Leisure Lesbians
(For Serious Reporting Look Elsewhere)
Words: Leisure Lesbian / Image: Salman Toor
LL: Two
Lockdowns are lifting. These are glorious words to write, especially as they coincide with sunshine and green foliage bursting out riotously everywhere. To the parks! And in the park with perhaps a glass of Koppitsch’s Homok—I say a glass but I mean three—and a good read, it is easy for the afternoon to slip by. But at some point, I can’t escape my phone any longer. And then I must confront my royal dilemma.
Let’s say, hypothetically of course, I have a girlfriend who is active on IG and every time she posts a particular person always likes it. Fair enough, we all have friends who like to support us on social media. But what if this person happens to have a crush on my gf and I suspect this social media fawning is really flirting. Now, insert the detail that this unnamed person is a member of a royal family. I will not be disclosing more than that. But periodically I do find myself thinking (insert royal title here) stop flirting with my gf.
Now this woman, who happens to be of royal birth, seems like chill company. I don’t want her to disappear because, really I want to seduce her as a friend. I envision us sharing matcha lattes and pictures of our cats and cocaine and whatever else you do with your friends, preferably without her sleeping with my girlfriend. And we had planned a trip to the Hebrides to facilitate this, but then Covid shut down the world once more. So here I am, staring at my phone. A sourdough starter just can’t compete.
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LL: One
Like everyone else who is lucky enough to have some soil of their own during lockdown, I have been gardening. Never having been much of a gardener before, I am now attacking the pursuit wholeheartedly — with gloves. There will be runner beans and arugula and tiny tomatoes, and maybe some wild thing I can ferment à la Noma (may you and others open fully again soon). My aspirations are grand, though I am aware that in a few months it may all be compost. And in between tending my green darlings, I have been drinking. Sitting in the garden at the apero hour, wine in hand — an injection of calm into turbulent days! And the wine in question? It is orange.
Skin-contact white, called orange despite often being yellow-hued, is a divisive beast. Criticized as pretentious and hipster and deemed “flawed” in character by many, this old technique of making skin-macerated white wine has become popular over the last few years as part of the trend towards natural wines. A trend I am firmly embracing; give me an unfiltered hazy glass with a marmalade hue and I am joyous. Label it biodynamic, name drop Rudolf Steiner, and tell me you have appropriately used manure from a buried cow horn and I will pay you money for your wares. There is obviously a wide spectrum of orange wines and — as with all wines — some are banal and forgettable and others complex delights. But currently, with the climate still fluctuating between chilly nights and sun-drenched afternoons, I am firmly in an orange state of mind. There is a Slovakian bottle I am coveting at the moment, with notes of mineral and barnyard that pairs just as well with an evening of zoom chats as one spent digging in soil. And when it comes time to bang your appreciation for front line workers, the bottle — struck with a metal ladle — makes a loud satisfactory peal.
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