I love leading tasting sessions, but do people actually want to know about cryo hops and malt varieties?
At school, the very act of standing in front of the class to give a talk was enough to make me faint. I wasn’t a shy child as such, I just didn’t like that much undivided attention on me—it turned out that despite playing multiple instruments and being a bit of a show off, I had, and still get, major stage fright. I remember standing on the school stage with some of my closest friends to play bass in our joke band and being so utterly overwhelmed by the crowd of literally tens of fellow pupils, the guitarist just turned my amp right down mid song and walked me to the side of the stage slightly behind the curtain. So much for my career as a nu-metal postergirl.
I was always told that preparation was the difference between giving a great talk and absolutely chumping it, but in my experience the only thing that has helped me to overcome the violent shakes and excessive sweating is having years of nerdy research behind me that just so happens to be on the topic I’m talking about. Confidence in my abilities and knowledge is the only thing left when I’m talking in front of people, the rest of my soul seems to leave my body for the entire duration, and that confidence has taken years to build.
Unlikely as it is, I really enjoy running beer tasting sessions. I love the playfulness of getting attendees to try something new and to describe what they taste and smell and understand what it is that they are tasting, and why. Being able to let my nerdy side loose appeals to the side of me that might have been a teacher, using pages and pages of book learning to build a picture of what exactly makes a beer taste the way it does, and enjoying the looks of understanding when my cohort realise there is more to beer than their usual two options on the bar—lager or Guinness.
I worry sometimes I go too far. Does the average drinker care about cryo hops? Are my enthusiastic sermons about malt turning people off? I think about what I want from a beer tasting—to learn about who made it, and how, and why—and I hope that other people want to know the same thing. But honestly, am I mostly talking gibberish to a room full of people who would rather just drink and enjoy?
It’s my opinion that all things are more enjoyable if you know a little about them. For example, I’ve gotten really into the Euros these past couple of weeks because I’ve bothered this time around to listen to the commentators and learn about the rules and idiosyncrasies of the game. I did the same for cycling, and the same with wine. I love to learn, it’s my favourite hobby besides thinking about things (honestly, sitting and thinking about something knotty really is one of my favourite activities ever) and I guess I hope that in my tasting sessions I transfer a bit of that passion for knowledge. I know that beer is, at it’s soul, a simple drink for everyone to enjoy. But when it comes to the details, that’s when it all lights up for me, and I wonder how many people really are interested in the processes and ingredients but were just too afraid to ask—because it’s “just beer”. I truly think there’s a wall between the beer world and the average drinker, built by lack of info but conversely, by a vast, impenetrable-seeming pile of details. That’s why I like running tasting sessions. It feels in that moment like I’m knocking that wall down.
My story about The Swan With Two Necks is being published in two weeks
I’ve re-joined the Guild of Beer Writers
I’m working on a print zine for Pellicle
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A summery treat for people who almost like tomatoes.
Yesterday I overcame a severe problem. I ate raw tomatoes without gagging. They say that a person’s tastebuds change every seven years, and all my life I’ve hoped that in the next septennial I’d become a lover of tomatoes.
They are just so beautiful, a perfect vision of summer. They look juicy and fun. Big berries the vibrant colour of poison. I’ve always wanted to eat a caprese salad, but to me, tomatoes tasted of bile and puddle water. Disappointingly bland and sour.
I learned that this is because I live in England and buy my veg from the supermarket. Out of season tomatoes in Britain aren’t worth shit. In Spain, I ate them cut in slices on soft, crusty bread, and wondered why their fresh, gorgeous fragrance isn’t used in every perfume and Glade plug in. I realised that I do, finally, like tomatoes. I’m just picky. They have to taste like pure sunshine, or I’m not interested.
I will never eat the cherry tomato on the side of my pub meal plate. I will probably always take the anaemic slice of beef tom out of my burger. But if it’s hot outside—and it’s hot right now—I at least know that I can treat myself to some deeply ripened tomatoes with stylish pretentions and colourful blotches and that I will enjoy them. What a breakthrough. How brave!
