Month: February 2020

Good morning.

I won’t strain you with an exclamation mark — it’s too early for that, and anyway, I don’t want to tempt fate. Will this be a good day? Who’s to say. If I’m honest, so far, everything has seemed to be suspended in a clear, unappetising jelly. My frontal lobes, I said to Dianne (who always reads this newsletter — hello), feel like they are made of parmesan. Hard, gritty, unyeilding, probably more useful as foodstuff than as a superhighway for neurotransmitted electrical thought.

But: it’s sunny today. I saw buds on some of my favourite horse chestnut trees on Monday, shiny with melted hail. I’m well-over half-finished the first draft (hah, draft) of the book I’ve been saying I’d write for years. I will be planting potatoes soon. And a friend who was very ill, is miraculously getting better. 

I don’t like wishing life away. I don’t like getting to the end of a month and realising I’ve spent its entirety hoping it would end soon. But this winter has been a bad one — no, you weren’t imagining it. I thought I’d use this week’s newsletter to tell you that yesterday I drew The Knight Of Pentacles, and of all the cards promising fortune and success, he is the best one. He keeps grinding, and bit by bit, he gets there. He reaches his destination so gradually it feels like he was always there. So today, instead of thinking about what I haven’t done, I’m looking at what I have. It’s surprising what you can achieve when you’re just doing what you can, brain on low-power, plugging away. 

This is as much self-helpery as I can bring myself to write. I promise there will be no more of this for at least a few months.

Other Stuff:

• First of all, read this. It’s a journey around Santiago eating amazing sandwiches with a self-made sarnie-celeb. I mean… what’s not to fucking like about it? It’s brilliant!

• Lovely news from the publishing world: Elinor Lipman is (finally) getting published in the UK. Her novels Turpentine Lane and Good Riddance will be available next month. Last time I checked, this link had more info.

• Behind-the-scenes footage of the recording of Disney’s Hercules aka. the best thing you will watch all week.

• A sensitive look at Fleetwood from a local who moved away. Thinking about hometown guilt is something I do quite a lot. Why do we feel connected to the places we’re born/grew up in? Why do we feel responsibilities towards those places?

• Take a look at the gorgeously buzzy manipulated photography by multimedia artist Liam Wong. It’s so good, I think, because looking at them feels like being in a city. Like there’s too much to see in each picture, everything’s fascinating and overwhelming, and vying for attention. (Review of his new book TO:KY:OO book can be found here.)

• I loved this observation that the plane trees on Victoria Embankment might be among the most famously-painted trees in the world. It also made me think of The Buttermere Pines, and that’s always a nice thing to think about.

• Nostalgia for things not yet completely gone is one of my favourite melancholy topics and this from the BBC on the split-flap arrivals boards in airports was particularly wistful.

My Stuff

• I spent an evening at a student beer society club to find out whether our assumptions about young people’s drinking habits are true. TL;DR: No. We got them a bit wrong.

• Follow my bookstagram if you like books and/or poetry.

• Last week I was invited by Cloudwater to do two talks at Friends & Family & Beer — one with Duration Brewery, and one with the delightful Claire Bullen. While it was terrifying and WAY out of my comfort zone, I’m glad I did it and grateful for the opportunity. Thank you to those of you who came to see the talks.

• While I love writing this newsletter and especially love hearing your thoughts about things I’ve talked about in it, it does take me some time and effort to put together. If you’re feeling generous, I have a ko-fi account where you can, in effect, buy me a pint or a magazine. I’m extremely grateful to those of you who have tipped me before! Thank you.

Sega, by Liam Wong

There’s always been a part of me that believes the world has discreetly ended while I’ve been in the cinema. The louder the film, the more believable this thought is. A soundproofed room, atmosphere thickened by popcorn smells and heavy furniture, Dolby Surround blasting and smashing its way around our heads, protecting me from the deserted world beyond. 

I don’t know when I started expecting the world to be different once I walked out of the pictures. A couple of hours is nothing — you can’t even get a cut and recolour in two hours. Not at my hairdresser’s, anyway. There’s something about being shut off from everything, even for such a relatively short length of time, that makes resurfacing unreal. Everything has been swapped, then moved back into place, but ever-so-slightly off. Like that memory tray game. Stapler, mug, pencil, ruler, elastic band. Comb. I was always bad at it.

I don’t go to the pictures often, but we went last week to see Parasite. When it was over, I felt the same shaky sensations of the world having changed. When I walked out, things were different, just slightly, forever.

Other Stuff

• Thank you to Josh Farrington for showing me this piece on the best olive oil in England, which you can find in an electrical supplies shop in Clerkenwell.

• I thought this was pretty cool: Innovative home cooks are selling their meals on Facebook marketplace. 

• The “Your Stonehenge” looks like a great exhibit and now I have another reason to go there.

