Author: Katie Mather

In the past few weeks, I’ve really gotten into baking.

There’s an internal struggle within me every time I start enjoying what are known as traditional women’s chores. This time last year I got really into cleaning, and while I do still enjoy a good washing machine deep clean even now that particular fever is over, the guilt remains. Am I wasting my time with these tasks? Who am I doing them for? Am I enjoying the process of cleaning, or am I procrastinating, or having an obsessive episode, or feeling duty-bound? Shouldn’t I be doing something more worthwhile?

There is guilt for baking and cooking and cleaning, and there is guilt when I do none of these things. I see dust on the TV and feel guilty for reading and writing all afternoon. I see an unread book, and feel guilty for spending the morning making buns and mopping the floors.

I bake biscuits mostly, and sometimes bread or cakes. Things we generally eat. Filling the biscuit tin with coffee and chocolate cookies (Ruby Tandoh’s recipe from Flavour is brilliant, please give it a go) makes me feel prepared and settled. Like I’ve done something that wasn’t work, and created something delicious that I can enjoy. Right now I’m thinking about how good I’ll feel once the lemon drizzle cake I plan to make this afternoon is cooling on the wire rack. Once I’ve written 1000 more words, obviously.

HELP ME!

Soon it’ll be a whole year since The Gulp began. I was thinking about putting something together using my favourite editions, but to be honest, they were never meant to be anything but quick, disposable blog posts.

I’d like to share things you like in the 1st Birthday edition in a month’s time to celebrate the milestone. Show me stuff you’ve found online that you love and that you think others will love too.

Send links to katiematherwrites@gmail.com

Thanks!

Other Stuff

• Learning that Ruby Tandoh wrote recipes for The View magazine, I had a look. I’d never heard of them before. It’s a magazine that supports women in the prison system, giving them a space to publish their art, photography, poetry and writing. Obviously, I am now a subscriber. Find out more about the magazine here.

• A great interview with skater Andrew Reynolds in Jenkem Mag, with particular focus on getting sober, and how he’s downsized his life. Trust a skater to remind me what the important things are.

• How weird to finish Wolf Hall this week and think “I wonder what the sweating sickness is”, only for The New Yorker to publish a fascinating essay on the illness and its presence in the Wolf Hall trilogy by Jia Tolentino. Coincidence? Or since we’re trapped indoors are we all just doing and thinking exactly the same things now?

• Before Normal People, there was Sally Rooney’s short story At The Clinic, in which she used Marianne and Connell first.

• Pork pies! The best pork pies!

• Cillian Murphy’s Top 10 favourite books.

• A “found poem” about beer, by Boak and Bailey.

• I’ve really enjoyed reading my Weird Walk zines this week. I’ve also loved getting to know Hellebore. Zines are great.

• I like the ideas and painstaking effort behind Jean-Luc Mylene’s free, striking bird photography than the photographs themselves, but maybe that’s the point. A moment can’t ever live up to months of patient expectation. 

My Stuff

• I’ve got a fair few pieces in this month’s Ferment magazine. Something on mild which I’m really pleased with, something about travelling around the world using the internet (something I do a lot, particularly when I’m anxious and distracted) and an interview with Jaega Wise. None are up on the site yet but you’ll find them in the print mag which has been going out already.

• I’m working on a lot of short stories. If you or someone you know runs a mag or zine and is accepting short story submissions, please let me know! I might not have them on my list!

• I’m running a Zoom coffee morning via my bookstagram account next Wednesday at 10am to talk about books and writing and lockdown. If you’d like to join in, find out how here.

PO – 30, Janvier – Février 2006 © Jean-Luc Mylayne

Apologies to anyone hoping to click on Valerie Kathawala’s piece on wine in Vienna for Pellicle magazine in this week’s newsletter. I’m an idiot and used the wrong URL.

You can find it here.

Thank you to Chris for letting me know about the error! Happy reading.

A fascination with medieval history that I thought I’d left behind in my childhood has been the filter through which I’ve viewed this week. While the world escapes in their own ways, I’ve dug deep into stories filled with knights and monks and detailed architectural musings on 12th Century cathedrals. Instead of dealing with… *gestures vaguely* this, I’m dreaming of ancient oak forests and ten-day travels on horseback to the nearest city; of tournaments, of banners streaming in the strong wind of a late-spring day, and of plate armour shining in the sun. I’m glad of my daily bread and beer, for it is more than I should expect as a common serf in the outer-suburbs of the lands of De Lacy.

What is it about wattle and daub, pottage and monastery politics that I’m loving so much? Because that’s all I’m interested in currently, not even the fun stuff — I want the dark ages, but no magic or dragons, thanks. Is it comforting to think about life continuing through harsh, unyielding circumstances? Do I like learning about sophisticated people from a time I can barely comprehend not only surviving brutality but thriving and shagging and learning Norman French, Latin and sparring techniques to boot? Am I finding solace in the idea that time has slogged on so far from these times and even the worst plagues, battles, fires and slaughters didn’t wipe us out altogether? Or am I envious of a time when people neither understood the importance of washing their hands nor talked about it every second of the day?

