THOUGHTS ON EXCELLENCE

To say I don’t watch a lot of track and field would be a gross understatement. The occasional Olympic dash is about all I can recall. And so I don’t know how I came to see Australia’s Jessica Hull setting a new 2000m world record recently. The way she outpaces the rest of the field strikes me as a fearsome and entirely exhilarating feat.  There is a video here.

I was thinking about that ability to be so much better than your competitors while having dinner at The Everly last night (on my own, with a book). The food was brilliant, sublime even, but then it always is. The service was its equal. I come away from that restaurant every time slightly in awe of what’s just happened to me.

I feel the same way about Northside, on Princess below Clergy. The space (both inside and out) is more lovely than any I know of (in any city), and whenever I go (usually with one of my kids, for lunch), there is the feeling afterwards that I have been perfectly drugged.

The Everly opens for business an hour after Northside closes, so they are never in competition with each other and you can visit both - one for lunch and one for dinner. I really think you should do that; the only problem will be in trying to match that day’s excellence moving forward.

These two, then, strike me as the local dining scene equivalent of Jessica Hull’s lung-busting 2 km race and it felt important to write that down before I lost track of the thought. The fact that Northside is an Aussie-style cafe and Jess is one of the owners (Cade is the other) feels a nice add-on.

The reason for my eating alone was that Sam and Willa are housesitting in Bridgetown and were sending me humid pictures from a drive-in theatre just north of that Caribbean city. And Lucian was on a train south of Toronto, heading for a friend’s place on Lake Erie. They were living well, in other words, and I felt a need to do the same, to share that feeling with them.

I took a book — Solar Bones by Mike McCormack — that I’ve been carrying around for weeks, like a passport. The bookmark fell out a couple of weeks ago and I stuck it back in somewhere close to the start. So I’m re-reading much of the novel before I’ve even reached the end, which feels both enormously decadent and richly rewarding. Over dinner I read sections about the protagonist’s house falling apart around him when he was living in it alone (tell me about it!) and then the frustrating inability of his father to come to terms with the death of his wife. The experience was hallucinogenic, disconcerting. It felt I was reading my own diary (and was a much better writer!). I could feel my heart rate climbing. A private eye wielding McCormack’s pen had surely been following me, I thought, and then I stopped reading in case I was about to stumble across my own future, held luminously against the pages on that table set so perfectly before me.