Last night I made panzanella for tea, another dish I’ve always wanted to eat but have never been able to stomach. Until now.
It was the perfect side dish for pesto chicken, and it used up all the leftover rye and wheat loaf I hadn’t made sandwiches with over the weekend (best laid plans etc.) Here’s how I made it. As always, no real measurements were taken or remembered. Just taste as you go. It’s bread and oil and tomatoes. You can’t go far wrong.
Panzanella
Bread, torn or cut into chunks
Olive oil
2 cloves garlic
Juicy, ripe tomatoes
Balsamic vinegar
Smoked salt
Black pepper
Capers
Fresh basil
Dijon mustard
Put the bread chunks into a mixing bowl and toss them well with a glug of olive oil. Add a pinch of salt, and put in the oven at 200°C fan for about 15 mins, or until the bread starts to brown and harden but still has a chew.
Roughly chop your tomatoes into big chunks that would fill your mouth and place them into a colander over the bowl you tossed the bread in. Shake smoked salt over them and let the juice drip into the bowl until the bread is done.
Take the bread out of the oven once it’s done and let it cool a little.
Move the tomato-filled colander to a plate and to the tomato juice add a generous amount of olive oil, a half tsp of Dijon mustard, a glug of balsic vinegar, grated garlic cloves, freshly ground black pepper, capers, and a big pinch of the smoked salt. Mix with a whisk or fork until it becomes a dressing.
Add the baked bread chunks to the bowl with a bunch of torn up basil, and toss until totally combined.
Leave for around 10 mins to get real juicy.
Eat as much of it as you can—you can’t save it for later.
When nothing springs to mind, a good sandwich is better than a mediocre meal.
I was paid a little money today so I bought a roast chicken from the butchers down the road. I was going to maybe make something tofu-ish for tea, probably another curry, but I wasn’t sure, and nothing else in my freezer was really doing it for me. Normally there’s nothing left after four in the afternoon, but today there was a row of bronzed rotisserie babes visible through the window, and I knew. Today is a roast chicken salad sandwich kind of day. The type where the seeded bread is soft and the butter is thickly spread, the chicken is generously torn into chunks and salt is sprinkled with abandon. The salad: anything I have in the fridge, probably romaine and spinach, with cornichons chopped up, and a little mayonnaise between the chicken and the greens.
While roast chicken sandwiches are one of my favourite things to eat, they aren’t my favourite sandwich. The best sandwich you can make me is tuna mayo. You can add cheese if you want, and toast it if you feel like it, but just a plain tuna mayo sandwich, when it’s done right, is a song.
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I put vinegar in my tuna mayo mixture. I can’t remember when I started doing this, but instead of using lemon juice, which I think is too acrid for the sweet blandness of tinned tuna fish, adding a dash of malt or cider vinegar adds a piquancy that lifts the whole dish. I also add freshly ground pepper to the mix, and a sprinkle of salt—but then I always buy cans of tuna in spring water, not brine.
I will eat a plain tuna sandwich, especially if it’s on buttered Warburton’s Toastie bread, but my absolute favourite type of tuna sandwich is one with mixed salad leaves on it. Even just baby spinach will do. I need that little addition of freshness to really elevate the butty. Cucumber? Sure, if you’ve made it on a white baguette. But on a sandwich? Kindof sloppy, not very tasty—I’m not that into it. A controversial opinion I’m sure, but cucumber shines in so many other applications, it just doesn’t need to be included here. Put it with the chicken instead, in chunky coins, or in quick-pickled ribbons.
It’s never been able to separate sexiness from actual sexism. How can we change that?
Throughout this piece I refer to women—this includes and always will include Trans Women. It is also a piece of personal insight and opinion. Please take from it what you will and be respectful in your responses.
I’m a woman, and I like sexy things. Things that are delicious and decadent, things that are a bit risqué—things that remind me that I’m not a grey blob in a hoodie, that I am alive.
