Last night at dinner at the Dusty Knuckle Harringay — which we’d recently discovered transforms into a pizzeria in the evenings — I experienced a moment of sudden disorientation.
A child heaved open the exit door with everything she had, throwing it wide open while her mother laughed behind her. Silvia reached out to hold the door from swinging back shut, and the mother turned to her, still laughing, to thank her. And then, on witnessing this entirely ordinary affair, my mind dropped out of ordinary experience: my heart rate rose, my mind lost the ability to identify forms, a blank clarity set in, and I felt my pulse in my throat — I felt like I was coming up on MDMA. Overwhelmingly, the emotion I felt was surprise.
The feeling softened after a few minutes, but lay in wait, jaws loosened, just under the surface of the familiar. Minutes earlier Silvia had reported feeling high during her trip to the bathrooms — was she feeling the same thing? We had a few theories: one, the half-pint Dalston ales we were drinking (and were just about halfway through) were spiked; two, the chilli honey drizzled over our nduja pizza had psychedelic properties; and three, the emotions of the day had found an explosive release.
As we made our way home I felt alongside cautious wonder heightened senses and a trace of optimism. The autumn night was crisp and bright, and I was immune to the disorder of the North London streets. The moon hung low and shone clear, and seemed to have stepped out against the night sky. I noticed that I could see again, to perceive.
Earlier, we’d found ourselves on a walk by a canal that emerged from the North East corner of Finsbury Park and arced South into the reservoir. A late summer evening glow set a glimmer alive on the surface of the shallow canal waters, on which the grasses and shrubs and willows had mirrored themselves, and through which images the coots rippled through. We saw between the two banks an artificial island, a nest of leaves and twigs on which sat a mother coot, crying out with naked vulnerability. Two infant coots whizzed around their mother, dizzy, surely, from their contact with the excesses of the world. Another adult—their father, presumably—tirelessly made trips from the nest to the bank to retrieve nest-building materials and back to the nest to place them around the mother and build what fortress his natural abilities permitted him to build.
What a beautiful glimpse of love in the animal kingdom, we thought. Why did nature evolve predators, I asked. All life consumes life, Silvia reminded me.