Our Perfect Evening in London
Ask most people to describe a perfect evening in London and you get a restaurant, a bar, something with a view. Ours used to sound like that too. It stopped being true somewhere around the fifth year.
The evening we now look forward to costs almost nothing and involves leaving the flat once.
Six o'clock
A walk, whatever the weather is doing, because in this city waiting for good weather is a way of never going outside. Forty minutes, no destination. The light in London in the hour before sunset does something to the brick that we have never got used to.
This is the last time either of us looks at a screen with any seriousness.
Seven
Cooking, badly, with the radio on. Something that takes an hour rather than twenty minutes — not because it tastes better but because an hour of chopping is the closest either of us gets to not thinking.
Wine, sometimes. Less than we used to, and earlier, once we understood what it does to the second half of the night.
Nine
This is where the evening turns, and it turns with a light switch.
The overhead goes off. Two lamps and a candle instead. It takes four seconds and it changes the room from somewhere you do things into somewhere you stop doing things. Everything after this point happens at the brightness of a restaurant rather than a kitchen.
The city carries on being loud outside. Inside, the room has agreed the day is over.
Half past nine
The diffuser goes on. Whatever we're using that week — lavender when we want the obvious, sandalwood when the flat feels cold and the windows have been shut all day.
Then ten minutes of closing the day: what happened, what's tomorrow, what neither of us is going to think about again tonight. It sounds like a meeting. It takes as long as making tea.
Ten
Reading, in bed, on paper. Phones charging in the hallway where they can be heard but not reached.
The window open even in February, because the room needs to be colder than feels sensible when you get in. And the blanket, which is the only genuinely luxurious object in the whole evening and is probably doing more than the rest of it combined.
What we gave up to get here
Weeknight plans, mostly. For a long time that felt like a loss, and for a while it genuinely was — there is a version of your late twenties that involves saying yes to things on a Tuesday.
What we got back was every Wednesday morning. That turned out to be the better trade, and we didn't expect it to be.
The evening isn't impressive. Nobody photographs it. But it's the reason the following day is usually good, and after five years in this city that's the thing we've learned to protect.
