Month: December 2019

I love watching food travel shows. They’re obviously ideal for a bit of escapism, and the best ones teach you something about local food and drink culture alongside gratuitous shots of bountiful market stalls. Unfortunately they’re inherently problematic too; you can’t show everything about a particular country, or even a region within an hour or so. Something’s going to be simplified, something’s going to be missed, something’s going to be sensationalised for effect. There are some great ones, and some terrible ones, and I’ll watch them all, hearing over and over again about the wonder of food in context, looking at flights on Skyscanner as the presenters crack crab claws by the glittering ocean.

Over Christmas there will be hundreds of re-runs of fake-kitchen how-to cookery shows and they’ll encourage me to write out shopping lists of ingredients I’ll never buy. There’ll be thinly-premised travelogues stringing together cheese eating and wine drinking: I’ll watch them too. Because deep inside the cold mashed potato structure of every perfectly-lit food programme is a sliver of truth. When people travel and eat food, those are the best times. Things happen to them. They say stuff they believe is meaningful with a mouth full of spaghetti. They get emotional about dips. They hold a bottle of beer, enlightened by knowledge they’ve received telepathically, transmitted to them by a bowl of broth. I relate. Hard.

Whenever I see a remotely poignant moment of honesty on a TV show, it’s usually when food, and a tiny bit of exhaustion, is involved. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for Christmas dinner.

Happy Christmas!

I hope you all have a wonderful and restful Christmas week and don’t get stuck behind too many tenner-wavers at the bar! I’d like to say that I’ll definitely be writing up a newsletter for next week, but I don’t for definite that I’ll be able to, or want to for that matter. 

If you enjoy reading this and you want to buy me a Christmas drink (I’m on the sauce as we speak, actually) you can do so via www.ko-fi.com/shinybiscuit, or find me at The New Inn. Thank you very much for reading this newsletter and supporting my work, and see you in the New Year (probably)!

Other Stuff

• Travel down to the very bottom of the sea. I lost a lot of time on this. It’s incredible. And so very, very spooky in a really real way.

• Do you like learning in-depth things about foods you take for granted? Me too! Everything we know about chocolate chips is wrong.

• No, Eoghan doesn’t pay me to put his pieces in this newsletter but he seems to write one every week and I always like them. So here is his latest, where he takes us all on his Trans-Siberian Express honeymoon. Don’t worry, it’s not awkward. You don’t have to sit next to them.

• Look at these amazing procrastination gingerbread houses.

• Cheese triangle labels from the 40s and 50s! That’s it!

• Do you like beer writing? Then here’s a collection to get stuck into. Boak & Bailey’s own “best of 2019”.

• I woke up nervous and scared about going to work on Tuesday. It happens fairly often, even though I quit my job almost two years ago. This piece on burnout couldn’t have come at a better time.

• A lovely piece about those wooden duck ornaments, you know the ones, by Caroline O’Donoghue.

• I had no idea about the urban folklore around this ridiculous, potentially incestuous advert but this article about it is…. *kisses fingers*

• Soleil Ho and Ruth Reichel — two of my biggest heroes — talking about the changing role of food writers.

• A great piece by The Cider Critic James Finch about where cider is now and where trends might be taking it.

• Super interesting insights into the human brain, via the super interesting topic of Arctic exploration.

• There is nothing on the internet more soothing than an official website for a nature reserve. Walthamstow Marshes is a perfect example.

• The incredible, sad story of Letizia Battaglia — the woman who photographed the mafia and lived.

• “…stories that cover the emergence of new culinary trends in gentrifying cities without acknowledging the traditions that are already in place do more than just erase these stories from the public narrative. They tell people who are already being displaced that their experience never mattered in the first place.” — Mariana Viera has lived in North Hollywood all her life and she wants her panaderías back.

My Stuff

• All of us Original Gravity folks were asked for our best beer memories of 2019. I wrote something super nice about mine and Tom’s wedding, and it also includes bonus witch marks.

• Fancy a lol? I found an interview video a student made of me while I was on an Alumni panel thing at my old uni.

