Karl Ove certainly captures the torment of being a man with a toddler in a group of mainly yummy mummies, especially when he is unable to participate very well, is head over heels in instant lust with the fit young guitar playing leader of the session. It's a symptom perhaps of his malaise that he doesn't lust after the yummy mummies either. It's a terrible shorthand, "yummy mummy", meant to be demeaning, but I see it much more positively. These young sexually active (well mostly, maybe) attractive women with small children, who hasn't walked behind a woman like that watching the movement of shapely buttocks beneath thin cotton but sensible dresses - or pictured that tired that tired rushed woman who has come out with no make up, hair awry, on the side of the bed instead of at the helm of a pushchair. It seems like he has cut himself off from the most ordinary of consolations and feels himself diminished and damaged by his poor showing.
He says he wants isolation - that's why he never goes to the same cafe for too long, so as the waiters don't get familiar. I'm beginning to wonder what he would be like to meet - presumably terse, morose and eager to leave. But maybe he's not, maybe this is all a pose, just a description of that set of feelings, that persona that everyone inhabits in some hours, minutes or days of their lives, when they cannot find meaning in contact, only a kind of rough solace in being alone, anonymously in a big city, or alone completely. .
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