Dad’s beans and rice in London’s cold drizzle – 08/11/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

I spent my 22nd birthday at the hostel I lived in, for just over a month, in London. Just to place the antiquity of the fact, it was 1992.

I was a spoiled, arrogant, self-destructive young man. I traveled with my father’s money, straight from three months of vagrancy in California.

Privileged, no doubt, I arrived in London determined to suffer. And I succeeded in the attempt, for it is too easy to suffer in London.

The weather was as bad as they said, even worse without the proper gear to face the freezing, incessant drizzle. It was a month, or a little more, of wet clothes and shoes.

At the hostel, I slept in a room with multiple bunk beds and the smell of foot odor. It barely fit in the bathroom. The basement had a collective kitchen in which Germans made spaghetti with ketchup.

In an effort to earn a few pennies, I got surreally awful jobs.

In one of them, an Australian hack would put four unfortunates (me plus three) in the car and release them in different blocks of the same region. Our mission: ring all the bells to sell deplorable paintings, clown and crying boy paintings.

I, obviously, just took the door in the face. On the third day of humiliation, my birthday, I went to the boss and resigned.

At that point in my life, I had rarely felt so bad.

The cold, the frowns, the distance from home, everything strange, strange food. A little too much for an upper-middle-class brat from São Paulo, ignorant of everything that wasn’t his backyard.

Exhausted, wet and cold (hunger I got used to sublimate), I arrived at the hostel, ordered a beer and went to chat with the other foreigners.

The phone rang, and the lady at the front desk called me. It could only be a mistake, no one I knew had that number.

It wasn’t a mistake. It was my dad, who knows how he googled the phone and called to congratulate me.

I cried with joy as now I cry with longing.

*

I’ll be back in London for a little over a month. Now the father is me.

My daughter won a master’s scholarship and invited me to help her adapt – her husband can only travel at the end of the year.

I go excited, determined to suffer as little as possible. I’m willing to distract daughter and grandson from sadness.

Difficult task –sadness, in London, is like fine rain–, but I will try.

With all due respect for fish and chips, I am determined to install a piece of Brazil in the kitchen. London put up with the Gross Kitchen. Or would it be Brutal Cuisine?

I want to search the city for cheese bread, couscous and tapioca. I’m going to cook rice and beans – beans with garlic and bacon, not the English breakfast sweet beans.

Who knows like this, the longing gives a break.

*

The receptionist at the hostel didn’t speak Portuguese, but she understood everything. As soon as I hung up the phone in tears, she gave me a hug, a kiss on the cheek – my first human contact in Britain – and handed over a Kit-Kat that normally cost money.

Without detracting from English cuisine, it was the best meal of the trip.

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