• We all know that tons of the “hey look how easy it is to make these disgusting-looking Frankensnacks” videos are full of shit, but this video PROVES it, and is hilarious too. 

• Stories are my favourite things. Obviously. My second-favourite thing is hearing people who love stories talk about how much they love stories. Here’s Michael Rosen and Clare Muireann Murphy talking about the art and magic of telling stories, and then Clare tells a story about the first satirical poem ever written and talks about the importance of the Fool. Totally captivating.

• The tale of Pivovar Kutná Hora, told by master storyteller Adrian Tierney-Jones.

• A map! An amazingly detailed map! Follow this link and click “UK Soil Observatory viewer”, then change the layers to suit what you want to see. Soil erosion? Soil type? Crops? I could lose hours to this stuff.

• I pledged for an Unbound book this week because it looks pretty fucking ace. 

My Stuff 

• I wanted to know if younger people are still avoiding pubs and refusing alcohol as per an article I wrote a few years ago, so I spoke to university beer societies about how they feel about drinking in 2020.

Two siblings at Stonehenge – one on leave from the RAF –  1941
[Image: Joyce Leeson]

In 2018, I read one book all the way through. The Essex Serpent. I finished it on the last day of December while I was having a pre-NYE-night-out bath, and on New Year’s Day I re-ignited my Goodreads account and set what seemed to me an impossible target: 25 books read by December 31st 2019. By Craig David’s televised NYE 2019 BBC concert at 11pm (why did that happen, again?) I’d read 30 books. 

I loved reading when I was little. I often had three books under my pillow, and would sometimes read two at a time, skipping from one to the other like an impatient channel-skipper. I wasn’t a loner, but I liked to read a lot, and rather than set me apart from the other kids, we shared our favourite books. Ever the Monica even at the age of six or seven, I suggested we write our own book reviews and stories to bring to our playtimes together. It never took off (why would it? I was essentially creating my own zine sweatshop when we could’ve all been doing cartwheels), but the idea that I could write my own stories as well as read them was exhilarating to me. My teacher at the time told me I had an excellent expressive reading voice. “You could make reading tapes for the library,” she said. This has stayed with me forever. It’s a nice thought, but why didn’t “you could be a broadcaster, or an actor, or an author!” come out of her mouth? I think about that a lot.

I stopped reading at some point during my teens. I lost interest in keeping track of plots, and the larger my educational and personal workloads got, the less time I had to force myself to sit down and engage with a book. It was far, far easier to let entertainment flash before my eyes passively. I watched the same DVDs over and over. I still do that, by the way. It’s just Netflix now instead of The Nightmare Before Christmas being started from the beginning on a DVD player that sounds like a chilling unit.

For a long time after that, I thought I hated reading. Or maybe I did actually hate reading. But I still loved writing. The dissonance between those two things was loud, and there were so many ways I knew I could improve my style and create more sophisticated worlds if only I picked up a book again. In response to this career-driven need to read, I only read classics. I didn’t enjoy myself with them most of the time. I missed their nuances and humour in pursuit of what they could teach me about the craft of writing. 

In the end, it took a gothic novel about a woman set free by the death of her cruel husband to discover fossils and monsters in the mud and Pagan hinterlands to remind me that books aren’t just for reference. They can make you feel things too. They can take a flint to the long-burned out fire of your imagination and set it alight again. I didn’t hate reading. I’d just been choosing the wrong words to read. And that’s what I’d say to Sarah Perry if I ever saw her.

Other stuff

• I read this piece by poet Jack Underwood as soon as I woke up today and it felt like a bolt of lightning hit me.

• Beth McColl has written a piece for GBH that manages to give a totally unique depiction of depression, while simultaneously making me feel like I share with her the memories she’s dredging up from the deep.

• If you love a big, wacky investigative journalism piece full of twists and turns and scams, read this on AirBnB in London. And then maybe reconsider using AirBnBs.

• Don’t you just love great packaging?

• Italicising non-English words. Why do we do it? “What is the actual measure for whether a word belongs to a language?” asks Khairani Barokka, and honestly, it’s been playing on my mind ever since.

• Jeanne Calment was the oldest woman who ever lived, and she died aged 122 in 1997 having lived her whole life in Arles, France. But there are men out there intent on revealing her whole life as a conspiracy. Was she really who she said she was? Could her DNA reveal the secret to everlasting life? This longread is immense but totally worth it (and you can listen to it using the link if you prefer.)

• Please look at this hashtag — #bookillustrationofthedaybirthday2 — it’s full of gorgeous book illustrations and you’ll be scrolling through it for hours.

• Some activism for you: if you like walking in the countryside in England and Wales, join this campaign to identify 10,000 miles of historic footpaths before they get wiped from the new record in 2026.

