Chapter 1 :The Day Matthew Goode Saved Me.
- Raffaella Sero
- Oct 23, 2018
- 4 min read
I was going to start this blog with an excursus of my life as keeper of a diary, and maybe I will write about my life as the keeper of a diary some day. But that can wait, that will have to wait, because now I have something far more exciting to report.
Today, I was saved by Matthew Goode.
You may remember Matthew Goode for playing the protagonist in Brideshead Revisited, being hands down the best thing in the last season of Downton Abbey, starring as The Tall and Dark Stranger in several of my day-dreams. Ok, maybe you won’t remember that one.
Alright, he only accidentally saved me, without even realising it, and he did save me only from the horrific menace of a three billions calories piece of chocolate cake. Nevertheless, the fact remains: today, I was saved by Matthew Goode. How many of you can say the same? Yeah, I thought so.
Let me tell you how it went.
Where shall I start? Last night, sitting on the floor of my kitchen, watching Gilmore Girls on my phone as I waited for a ton of spaghetti to cook? (The GG episode was “Nick and Nora/Sid and Nacy” - I guess I needed Rory’s special brand of journalistic girl power right then). Or this morning, when I woke up at a quarter to seven, already wailing ‘craaaaaaap’ because I thought I had overslept and I had an essay to write? No, let’s move forward a little and begin with lunch, the first good thing in my day.
It was around two pm, I had just finished the second of my 2,500 words essays in less than twelve hours (not bad, right? I hope so, at least … ). My uterus was lamenting loudly and painfully, I felt crossed with God and the Universe and Everything, not to mention I felt like eating pretty much God, the Universe, and Everything. Then, just before giving in to the sad reality of yet another 500 grams of spaghetti only accompanied by the dubious improvement of Tesco’s Extra Virgin Olive Oil (I was born in the South of Italy: just don’t get me started on Extra Virgin Olive Oil), when I finally opened my university mail box to learn that my 3pm class for the afternoon had been cancelled. Suddently, then, I found myself with time for lunch, not to mention with the glorious perspective of a free afternoon. Still, I wasn’t happy. I made myself a dish of roasted squash with evo oil, balsamic vinegar and oregano on a peppery salad. I ate while reading Amy Tan’s “The Kitchen God’s Wife”. I love that book and the food was delicious; still, I wasn’t happy (please refer to the bit about my angry uterus). Finally, I accepted the ineluctable truth that I simply was not going to be happy today. Thus, growing grim about the mouth but unable to get to sea just yet, I took my laptop and the drizzly November in my soul and decided to go hunting for sweets instead: if I couldn’t be happy, at least I could be on a sugar high. Before realising it, I was out of my college, trying to decide whether I felt more like having an ice-cream sundae or a slice of chocolate cake. What I really wanted, let’s be honest, was chocolate cake with salted caramel ice-cream on the side. Probably I would have gone I through with it - even though I wasn’t really hungry, even though I was already sort of regretting it - if it had not been for Matthew Goode.
Still absorbed in my cake vs. ice-cream dilemma, I bumped into a crowd of people standing between the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian library, some holding cameras, some walking up and down in the narrow space, some telling the ones walking up and down the narrow space how to walk up and down the narrow space in the right way. I stopped, mesmerised. Because, for the last two weeks or so, every cell of my brain that wasn’t otherwise employed has been fixed on the idea of becoming a TV runner. I was looking around me, with eyes as big as teacups, drinking in as much information as possible, wondering if there was any chance they were shooting Endeavour, when Matthew Goode appeared on the steps of the Bod.
As the narrating voice in Jane the Virgin would put it, “I’m not going to lie, friends: it felt like fate”.
After that, of course, I could not possibly go and close myself into Caffé Nero for all the cappuccino cake in the world. I had to stay, I had to look - I also had to finish my entry for the Mays Anthology and send it over before 6pm. Thus it was that, instead of guiltily stuffing my face with cake because I’d had couple of bad days, I walked to the Rad Cam, I sat on its steps, I opened my laptop and I began to write, throwing the occasional glance at my saviour Matthew Goode as he stood opposite me on the steps of the Bod, staring out at the winter day with that expression people always have in ITV dramas and romantic novels, with his eyes fixed on something only he could see.
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