There has always been a difficulty between treading the line between sensuality and straight-up sexism in advertising. Internalised misogyny throughout society objectifies women, and using their bodies to sell, well, anything you can think of, underlines the perceived cheapness of women, and their usefulness only as a commodity. The flip side of this is a whole demographic of men who openly despise women, believing that we want this objectification, that we desire the male gaze—of which they are responsible—and will do anything to get it. Either way, women come out right at the bottom.
As I write this, a Chicago house tune by FISHER is playing through my speakers. The femme voice over the top says: “take it off/slow/steady/undress/impress.” Even music uses women to feel sexier. FISHER is a 37 year old man. It’s not his voice. Yet I still like the song—it’s cheeky, it’s fun. I’m not offended by it, in fact I feel slightly energised. It makes me want to dance in a club wearing a sparkly dress. Have I been brainwashed by the patriarchy to want to dance in the club in a sparkly dress to songs that talk about getting naked? Or is this what I want? It’s so hard to tell anymore. Let me call a taxi and we can talk about it on our way over there.
I wanted to have a go at untangling some of these ideas because I sometimes find the sexism in beer arguments difficult to engage with. Let me begin by saying I completely agree that women are just as valuable within the industry as men, that beer is for everyone, and that as a woman who drinks beer and promotes it too, I have a responsibility to advocate for women within the industry.
The way women have been treated in the beer industry is disgusting. Inequality and harassment has been more common than anyone thought (although, you know, people do talk about it if you listen), and women are still treated with condescension in beer spheres. We still feel unsafe at festivals, and places where high levels of alcohol consumption mean we feel as though we need to be on the alert around our fellow drinkers. I’m making allusions. You all know what I mean.
To promote women within the beer industry is commendable. I want to help in any way I can. But I also, parallel to this, want to protect women, and I want bigger issues relating to women in beer to be addressed and worked on before I encourage more women to choose a career within it. I want women working in breweries to be treated equally and paid the same as men. I want women in the beer world to be commended for their achievements and their skills and talent and chosen to be mentors and leaders within industry—not just added to roundtables and speakers’ lists to talk about “being a woman in the beer world”. I want people who abuse, harass and demean women within the beer industry to be held accountable for their actions, to lose their jobs and status, to understand that this is not an acceptable way for anyone to act, anywhere. I never again want to find a woman a job in a hospitality setting only for them to leave that job because a manager, or a colleague of any kind, was bullying or harassing them because they are a woman. I want women to feel safe and valued within our industry, and I want the same for me.
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Customers don’t see this side of the industry, and so while it is incredibly important to me, I’m not convinced that the treatment of women within beer is the reason more women aren’t drinking beer. Perhaps that “laddish” image doesn’t work in beer’s favour for many people, not just women. But in a conversation with drinks writer Rachel Hendry, we both agreed on something: women who don’t drink beer want something that matches their mood. A drink that accentuates their style and punctuates their sentences. A drink that makes them feel how they want to feel. When I go out and choose not to drink beer—and I’m reminding you here, I’m a woman—it’s because I want something chic like a martini, or sexy and flirty like a spicy margarita. Easy-breezy like a vodka tonic.
Beer is seriously unsexy. Is that why women who don’t love beer for all its flavours and styles and aromas don’t drink it? I don’t know. Has anyone asked them? What do women want? As Rachel says: “To feel sexy! And strong! And smart! And sensual! Give me a champagne coupe!”
Yes, there is a lot more to women than these simple, carnal desires, and to judge all women as one entity is futile. You know it is. We can’t understand why women aren’t drinking beer because we are guessing at what non-beer-drinking women want instead of asking them. In a study by Dea Latis, who actually have been asking women what they think, women were asked why they didn’t drink beer they said three things: advertising, presentation, and health/calorific concerns. Are the first two not what I’ve been saying?
