This feels like a liberation. I have wandered, all alone, across the university campus, and have found my way to the coffee shop tucked away in a neighbourhood of townhouses. It's run and staffed by a Korean family, and they are connected to a Korean evangelical church that rents space in the local Anglican parish. It is always quiet here and the patio has only one lone occupant, a young woman, likely student, engrossed in her smartphone. A hummingbird visits the potted petunias of one of the hanging flower pots overhead, probing each electric magenta flower with hungry precision and curious greed. I have decided to ignore my phone for now, though it is lurking in my pocket, like a sinister imp always on the ready to emerge from the dark and make trouble. I decided to carry with me the Doris Lessing novel and give it another go. The Four Gated City. I am still at the beginning and making slow progress because this is an incredibly dense novel. Not boring. Dense. So this Martha woman has recently turned thirty and is on her own in postwar London where she is freebooting around and having adventures. Right now she is in a restaurant with a couple of middle class twits who are there to keep an eye on her, and she suspects maybe more than an eye. But she is telling them all about how completely divorced from reality they are...this is going to be interesting. It's a nice day and I can't sit still much longer,. I have drained the last bitter drops of my Americano and now I am on my way to the forest nearby...
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