Month: June 2022

A smell I didn’t know was nostalgic, a place in time I didn’t know I was nostalgic for.

Tom came back from the market with a punnet of strawberries and like always, I peered at the top to see where they’d come from. Small, shiny beauties from Scotland.

In the village where I grew up (okay, one of the villages where I grew up), there was an unofficial strawberry fortnight. During the summer holidays, or just before them, I can’t quite remember, the paper shop where I ended up working for a little while would put out pallets full of local strawberries on the produce table outside—and they would go within the hour. They smelled like the end of school and the sweet syrup of melted ice poles—like strawberry-flavoured things, like laces and milkshakes and jam and campinos—not like the fruits I knew. Those promised sweetness and tasted sour. These strawberries were joyful, and folks carried four punnets at a time, away home to make meringues, or jams, or to sit on the front garden popping one after another into their mouths. When I worked at the shop, I’d write down orders for them on the corner of a paper bag.

Today when I saw the tartan-printed label on our market-bought strawbs, my heart did a little flip. I opened the punnet, knowing that I expected some sort of fanfare. The smell took me away almost instantly to a patchwork of summer memories: beach swimming at St Cyrus, house parties in the middle of nowhere, tracing Edwardian schoolboy carvings at Edzell Castle, cycling too fast over gravel tracks, walking out, out, out into the woods and fields of the Howe o the Mearns. The white river behind the blue door. The end of High School.

The shop used to smell like this, I said. It felt good to have warm memories of time I almost forgot.

That’s nice, said Tom. That’s a nice memory.

Other Stuff

• Meet Me In Brixton McD’s — so good when people are given space to write about food that means something to them, whatever its provenance. Yvonne Maxwell paints a picture of her childhood and how McDonald’s was a part of it. Burgers are important, you know.

• I am once again begging you to follow Caffs Not Cafés on Instagram. While the name might suggest a certain anti-snobbery towards posher establishments, Isaac Rangaswami truly adores the caffs he visits, and records them faithfully and thoughtfully with every post. I learn more about London’s food culture from him than from anyone else, I think.

• On Pellicle this week, a fantastic piece by AJ Cox on the link between musicians and the beer industry. There’s a lot of crossover. It’s a super intriguing idea for a story.

• As someone who literally just decided to get into film photography (nothing special, point and click, I found the camera in our attic) and who might be the last person remaining on this earth who actually enjoys putting filters and stupid shit on their pictures, I have become super fascinated by the idea of “film soup”.

• The BierCult festival in Brussels is approaching and I am thrilled to be a part of it. It’s going to be a long weekend of beer talks, tastings and other beer-related fun, and I’ll be hosting something on natural wine as part of Sunday’s Compound Drinking session. If you’re going to be in the area, or you fancy popping across the channel to join in, you can get a ticket here.

My Stuff

Not much to report this week from me. A big project is about to finally go live so I’ll keep you updated on that in the coming weeks, and I’m currently spending all my free time writing copy for a famous travel website, which is keeping me busy but not exactly sane.

Keeping away from Twitter continues to do me a lot of good, and I’m urging you as a friend to scroll less. I know, it’s rich coming from someone like me. But it’s summer, and reading in the park with a bubbly water is what you deserve. Go enjoy yourself.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider sliding a tip over the counter. I am currently saving up to get some films developed, and to travel to Ulverston for a project of my own for once.

Film Soup – Stephanie Bryan

You use two “n”s if you’ve visited more than once and want people to know that.

I came back from the Isle of Man two weeks ago and it feels like an eternity spent away. Away from its craggy shores and manic seagulls, away from its strangeness. My memories of the island are stronger than ever.

I’ve visited the Isle of Man throughout my life since I was little, heading over for the TT Races. This dangerous motorsport is something I love with all my heart, and I can’t explain why. I’ve been thinking it over more than ever this year. A tragic year for the race, the casualties were many and it shocked me. It’s hard to balance that passion with the guilt and sadness. But as my friend points out, who races in the Superstock and Supersport races, he chooses to do it. It’s his whole life. He spends his year thinking about it, training for it, and he wants to do it for himself, and for no other reason. You could call this selfish, I suppose. Delusion. I call it commitment. Passion. I praise him for it. Perhaps I’m deluded too.

