Mayonnaise

‘Could I prevail upon you’, said Lorna, 

‘to make me some more of that mayonnaise?’ – 

with garlic, for dipping crudités in: 

a small thank-you-for-having-me gesture 

after my stay in her Newcastle house. 

She had another guest on my last night. 

He sat with us next morning at breakfast, 

drinking his coffee as I stirred and whisked 

and added this or that and whisked some more, 

while Lorna made notes. He said there should be 

a genre painting recording the scene 

(this being in the days before Facebook) 

in case the three of us became famous, 

called ‘Roy Fisher watching Lorna Tracy 

watching Fleur Adcock making mayonnaise.’ 

Quite soon he dropped me off at the station, 

and drove to Durham for his assignment. 

‘A most entertaining man, Roy’, I wrote 

in my journal on the train going home, 

‘with a nice line in pedantic phrases.’ 

He was fifty-two, which I then supposed 

to be quite old, but as it came about 

we had something like thirty-five years more, 

on and off, to entertain each other 

one way or the next, as our lives allowed. 

Published The Mermaid’s Purse (Bloodaxe 2021)  and Collected Poems (Bloodaxe 2024) 

Fleur Adcock's poetry is widely recognized in her birthplace of New Zealand and in the UK, where she now resides. Her books are published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and in New Zealand by Te Herenga Waka Press (formerly Victoria University Press). They are now brought together in her Collected Poems which is published this year. She received an OBE in 1996 and has held positions as writer in residence, including the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship 1979-1981, living in Newcastle.  In 2006 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and in 2019 the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

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