap. None of this was Alvy's fault, of course. I was the problem, not them. I vaguely remembered having been before for a beer and liked it, but never got round to going back. So now, in a bad mood, I mentally apologised to Alvy's in advance for not giving it a fair hearing.
We sat down and ordered ginger beers, while I griped self-pityingly about how shit Kennedy Town was when I lived there (before the new MTR station brought civilisation) and how annoyingly bloody hot it was outside. Poor me. We ordered some food to share - a pizza, a bagel, some pancakes for desert. Whatever.
The bagel arrived, toasted, cut in half and with the smoked fish mixture in a pot on the side, which felt a bit lazy. Alvy's was just living up to my mood, so who was I to care.
But like a flashlight in the dark the pizza arrived and things started to pick up. The ginger beers started to feel like a cold icy coca cola on a hangover day, and I realised the chewy bagel and firm cured fish was actually pretty damn good. What triggered this onslaught of positivity I don't know, but what I can say is that it led to some laughs, a heated debate about what constitutes great pizza and a firm agreement that this was indeed pretty close to most people's definition of great pizza. This one had a slightly chewy, but not too large a crust, a thin, but not too crispy a base, and a sparing use of toppings, which somehow seemed to make things more delicious because of the anticipation and the ability to really savour the good parts.
We were too carbed-out to honour our order of sourdough pancakes with banana and bacon, but I have made a mental note to come back for a further hit of sunshine in future. Fear of being melodramatic won't let me go as far as to say this pizza changed my life (because, well, it didn't), but I can say it did give me a brilliant little hit of something truly enjoyable just when I needed it most. It left me with the feeling that tomorrow is another day, perhaps totally fucking shite, perhaps great, but if there is a trip to Alvy's in there for lunch with good company, there will probably be a few spots of sunshine to look forward to at worst.