Babylon

We pulled papa's table out along the canal for the first time this year.

Lunch was a strange assembly of food and people and there were more people than food.

Abdel dropped by with tales of heart break, Lizzie and Bobby came round followed by Fredérique, the stair lift fitter. 

The oven timed out and Nico's jumping around left the fire burning unattended.  I watched  young Fred being polite over his charred merguez and under-cooked spuds and wanted to slip him a ha'penny to get himself an ice cream.  Instead I poured him another glass of wine and shoved some salad on his plate.  he was polite enough to say that, as a rugby man, the best gastronomic moments of his life were a post match bowl of peanuts and a beer in a bar.

He said that the company he worked for could only track his van and not him and poured himself another glass.

I worried briefly about the safety measures required to attach a chair lift to an 18th century wooden banister with an 86 kilo/ 86 year old man on board but reckoned that, as an Occitane rugby player, he could probably hold his act together.

Abdel looked like he hadn't slept in along while. 

We pull a couple of chairs back into the sun.
Pauline has fallen in with a Bourgeois Bohemian bunch and is leaving him and The Babylon System (r.e Bob Marley) for an anti-consumerist life in a hut in a wood which involves being self sufficient etc and having no access to any establishment selling anything (a shop, I suppose)

Abdel argues that a hut in a wood isn't an attractive option when you've grown up in poverty somewhere in Morocco and you can hate Babylon as much as you want but money doesn't fall out of trees and Pauline needs to realise that getting out of bed at 4 in the afternoon isn't going to keep her fed.

I get his point and give him a futile hug.  
Abdel is suffering and young Fred has gone hungry.  

Abdel pulls on his Marley-esque joint and talks a whole lot more.  I listen and nod and take upside down photos.