• Maybe this is a long shot but if you’re at an Accrington game in the near future, you can pick up a copy of the latest edition of Raw Milk. I’ve written about beer for it and I’m super proud to be involved!

• Reminder that I’m making zines — email me at katiematherwrites@gmail.com with your full name to reserve a copy.

“My father’s collection of 1940s and 50s cheese labels“
by Julian Tysoe

There’s something about tiny little model houses that makes my heart feel warm. I get the same feeling looking at the painstaking detail of that sweeping rooftops-of-London scene at the start of Muppet’s Christmas Carol, or the Jolly Pocket Postman books. Like an aching nostalgia for somewhere I’ve never been.

I don’t imagine myself there — I think of the alternative lives that could exist inside those warm yellow windows; the people who might find a place like this and call it home. The best model homes have suggestions of lives being lived inside, just out of sight. In a local department store near my house there’s a Christmas display of perfect festive homes, shops, a cobbled high street, churches with little stained glass windows and even a couple of pubs. A train chugs around the town’s perimeter every minute or so — I suppose I am jealous of their transport links — and a hot air balloon with two little people inside, one holding binoculars, dangles over the pond where locals are ice skating. My favourite tiny buildings have silhouettes of people sat around dinner tables, or dancing, or drinking a beer. I like thinking about who they might be and what brought them to such a perfect little place. It’s incredibly soothing.

I like this article where they try to understand why tiny things are so appealing to us, but in a way, I also wish nobody was trying to undo the magic. Let me have my little worlds, where there’s always a light on in the window somewhere, and someone’s always baking a cake.

Other stuff

• You don’t know Jack about Monterey Jack, but after this brilliant piece by Rachel Wharton, you’re gonna be up to speed.

• A gorgeous short read by Hollie at Globe Hops about the ritual of the Christmas Day pint.

• MiMi Aye has a laugh that made me smile in the torrential rain when my Primark bags disintegrated on Cathedral Square in Blackburn. Listen to her on the Lecker podcast and let her brighten your day.

• You have to gaze at these beautiful, exquisite miniature landscapes made by Plymouth-based “needle painter” Victoria Rose.

• Modernist gingerbread houses. Because the only thing more perfect than a miniature house is an edible one, and the only thing still more perfect is one originally designed by Philip Johnson.

• Sign up for something fun — be a Manchester Beer and Cider Festival 2020 volunteer like me next year!

• A hop farm in Brussels? Of course I’m gonna like that.

• Adventuring and hiking from the perspective of a dog, all while pondering the deepest of questions — who is The Good Boy?

• I read The Guyliner’s Guardian Blind Date posts almost every week (sorry I miss it sometimes Justin) and this revisit of a classic blind date is a joy because THEY ARE GETTING MARRIED!

• Remember what I said about Amelia Tait? Well, to prove her greatness even more she’s written about how Muppet’s Christmas Carol is the greatest film ever made. Out of all the other films. For GQ.

• Organised crime. Tax evasion. Contraband. The off-the-books world of oricchiette in Bari, S. Italy.

• Finally, I want to share the lyrics to the song Just Go On from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt because it makes me really emotional and DON’T LAUGH okay, it’s just a realistic but ultimately uplifting little song and I think about the chorus pretty much every morning. “They say life’s too short, but they’re wrong/It’s so long!/And sometimes the only way to go/Is to just go on.”

My Stuff

• I had the immense pleasure of chatting to Dick Withecombe and Cath Potter about cider, politics and everything in-between for this piece published this week by Pellicle.

• I have started making my zines. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here’s why: I received a commendation at the Guild of Beer Writers’ Awards last week for a number of articles I submitted. I’ve decided to make a zine out of the pieces, plus an additional BONUS piece I couldn’t submit because it was published outside of the time frame. They will be £5 plus £1.00 shipping, and you can pre-order one now if you like by replying to this very email (or if you prefer, email me at katiematherwrites@gmail.com) telling me your full name so I can keep a note. Thanks!

Hometta-style gingerbread house — uncredited.
Via Present & Correct.

I made a playlist this week of all the songs that remind me of being 16 years old. I don’t usually like being reminded of being a teenager, they were difficult years for my whole family, but there’s a lot of election stuff in the news at the moment that’s bringing it all back to me anyway, so I thought — what the hell. Dive in.