I can only say how I feel. I am a bisexual woman in my mid (shut it) thirties, and I’ve seen a lot of shitty beer advertising that takes advantage of women for the male gaze, and it has always confused me. Yes, it’s crap, but it also finds a way to other me in a new, unimproved direction. I fancy women, so am I supposed to find this appealing too? Is that what people who love women are like? I know that more than once I’ve been offended, not by the pump clip or label art itself even, but because the beer was appalling. Boobs are too good to be used to sell badly made beer. I’ve also seen misguided attempts at bringing women into the fold by appealing to our “sweet tooth”. Absolutely get fucked. Am I angry about the assumption here, that women don’t like the taste of beer, or is it the lack of imagination? Maybe it’s both.
I’ve been taken in by women-centric marketing too—especially in the wine and spirits categories. Rachel said she agreed, and that, “Wine and spirits are sexier and aesthetically pleasing, and evocative of desire.”
Beer has never successfully managed this balance, and I have a strong suspicion that if anyone tried, women who like beer are so absolutely sick of being othered that these attempts would be shot down, no matter how chic and stylish and tasteful the design was. It’s an understandable reaction to years of putting up with this shit—keep women’s bodies off beer labels, keep gender away from beer marketing. But if we truly want more women to enjoy beer, to choose it in pubs and restaurants over the alternatives, we need to think about it beyond the drink and its social mores. I saw a t-shirt made by a Manchester bar depicting a woman relaxing in a huge glass of Delirium Red, eyes closed with pleasure, boobs out with abandon. I loved it, and wanted one of my own, and then I saw the comments underneath their Instagram post. “Disgusting!” I felt confused and guilty. This wasn’t a bad picture of a pin-up girl advertising a beer called “Daft Bitch,” this was a cute illustration on a t-shirt (designed by a woman, apparently, although I don’t have confirmation on this) advertising a bar I always have a great time in. I am still confused. Women who I respect have openly deemed it a disgrace. It’s a sexy image, but I don’t think it’s degrading—that’s just my opinion. I didn’t feel degraded, I felt like—hell yeah! Bathing in pink Belgian beer with my tiddies out! It’s pink beer summer, bitches! To delete sexiness from beer entirely and in every instance in the name of appealing to women and assuring our valued place within the industry assumes that women and their male allies aren’t interested in sexy things, only bad men are. And yes, if the male gaze is always the standard inspiration for this, then it would certainly seem that way. So, how can we include women? How can we make beer sexy, without being sexist?
“I think one of the only sensual pints being marketed at the moment is Guinness,” says Rachel. “The tension and the anticipation and the slow shimmer of the liquid.”
Yes, Rachel. Yes. Guinness seem to market to very separate demographics with incredible ease, but this is actually an unbelievable feat of engineering requiring hours of research, data collection and analysis, and many thousands of pounds in R&D, creative direction, and the actual making of the branding, the adverts, the posters, the bar towels. There are women in their adverts, drinking Guinness by the pint in the sun. There are luxurious close-ups of black-velvet beer glistening in perfect lighting. They know how to look classy, even aspirational when it’s warranted, and they can be fun too, and irreverent. Working with Co. Waterford-born artist Fatti Burke to create “The Snug”, an artistic interpretation of the traditional Irish Pub, was a combination of bright, joyful imagination and an abandonment of how beer is usually presented to people who aren’t already beer fans. Perhaps this sort of creativity is why 24% more women are drinking Guinness, even if they are shunning other types of beer. Meanwhile Guinness also manages to sponsor the Premier League, the Six Nations, and the Women’s Six Nations, appealing to people who don’t care much for olives in their drinks or Sabrina Carpenter. It’s not one or the other. Beer doesn’t need to pick men or women, and nor should it. But it needs to work on its image overall before any non-beer-drinking women would ever start choosing a pint over an Aperol Spritz, and it most certainly needs to stop asking “what do women want?” and actually start asking them.
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Accents and local dialect, when used sensitively, add more dimension and context to text than any number of descriptive passages. In my opinion.
This piece was originally written for the journal Off Assignment, who were very lovely throughout the process but in the end, it wasn’t quite right for them. I hope you enjoy it.