• Lose yourself in In Dreams, a hugely ambitious project from Soleil Ho and Mel Tow for the SF Chronicle. A different way to create an immersive restaurant review.

• How greetings cards are surviving the digital age.

• Speaking of Soleil, I absolutely LOVE this piece from her about working as a critic with a bad memory, and how it’s helped her forge her own unique style.

• Brit Marling is just… a hero. And her article for the NYT “I Don’t Want To Be The Strong Female Lead” skewers the prospects of women in the film industry perfectly.

• A captivating profile and history of Berthe Weill and her historic and important career. Who’s that? Exactly. She was an art dealer in turn of the century Paris who championed then-burgeoning artists like Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Suzanne Valadon, Modigliani and Derain. And she’s largely never spoken about. So read this.

My Stuff

• This week my piece on being part of the grape harvest at Trossenwein in Mosel was published on Pellicle. I hope you like it. I very vividly remember sitting on my bed at Rudi and Rita’s house after a day’s picking, finishing a Gulp newsletter before teatime. When I went downstairs for tea everyone congratulated me for getting my “work” done and we drank federweisser.

• I’ve started a bookstagram account to keep track of my book reviews (and keep them away from my main). You can follow it here if you’re interested.

25th anniversary of Galerie Berthe Weill, 1926. © Centre Georges Pompidou.
Courtesy of Marianne Le Morvan.

Yesterday I drank a glass of wine that tasted like walking through a botanic garden. When I smelled it I imagined huge creamy white flowers opening their succulent petals, brushing me with fragrance as I passed by. Except of course, it was just a glass of wine and I was being me, cackling and slurping and enjoying the synaesthesia of flavours turning into colours in my head. I’m like this with music too. I used to write web copy reviews for a dance music downloads site, a fair few of my sentences were copy-pasted into a Music Reviews Bullshit tumblr account. I was thrilled, and checked every week to see if I’d managed to make it into a new post.

Whenever the word “pretentious” is tossed around, it’s usually meant to as a dismissal. Proof that what’s been said has no value because it’s all gussied up. Pretentiousness is bad, and you should feel bad.

Well, no. Language is one of the only luxuries we all share, and I entertain myself by making that luxury as decadent as possible.

If you like my pretentious bullshit, you’re in luck. Next week a new piece of mine is being published and HOO BOY do I wax some serious lyricals over various mundanities. See you then.

Other Stuff:

• Watch this incredible upscaled video of a train coming into La Ciotat station in 1896. The sleeves! The hats! The hurrying ladies worried about not getting a seat! 

• I really liked this Helena Fitzgerald piece on rethinking how central alcohol was to her life and talking about the difference between hobby and habit.

• This beautiful triptych of meadow photos from James Rebanks (the Herdwick Shepherd) has been saved on a tab on my laptop since he posted it, where I can easily click and see it again and remind myself that the fog and gale force fuck winds won’t be around forever.

• Here’s a lovely piece about Summer Wine brewery by Matthew Curtis. They will be missed.

• 500 hopefuls, one dream career. Jonathan Liew on top form as he details the world of Q-School, the average person’s potential ticket into professional darts stardom.

• Another great piece by Jonathan Liew — he’s great, why not — about “Brand Saracens” and the unspoken truth of money equalling sporting success.

• I’m learning about wine at the moment and one term I like, but find too vague, is “minerality”. This piece taught me that people didn’t even talk about minerality until the mid-80s! And that mineral flavours are still debated by some people, and might not be due to soil types! Wine is nothing if not totally awkward. Don’t you love it?

• Speaking of wine, do you want to learn more about Chinese wine regions? I do!

• Mushroom experts debunking fungi depiction in art. This piece is amazing in its detail and passion for mushrooms in art and design, history and generally everything. 

• If you thought your last road trip to 3F for some rare bottles was edgy, get a load of the spies who were tasked by their superiors to bring Nablus tahini into Israel. 

• Katie Goh interviewed the makers of SPAM magazine via Google docs and it totally captured my imagination. The interview is great, but the method is inspired!

• I don’t really want to read anything about climate change at the moment but this map of Ice Age Britain and Ireland/NW Europe really grabbed me. Seeing rivers flowing over Doggerland was fascinating — if anyone has a map like this but with contours, I’d love to see it.

My Stuff:

• I’ve been off sick for a couple of weeks l so there’s nothing out there currently. Nothing serious, I just had to prioritise my mental health for a little while. I’m back on it now though so expect a few things being cranked out over the next month or so. Starting with the piece next week, obv.

• A reminder that Dick and Cath are ace people and I loved writing about them for Pellicle.

• ICYMI: I wrote about beer and lower-league football and had fun doing it.

• ICYMI: I wrote about the really cool woods traditionally used in Brazil for cooperage and how brewers are using them to create new and exciting flavours.

Mushroom Motif (Black and Ochre) 2017 – Alex Morrison