by David Wills

Created on: January 19, 2009

An aged hippy-poet friend of mine, Mark, and his Anglo-Franco wife, Felicite, invited me to breakfast one day. The three reasons for my visit were: firstly, breakfast, but also to help Felicite get her old laptop online, and to raid Mark's Ventura-come-library.

I was living on an organic farm in the surprisingly liberal community of San Luis Obispo, Ca., at the time, and had left my entire book collection back home in Scotland, so I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to raid Mark's books. We sat in the old wagon and rapped poetry back and forth and talked about literature and drugs and life the usual. I picked out a Blake collection, Danny Sugerman's Wonderland Avenue, William A. Henry III's In Defence of Elitism, Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Thomas A Harris' I'm OK You're OK

and Bruce Eisner's ecstasy: The MDMA Story.

After borrowing the books, we all sat down to breakfast. It was Sunday, and we were not working until mid-afternoon. Their place consisted of an eight-by-ten foot barn' and two ancient campervans, all positioned to create a little garden in the middle, shielded from the life of the farm, and wind, and cornered in by bushes, over the top of which we could see Hollister Peak and several other of the Nine Sisters mountain range, in front of which ran an occasional charge of horses.

Felicite was in her mid-seventies, and had recently taken a bad fall and struggled with mobility, but while Mark and I went a found an old picnic table, and brought it into the middle of the sun-drenched garden, she managed to put together a wonderful breakfast of tea, pancakes, butter, strawberries, goat yoghurt, seven-seed mix and syrup.

"Now," Felicite said in her quiet, yet somehow motherly voice, which had a strong English accent despite her having spent the last few decades living around America and Southern France, "First you put the butter on the cakes. Then you put the syrup on the butter. Then you put the yoghurt on the syrup. Then you put the strawberries on the yoghurt. That's the only way to do it. Sometimes Mark and I, we talk with our breakfast and forget, and it's never quite right if you do it any other way."

Felicite, quiet though she was, and retiring though she was around others, was pretty bossy with Mark, and fairly straight with me by this stage, having known her for a few weeks. She demanded Mark pour the tea. He did.

We were eating the pancakes and sipping the tea, and talking as usual of thrift stores and bargains and the usual

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