Thomas Marks.
When we meet, Country Mouse is all talk of Appleby Fair, of the mutter of horse-dealers and the leathery smell of the animals. It’s his enthusiasm, paired with a visit to The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot at the British Museum (until 30 September) that has me watching for horses and their ghosts in London this month. Sitting in the quiet July dusk of Canonbury Square, it’s not long before I imagine the clean clip of hooves in the distance…
Thomas Marks.
An arancino is about the size of a shot put. The principal ingredient is sticky, thick-grained rice, starchy and buttery, which cocoons one or other type of filling: for me, that’s ragu e piselli, a daub of mince, peas and gravy that mightn’t be out of place in a cottage pie. The barista hands it over in grease-paper, which is soon glossy with frying oil. The ball has a weight that makes you wonder how it’s been put together, and as soon as you bite through its golden crust of breadcrumbs, it starts to lose its structure: food that wants to fall apart.
I’m in Palermo, the regional capital of Sicily, sneaking from a long-grey London to seek out the kind heat of May. There are wonders of colour and high exuberance here – the gleaming twelfth-century mosaics, the plump, purple aubergines that spill from market stalls, the grinning playgrounds of baroque putti that decorate buildings meant for prayer. It’s the vividness I see first, before my eye starts to attune to the Sicilian shadows. But before long, my overriding feeling is of a city that has settled on the brink of collapse – which is why no street food could be more fitting here than the arancino…
Thomas Marks re-orientates his London bearings at the prompting of a not-so-discreet new skyscraper.
A shard is a piece that’s been broken off something else and, as such, it tends to take on an accidental and often dangerous shape. So there’s an inevitable irony in pointing out that Renzo Piano’s vast London Bridge skyscraper, known as The Shard, has now been completed. The building is an extraordinary structural achievement that’s been made to resemble a colossal fragment. Piano has gone for stylised breakage: vast staggered planes of glass, a scalene tilt, a splintered steel spire…
Following Jon Day’s appearance as Country Mouse last month, Thomas Marks now takes to the streets of London as Town Mouse, eagerly watching clocks for the coming of summer.
The clocks change this month, and London shrugs off its dark winter. I have always loved that active verb, ‘change’, since it lets me imagine the clocks flickering into life, adjusting their own mechanisms before they retune the mood of the capital. Out of Mean Time comes the kind light of summer: the hour’s leap forward seems so enigmatic, when I hesitate over it, that it might just as well be some trick of natural magic. Each year, it draws my thoughts down the river to Greenwich, to the meridian line – and to the unfathomable way that time fans out from this city…
