CARROT JUICE

She always feeds me first while her own food grows cold.

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If I like something, I want to eat it every day at the same place and at the same time, until I feel sick at the sight of it and yearn for a new experience.

I considered myself lucky when, about a month ago, a new bistro opened on Shepherd’s Bush Road next to the wine shop. It has a good, if slightly expensive, menu: soup, gnocchi, cauliflower cheese, frittata, and salads. The chef is a friendly Calabrian.

With some effort, and not a little peril, Isabella gets me through the door. There are few establishments that we can actually get into. This place is small but comfortable, with little stools and low tables. There is a fridge selling French cheese and charcuterie. When it first opened, it could become crowded. Now the numbers appear to be dropping off.

Isabella orders our food while speaking to the manager, a talkative, worried Frenchman. Now, at the end of the year, he is worrying even more since an engineer arrived to cut off the electricity because the previous owner hadn’t paid the bill. There have also been complaints about noise from the neighbour upstairs, though he has chosen to live on one of the busiest roads in West London.

The Frenchman works from eight in the morning until eleven at night. It has become clear to me – I, an indolent man who works regularly but little – how hard it is to run a small business. Recently he was fined for leaving his rubbish out on the wrong day, even though the firm employed to remove it failed to turn up. I tell Isabella that a similar thing happened to my former barber Luka, who began with a shed in an old garage, before moving to a shop on Shepherd’s Bush Green but has now returned home to the Balkans, having found it too stressful and unprofitable to survive here.

What I can’t bear to tell the Frenchman is that I have already grown tired of his gnocchi, which I find a little rich. So now Isabella, in her yellow coat and carrying a silver ramp for my wheelchair under her arm, hurries me past his window hoping he doesn’t see us betraying him for another restaurant.

She and I have decided to try a Lebanese café further down the road, which has just opened and was recommended by my new barber. It has been smartly done up and is obviously a small family business, not a chain. The broccoli soup was fine, though it came with several slices of unwanted buttered toast. The strangely dark red beetroot hummus and the falafel were good. I ordered a carrot juice, which came with three blocks of ice that Isabella extracted; then it was carroty.

Middle-aged friends recently single are dating on romantic websites which, it turns out, are often not so romantic. One female friend and I had a discussion about what the point of a partner is; she suggested it is someone you love to watch television with. I added that the partner is also the person you most like to have lunch with, and with whom you can sit without having to make conversation. But if you do decide to chat, she will be happy to hear from you and you from her.

Isabella listens to my chatter as I look out of the window and think of other things – mostly memories – which I study now with an intensity I never did before as if trying to reclaim my life even as I almost lost it. She always feeds me first while her own food grows cold.

At the end of your first meal in a new restaurant, you will inevitably ask yourself whether you will return. Here, I was not convinced that we would. And I have to admit – though I haven’t mentioned it before – that Isabella and I are currently mesmerised by Farmer J’s new joint: an expensively fitted-out chain restaurant at the bottom of Hammersmith Grove.

If you go in there at 12:30 p.m., it is more or less empty, which is practical since I need more space for my wheelchair. But if you enter half an hour later there are queues inside and out on the street. This is healthy food for a part of Hammersmith flooded with affluent, attractive, and mostly white office workers in their mid-twenties; they wear fashionable clothes and enjoy a varied assortment of unpronounceable vegetables.

When Farmer J reopens after the Christmas holidays, I want to return to the same spot being fed macaroni and cheese with truffle by Isabella until my enthusiasm runs dry.

As I dictated this blog to Carlo, he guffawed in boredom and disgust.

“How is it,” he said with a queenie pout, “that we have come to this: you describing carrot juice and me having to write it down?”

I replied: “My world has narrowed to carrot juice. At least I’m alive and can suck through a straw. That’s something. In fact, it’s quite a lot.”

“Okay,” he said. “What next?”