Where I come from in the north of England, we have words for things that don’t exist elsewhere, and accents that bypass words altogether, making sentences clipped, personal, and efficient all at once. When I was younger, I loved cutting “the” down into “t’”, feeling older and wiser, speaking like a grownup. I was told over and over again to speak properly. This parrying of proper speech versus local dialect in my country has lived with me ever since.
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Because—why should local accents be massaged out? Detoxed through homespun speech therapy applied at home, the knots of its history and sense of place smoothed into the beige insincerity of the “proper” English accent. I knew that “gan yam” means “to go home” in the Cumbrian dialect, that dish is another word for face, and that “how’s tha’ diddlin’?” was a much warmer, funnier way to say “how’s things?” The words I came across in my muddled area of the north west were from Cumbria, North Yorkshire, and deepest Lancashire, and I repeated them as much as I could. Knowing there were other ways to speak, besides the given language I was taught in school, felt rebellious and free. It made the country I lived in seem big and wild.
During the 90s it was rare to hear northern accents on the radio or on the telly without them being used as part of a character’s personality and a marker of their socio-economic standing. Coronation Street was a steadfastly working class soap made from a patchwork of northern stereotypes—the heavy drinking odd-jobber, the gossiping old ladies in their press-studded aprons and shampoo and set hairstyles, the thickly-accented butcher, the simple nephew being groomed to take over the family business, the mill owner (okay, he actually ran an underwear and lingerie factory.) We didn’t watch it in our house. The newsreaders on every channel had fascinatingly smart accents from another world. Any comedy show was populated by southern voices. Northern accents were shorthand for poverty, crime, luddites (well, we did invent the movement) and ripe for patronisation.
In Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s book The Secret Garden, dialect and slang are used to separate the lower classes from the higher members of society, but rather than place prominence on the well-spoken characters, Burnett ensures her use of dialect is sympathetic and characteristic—it is never used as a tool with which to mock or belittle. Of course, it’s the servants and outliers of society who speak this way, but I can forgive her. It’s representative of its time. Mr. Archibald Craven, the master of Mistlethwaite Manor, might have a North Yorkshire surname, but he didn’t seem to pick up many colloquialisms on the aristocratic circuit. Nor did the actor who played him in the 1993 film adaptation, which I have watched many hundreds of times. He was not the focus of my attention, though. The resonance of a word I learned from this book has carried through, long into my adult life: the word “wick”. A word from Yorkshire, derived from Old English, its closest definition is “alive”. That one word doesn’t do the trick, though. Wick was taken from its use as a description of a candlewick to be used to share something the word “alive” can’t portray—a potential for life. A living energy. It is a bigger word than any of its closest synonyms. In The Secret Garden, the character Dickon—a child, a gardener, a wanderer—uses it to show life hidden within the most hidden places. The glow of green in a winter-blackened rose stem felt like it was so much more than merely alive. And it was. It was wick.
This book has travelled with me as my favourite story since I first read it as a child. The gothic nature of the stately home enthralled me, and the spookiness of being lonely was captivatingly familiar. I felt close to the main character, Mary Lennox, even though we had very little in common—she was high-born in India to wealthy parents, then orphaned by cholera, then sent to live in a grand mansion in the Yorkshire Dales. I was, during my first few readings of the book, a normal working class schoolgirl in Lancashire, who lived in a semi-detached house with no secrets to speak of.
It was only when Mary left the confines of the great house to explore the cold earth of its gardens that we began to get along. I too spent hours at a time alone in the garden, picking at the mud and lichen on unusual rocks, collecting dead twigs for birds’ nests, and looking closely enough at the grass that I could see the individual spears rising up from the ground, ants and woodlice crawling among it as though it were a bamboo forest. The smell of damp earth was comforting to me, and in the pages of The Secret Garden I could smell it, and I understood what the book meant when Mary became stronger and brighter because of it.
