Grapes

Tomato pips drying sticky red and yellow on the chopping board. Dark grapes in a bowl catch the light in the soft sheen of their skins. I bought them, and spring onions, and pak choi at the greengrocer's, a pork chop at the butcher's, a bottle of wine and some goats cheese at the cheese and wine place. The paper and a pint of milk from the post office. Decision after small decision I weave through my life. The taste of grapes and goats cheese and sauvignon suffuse my weekend. I buy this and not that, do this rather than that other thing I might have been going to do. Choose this film randomly from the library, my mind now full of its close-up loving of faces, my thoughts of spiritual yearning, suicide bombing, mopeds in Paris.

The client who asked if I'd seen other people like him, with thoughts like his, been able to help them. Treading a line between reassurance he's not the only one, and the unavoidable aloneness of his absolute uniqueness. I have your appearance but I'll never have your reality, as one of my training supervisors was fond of saying.

Thinking of all the sperm that died when the one that made me arrived and embedded itself in the egg in early 1962. The fantastic statistical remoteness of the chances of ever being here at all.