I’m back in my old bedroom, in a small council bungalow in Aberdeenshire, miles from anything and anyone. I’m sat on the silver carpet (chosen by me to replace rotten lino from a discount flooring place in Montrose) playing Final Fantasy IX on mute, which was given to me, along with the PS1 I’m playing it on, by a friend from school. A copied disc spins in my CD player, the repeat button flashing to let me know that it’s not the whole mixtape I’m replaying, it’s Signals Over The Air by Thursday, track 2, the song I’ve been holding on to like a liferaft for the past few hours. My hands are cold because although the meter’s got a few quid on it, the house only has storage heaters, and when mine’s on it smells like burning hair. I’m wrapped in my duvet, engrossed in an ice cave level, and the hi-hat and snare counts us in again. 

I know I was rarely alone in this house, but I can barely remember being anything but. We were helped into this emergency life by friends and neighbours, my mum’s colleagues, my friends at school. We weren’t alone, but I felt it, so deep down in my bones. The wide window that looked out from my bedroom over the dark stubble of winter wheatfields and a distant line of forestry commission pine trees didn’t try to console me. I could see the nothingness for miles and miles. How did this happen to us?

It’s not the poverty I remember. It’s the loneliness. Money isn’t just about bread and milk and fish fingers in the freezer. Money stops people associating with you. It turns a simple gift into pity. It leaves you stranded in a council house a 12 mile walk from your nearest friend’s house. It’s a writhing pit of shame in your stomach. It’s the question “how did this happen to us?” Because you never think it could happen to you. Until it does.

Please do not vote for the Tories next week.

Other Stuff

(You made it through the darkest part — It’s pretty much all uplifting beer stuff from now on)

• Lily Waite manages to make Manchester sound incredibly romantic in this wonderful piece about Marble brewery for Good Beer Hunting.

• I really enjoyed this by Matt Curtis on the potential of a beer release saturation point in the near future(and the virtues of a good pint of bitter) in Fement mag so it was nice seeing it gaining some attention online this week too.

• Oh look, ATJ has written something amazing about Orval, one of the greatest beers in the world!

• It’s so easy to take cask beer for granted but it’s quite exotic and glamorous elsewhere in the world. I’m really enjoying reading about Adrián Materos of Cerveza Rudimenteria’s experiences learning more about English cask. English version | Spanish version.

• This piece by Boak & Bailey caused a lot of conversations this week. I have a complicated view on the topic of gentrification and I wish everyone did. It isn’t always bad. Or good.

• Thank you to Evan Rail for sharing this brilliant piece from the NYT about a historically important currywurst stand in Berlin.

• Beautiful, familiar paintings of brutalist architecture by Frank Laws. They’re of homes in East London, but they could easily be anywhere, and that’s what I love about them. Also, the first line has given me a word to describe what fills my head every time I leave the house: Sonder.

• A really insightful group of interviews with members of i-collective, a group of indigenous chefs and activists across America, who hosted thanksgiving dinners to “celebrate the resilience of their people and tell their stories through food.”

• A really fun read about the new A Christmas Prince film. A lot of people are trying to skewer the humble filmed-in-Canada, set-in-a-made-up-European-principality Christmas film but I wish they’d just watch and enjoy them like this.

• Marissa Ross has written “I was 18, clenching everything from the armrests to my ass as I experienced my first full-frontal male-nudity on the big screen” in an article about Merlot, because of course she has. I nearly spat out my impy stout.

My Stuff

• I received a commendation from the Guild of Beer Writers awards this week, which was lovely. I shared the pieces I submitted to the awards in a previous newsletter, but I’ve decided to create my first ever zine out of them. There’ll be more information, and probably a pre-order link, in next week’s newsletter.

• I got a few reads this week for my piece on how beer festivals become. Read it if you want advice on how to start an event from the people who run your favourite festivals.

• Still proud of my local football and local beer piece. Even if you don’t like football might enjoy it — I know precisely fuck all about football and I loved researching and writing it.

MONUMENT I — Frank Laws