The garden wasn’t Mary’s only saviour, though. Her chambermaid Martha breezed through her sour personality and RP accent like a stiff westerly wind on wash day, feeding her good, nourishing food and treating her with kindness she had never received before, all with the straightforward, no-nonsense attitude and thoughtful vocabulary of a local Yorkshirewoman. There were lessons for Mary, and for me, in these scenes where the two were together—the young woman and the child at odds, a gulf of class between them. Instead of retreating, Martha bridges the gap, teaching Mary words from her dialect that helped her understand her surroundings that little bit more, introducing her to a world less opulent but more alive than she had ever known. To Mary, the only appropriate way to describe the moors is in Martha’s voice, and with the words that Dickon teaches her. There are some things that can’t be translated.
“I told thee tha’d like th’ moor after a bit. Just you wait till you see th’ gold-colored gorse blossoms an’ th’ blossoms o’ th’ broom, an’ th’ heather flowerin’, all purple bells, an’ hundreds o’ butterflies flutterin’ an’ bees hummin’ an’ skylarks soarin’ up an’ singin’. You’ll want to get out on it at sunrise an’ live out on it all day like Dickon does.”
Wick is the lesson that Dickon gave us all. To care even while all looks desolate and dead, knowing that life will spring up again is hope in its most pure form. Teaching such a vibrant, beautiful word to me, a girl who was lonely and insular, was a powerful magic. Within all things there is life that can be nurtured and can once again bloom. Wick is not just a gardening term—it’s not easily translated. Wick holds within it the power of nature. It is a word that means resurrection and joy and summer sunshine, and the smell of gorse and fresh, green leaves. It sounds like the wind rushing through the long grasses of marshy hilltops, and wet footsteps in the mud, and it looks like cold, spring sunshine so bright it can shine through closed eyelids. And to Mary, it means connection too, the use of a local word binding her more closely to a place she’s beginning to call home. The core of the rose stem that glows green is wick, and that core remains one of the most important and enduring images in literature to me. Amongst the abandoned and the dead there is life. Under every pile of rotten leaves there are new shoots. Winter never lasts forever. We can begin again.
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Kerroo finally have a taproom and they’re making beer in it!
Kerroo Brewing, run by Nick Scarffe and Elizabeth Townsend, has been a brewery on the Isle of Man for more than two years now, but it’s only just got its own space. Despite there being quite a few unused workshops and warehouses on the island, it’s not easy to get permission to revitalise them.
“We started off looking at the former Manx Kippers place in Peel,” says Elizabeth, “but it wasn’t fit for purpose at all and the changes we’d have to make would have been out of our budget.”
Fortuitously for the beautiful seaside town of Port Erin, Kerroo finally found a home at the former Commissioner’s Depot on Droghadfayle Road—just around the corner from the steam train station. What used to be a garage storage facility and even a bin lorry garage is now adorned with the Kerroo Brewing sigil and furnished with a lovely concrete bar.
“We hate the floor but we’re going to be sorting it soon,” says Nick, to which I point out that I quite like the remnants of parking area paint. “It’s lucky though, we’re on a natural slope, so we just installed a big drain and away we went.” I had never thought about how crucial floor types were to a functional brewery.
Inside the brewery is Kerroo’s kit, a 1000L stainless steel beauty from Leicester with two 16hl conical fermenters bought from Attic Brewery in Birmingham, all shipped over the Irish Sea way before the brewery even had a premises.
“We just knew they were the right pieces,” says Elizabeth. “We had faith it was going to happen!”
While they waited, and waited, and waited, Elizabeth networked her arse off. Becoming a member of the Women In Beer group, she met with other women from the beer industry across the UK, and travelled all over Scotland and England to visit maltsters and breweries to gather as much useful information as she could. Both she and Nick visited Lakes Brew Co. in Kendal, Gan Yam Brew, also in Kendal, Chainhouse Brew Co. in Preston, and Rivington Brewing Co. in Rivington, Lancashire to chat about the intricacies of setting up a brewery and tap room. The fact that the brewing world is so open to collaboration and community support even during such difficult times for the industry is incredibly inspiring to me. That people still find the time to lift others up is wonderful.
