Biting The Bullet

(The evidence - Exhibit A)

We were having a casual, lovely supper with friends on Monday night on their farm. Adi supplied the wine, Cornelia picked the salad from their vegetable patch. Nicky and Steve brought date sweets and halva from Abu Dhabi and Jacques and I brought the venison pies bought at a farmer's market. Sitting around the kitchen table surrounded by happy ( and yes, occasionally fighting) small boys and one gorgeous baby girl, it was exactly what happy suppers with friends should be. A table where a Louis Ghost chair sits elegantly next to worn white-paint-slightly-peeling-off-wooden one, where the glasses were expensive and the hastily grabbed kitchen cutlery not. A well-worn table with Syrian linen napkins piled high. An elegant glass salad bowl adjacent to the foil casing of the home-made pies. And suddenly amid the laughter and the conversation, Cornelia bit into the bullet that had killed the poor buck that was destined for our pie. Having ascertained that her teeth were still in good nick, and that lead poisoning was improbable, we continued eating the pie. And then a friend phoned from Europe wanting my opinion re her coming back and making a go of it in South Africa. I told her about the dinner and the pie and the bullet. I'm not sure why I did that? Or why I found it so significant? Why it pleased me as much as it did? But I want her to come home. And I don't think one finds bullets in one's pies in Antibes, or in the Caribbean island paradise that is St Barth's. And I think I'd miss that. I'm hoping she does too.