for a month, an experiment to quit the half pint I’ve been heating every day for my joe for the last twenty years or so. From the third or fourth cup I don’t miss it. It was the same with sugar, I quit a two-spoon habit when I stayed at a house in Stockwell with no supplies for a few weeks. No milk in the tropics, living in a hut on Rarotonga. No milk in the village in And Quiet Flows the Don, the returning combatant cossack’s new wife branded a witch for spooking the cattle. Only a few pages in and it’s tugging me away from On the Eve. Turgenev’s dreamy ramblings don’t have the earth and blood hammer-hit of Sholokhov, like you can smell the ponies and the steppe dust. I thank the stars for the Russian scribes. I thank the stars for the two inches of java juice that keeps me turning the pages.