Visiting the Kerroo Brewing tap room during TT practice week meant we caught them just before the mad rush of Port Erin Day (a day festival of food, drink, and tie-ins with motorbike-riding visitors to the TT races) and race week. Their hazy pale ale was a delicious burst of grapefruit and passionfruit, reminding me of Rivington’s Never Known Fog Like It, but a more sessionable, calmer cousin—one with a bite of refreshing bitterness and a little prickle of lemon zest left on your tongue.
Brewing hazy IPAs is a big step for an Isle of Man-based brewery. The Island’s beer purity laws, much like the Reinheitsgebot, were brought into effect by the island’s first commercial brewery, Okells, to prevent beer being made with inferior or unsuitable ingredients. Nick is making a fruit sour in his second fermenter, and pulls back a thermal blanket to show us its thick, bubbling, pinkness. He looks very excited about it.
“We asked if it was actually illegal to make a beer like this,” says Elizabeth. “Technically…it’s a grey area. I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone is going to prison.” All jokes aside, it’s extremely Isle of Man for there to still be an archaic pseudo-law hanging around that nobody really knows what to do with. There’s no way Kerroo’s beer is really illegal—but Dr. Okell back in 1874 wouldn’t have approved. Good job he’s not still around.
I was impressed by Elizabeth and Nick, not just for their brewing skills but for their tenacity. To keep the dream alive over all these years without a space to call their own must have been incredibly hard, and I hope that when they look around their airy, perfectly Isle of Man-quirky tap room, they are filled with immense pride. They should be proud. The more beer they make, the more full it’ll become, and I can’t wait to come back to the island to try some deeply criminal sours.
Follow Kerroo Brewing on Instagram to keep up with their story.
They came from the land of the ice and snow, and now they love hygge and ice cream.
Everyone from the Isle of Man I’ve met has asked me when I’m moving over. I’m not sure how much each resident gets in finders fees from the IOM government but they seem dead keen on keeping us here.
The arguments pro-Island are strong. Davison’s is the best ice cream in the world. The countryside is stunning. The beaches are clean and beautiful. There are puffins (!) and basking sharks (!!) and wallabies (!!!). Trad Manx pubs are great, and local fruit wine is tasty. People here eat chips with cheese and curry sauce. I’ve fallen in love with the way one road will feel like the Pennines, and the next view will be Pembrokeshire, until the hedgerows move into wide, rolling meadows and you could swear you were in Herefordshire.
“It’s the winters,” I say. I’m not scared of the cold—I’m scared of being isolated on a rock for four months of howling gales and horizontal rain.
The answer is always the same: you hunker down and enjoy the cosiness. You feel glad you’re dry and warm. You can still go sea swimming in all weathers. There is beauty even on the bleakest days, they say. They are hardy people, even the recent relocators. I don’t think I’m made of the right stuff, the heather and the gorse and the mist. But they’ll keep asking. And I’ll keep imagining my cottage in Peel, windows glowing in the midst of a cold winter evening, the rain blowing in over the sea from the west.
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Where a beach can be two things, and a castle is a bird sanctuary.
Peel, on the west of the island, is a Viking settlement and fortress, with a ruined castle and interior chapel still gripping to the craggy islet of St Patrick’s amidst the foam and spray of the Irish Sea. Once, it was only connected to the Isle of Man by a causeway, but now the Fenella bridge can swing open or closed to let walkers visit and fishing boats out of the harbour.
Here there are fulmars and gannets, guillemots, manx shearwater and even puffins. Standing with my back to the castle looking out towards Ireland, which was out of sight under grey skies, sea birds scooped and speared across the water, and picked their way across the jagged rock.
Waking up to the sound of waves is a luxury, and when we moved the van across town to the Fenella car park for breakfast I watched the crashing and spilling over the cliffs from my cosy bed. An update from Race Control warned of rain later in the day and wet roads from a dousing overnight, so rather than speed back to Douglas we settled in for a morning on Peel harbour, enjoying perhaps the only few hours of sunshine of the day.
The night before, and the whole reason we came to Peel, the beach was dug into pits and peaks for the sand race. A 40 year tradition, we were told!