The island itself is a mysterious rock in the middle of the Irish sea, named after the Irish Celtic god Manannán mac Lir, the ruler of the sea and the Otherworld. In both Irish and Manx Celtic mythology, Manannán survived the advent of human occupation in Ireland. He took his faerie and godly peoples of the Tuatha Dé Danann to reside in an isle cloaked in feth fíada, a magical mist, obscuring them from the human race, keeping them safe. There they stay, and there are places in the Isle of Man where even the automated voice on the bus will ask you to greet Themselves (the faeries) out of respect. The idea that this island is a place to protect yourself from the human race is enough to make me want to stay forever.

I didn’t have chance to visit the ancient and Neolithic sites of the Isle of Man, but I did have the opportunity to eat and drink there. To eat and drink on the Island is to learn about the fierce locality of the produce here. Borne out of pride and necessity, the vast majority of fresh produce you’ll find here has been grown or made on the Island. The Isle of Man is itself a brand, and it sells well. The produce is good. Isle of Man butter? Fantastic. Milk? Delicious. Seafood? Good enough for the god of the sea. Isle of Man-made vegan burgers covered in Isle of Man-made kimchi and Isle of Man hot sauce? Divine. (Shoutout to Junkbox for making the best burger I have ever tasted. I am not kidding around.)

It’s difficult to find some very common British products here, despite technically being part of the United Kingdom, and the alcohol taxes and legislations are different and confusing. But who needs British booze when you’ve got local breweries making really decent beer with local ingredients? Or imported cider when there’s a wealth of local orchards to farm fruit, and bountiful rewilded areas to forage in?

We took a bus to Port Erin on the southern tip of the island and walked along the seafront, graphite clouds racing to shower us then passing on to the east, leaving us, eventually, with mild sunshine that turned the water into glimmering copper oxide.

On the end of the sea wall above centuries-old fishermen’s shacks, is Foraging Vintners, a winery with a bar and outdoor seating where the sea wind can blow in your hair. Foraging Vintners make wine from local fruit and foraged ingredients, and spirits too.

The elderflower fizz and rhubarb fizz were both excellent quality fruit wines, with a soft mousse that gave us the idea some apple had been used in the making of it. We found out that these fizzes were used in place of Champagne on the TT podium. Manx pride. I love it. The elderflower fizz was delicate and bouncy, chucking handfuls of blossom into the air like a tipsy wedding guest. I loved it. The rhubarb was a blushing shade of sun-caught pink, and I was super happy they’d aimed to keep hold of the beautiful rose water flavours and aromas I get from really fresh rhubarb stalks. I had a Pomme-Rita to finish, made with tequila and their own apple fizz. It was hearty enough to keep me going when the rain started again, and kept me fuzzy on the steam train ride back to Douglas, waving at cars on the level crossings and playing music through the window with tinny drinking locals at Castletown station, on a steam train heading the other way.

Other Stuff

• The Two Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

• ASMR fascinates me, and there is a whole exhibit dedicated to it at the Design Museum right now. The London Review of Books is a part of this exhibit, and is showing their short film The Lost Art of Paste Up.

• Artist Shishi, known as Shishi.San on Instagram, works in textiles and yarn, and I’m in love with her oversized, brightly coloured tufted pieces based on traditional vases. She calls her technique “fluffy painting”, which I also love. Her work is currently on display at That’s What X Said in Brussels.

• Really enjoyed having a big old think about the ideas and themes brought up in this piece on women, class and wine by Steph Shuttleworth.

• Been thinking a lot about this piece on tinned fish v canned wine by Rachel Hendry recently.

• Wine made in Prague by Ole Ellekrog for Pellicle. I enjoyed working with Ole on his piece, not least because vines thriving in unexpected (to me) places is a total thrill to learn about.

My Stuff

• A v short piece I did for Glug about popping a spoon in a bottle of wine to keep the fizz in. It was unexpectedly charming to write!

• I would like to use this space to ask that you please take a look at the Pellicle website. I am so extremely proud of everything this magazine is doing right now, and excited about the future. I’d love for us to gain more readers every month—our writers deserve it, to be quite honest. If you feel you can afford to contribute to the Pellicle Patreon, please consider this a personal request. We can’t hire great artists, illustrators and writers without the support of a passionate, engaged readership. Thank you very much.