Black Dog Pizza, where thin crusts border on flammkuchen and the outdoor yard is a very cool place to sit and drink and eat and overhear people talk about the glass deposit system (recently imposed, apparently people were walking off and chucking their plastic cups into the sea.) We very much enjoyed our pints of Norseman lager and thyme roasted mushroom pizza, and I’d like to come back when the crowd is more typical (aka. I want to meet some genuine IOM hipsters. Do they exist? I’m intrigued.)
Pints before bed came from the excellent seafront pub The Marine Hotel, somewhere I’ve walked past maybe a million times, but never been inside before. I was cold from watching the sand races, I was thirsty for beer, it was perfect. Built in a sort-of pentagon shape with the bar in the middle, rooms are sectioned off for exploring, the front room being the busiest, the back room for dining, the side snug for pictures of Elvis, etc. etc.
We will be coming back here for food. The menu of pies and butties was exemplary, and there was black forest gateau on the pudding board. If you think I’m not eating pub black forest gateau, you are gravely mistaken.
After our first pints we were gently accosted by a man in a red bandanna and gold hoop earrings who wanted to discuss ghost apparitions. Only too happy to oblige.
The only way to eat breakfast in Peel, in my opinion, is to scoff a Manx kipper bap with cream cheese while walking along the front.
The Fish Bar, a little cabin in-between the castle and the prom, is where to get one. The lovely man will fry your salty, smoky kippers in butter in front of you while you look at the beautiful tubs of pickled shellfish you might snack on later. A bite is strangely like the best bacon butty you’ve ever eaten—crisp but meltingly fatty, salt balanced by creamy cheese spread, except with the scent of the sea all around. Eat on the move while the butter drips down your wrist and the fish is still hot from the pan.
This is my first foray into writing a newsletter on my phone, so if you notice any typos, please don’t tell me.
This past week has been seven long days of practice sessions, qualifying sessions, bike fixing, and a couple of races. The first Superbike and Supersport races roared over the island at the weekend, and after nights of hearing bikes screaming on the dyno I finally got to watch them take flight from the Grandstand and down Bray Hill.
Usually I watch from the hedges, but we’ve been busy in the paddock all week so I’ve become a regular at Trackside, the fan park bar. I’ve never really spent much time there in previous years—it’s a great place for a pint while the racers cross the finish line, but I’ve tended to use it as a pre-drinks place until now. This year, I’m on my own a lot while Tom and the rest of the team fettle and clean and do complicated-sounding data analysis, so having somewhere to be right in the thick of it when I haven’t got time to travel to Hillberry or Ballagary or Ramsey has been a super bonus find. The screens show the live coverage, you’re right beside the track—as the name would suggest—so you can hear the bikes roaring out of the pits, there’s a wine bar run by local wine shop Vino, and it feels totally safe. I get a burger and a beer, sit down on the grass in front of the big screens and the stage (yep, there’s a stage) and live my version of a festival lifestyle. It’s ideal. It’s heaven.
Inside the beer tent it’s a different vibe, and I’ve decided I love it. At the back of the park the queue for beer is long, but it goes fast, and while you wait you can watch the race coverage and overhear race gossip and outlandish claims about tenuous links to racers, the gear they’re using, and who’s going to win. Stand inside the tent to watch the screens and you’re transported to a European sports bar, you know the type, where everyone is raising their plastic cups and cheering one minute, and shouting mean expletives the next. Groups of men in matching shirts buy Carling in rounds, and get increasingly demonstrative with each other, arms around shoulders, laughs getting louder. It’s been sunny and we’re all a little red, excited to be brought together watching a sport we all love. Except this is not usual, we’re not watching football. We’re at the TT, and we’re experiencing it together. A man slaps Tom on the shoulder and wishes us well—we’re wearing our Butterfields of Skipton Shaun Anderson team shirts. Davey Todd posts a faster lap than Dunlop—there’s an uproar. Dunlop comes back—more cheering. I’ve somehow found my people, and they are, inexplicably, unexpectedly, totally improbably, drunk middle aged men dressed in motorcycle merch.