I don’t normally theme these newsletters, but since my week has relied very heavily on escapism, that’s exactly what I’m going to focus on. I tried to get a handle on the situation last weekend and all it did was make me go temporarily but extremely mad, so instead I’m in my solar, reading endless rip-roaring post-Arthurian political dramas, drinking beers with friends via video chat and forgetting to write in my journal. And occasionally doing some work until I forget how to spell. (I spelled “bulb” with an “o” yesterday. Still laughing about it. Things are not so well.)

Other Stuff

• Follow Felix Quintana as he tours us through his hometown of LA via his gorgeous “blueprint” cyanotypes taken using Google Earth and scratched with his own symbols of the city.

• David Hockney has been creating and sharing new artworks that in his words depict the renewal and love of the new season. The lead piece is titled: “Do Remember They Can’t Cancel The Spring.”

• Find out about the families who live on the Faroe Islands via this amazingly detailed and interactive longread. I didn’t know that some of the islands were connected by tunnels! And that some were only accessible by helicopter! Be warned, there are maps here, and where there are maps there are hundreds of wasted hours of zooming in and out and snooping around, in my experience.

• Author Reif Larsen did my dream job this week — he wrote a piece on how great travelling via Google Street View is for The New York Times. Nevermind, it’s totally captivating. I’ll allow it.

• Related to my current Medieval obsession, this essay from The Met on the art of the book in the Middle Ages is fascinating. Additional fun: every picture at the top is clickable to find out more about the contents, and see even more of their pages filled with beautiful illuminations and calligraphy.

• An excellent collection of bikepacking videos found by Tom on Bikepacking.com. Go to Mongolia. Go to The Cairngorms. Go to Canada, go to Colorado, go to Alaska and feel lucky that you don’t have to get as cold, muddy, exhausted and filthy as the people in the films. (But maybe note down some of the places for future dream trips.)

• Valerie Kathawala’s beautiful story on the wine culture of Vienna is so breezy and enchanting and full of interesting facts– and I loved learning that in Austria, vineyards are there to be enjoyed by EVERYONE.

• Claire Bullen’s tour of the beer cellars of the Czech Republic is as emotive and lavishly descriptive as you’d hope. It made me thirsty. And hungry. And jealous.

My Stuff

• This week Original Gravity reached out to me to ask if I wouldn’t mind them re-publishing my piece on holiday lagers. Of course not! I love this piece, and I’m so proud that it was one of my first ever pieces published outside of my blog. I hope you enjoy it.

• I was chuffed to be able to write a big old longread on Wide Street Brewery for Ferment Magazine. Meeting Sean and Carla was a highlight of Carnivale Brettanomyces last year and while I wish I could have been there in person to interview them, I’m glad to be sharing their unique, community-supported, communithy-supporting brewery with you.

David Hockney — Do Remember They Can’t Cancel The Spring

Nobody is dealing with the virus very well and that’s okay. How can you deal with something you can’t comprehend? 

I really could do without the constant entrepreneurial Instagram posts about it though. I don’t want to make the most of my lockdown. Nobody should feel the need to. We should be resting, staying safe, calling the people we care about and keeping our minds and bodies ticking over. So with that in mind, here is my list of things the Covid-19 pandemic is not:

1. The pandemic is not a writers’ retreat.

2. It is not an opportunity to work on my career (nor should I feel guilty for not doing so).

3. It is not a sign that I should be spending more time on self-care.

4. It is not possible to understand what it will mean for the future.

5. It is not glazed with silver linings, neither should I disregard any optimism I might feel.

6. It is not my own personal tragedy or an excuse to feel sorry for myself.

I haven’t been on Twitter (except a few weak-moment check-ups) for nearly two weeks because the constant rolling updates were getting to me, but honestly, it’s mainly because of the snark. The endless snark. The thing that pushed me over the edge was seeing people taking the piss out of other people using their quarantined time at home to learn how to make bread. I don’t know why this was my breaking point, but I truly snapped.

Bake your bread. Read your books. Nap your naps. Stay safe, take care and do what you can to stay mentally strong throughout this.

Other Stuff

• Bake your bread! This no-knead bread is great if you’re feeling exhausted, have limited mobility in your arms/hands/shoulders or you just don’t wanna knead.

• Hate bread? Not to worry, Jack Monroe has some amazing, cheap and totally store cupboard-friendly recipes to get you through the isolation period.

• I discovered American-Korean artist Yaeji this week and I can’t get enough. Her track “Waking Up Down” is a modern anthem. “I got waking up down/I got cooking down/I got making my list and checking down/I got hydrating down”

• There’s a new wine publication in town and it’s growing free and wild. Planet Of The Grapes is over on Medium and there are tons of great people writing for it already, including my fellow Trossenwein harvester Valerie Kathawala who directed me towards it. Her piece on “Disrupting German Wine” is a must-read, as is Alicia Kennedy’s fascinating look at rosé wine’s unpopularity in Spanish wine-drinking Puerto Rico — spoiler alert, it’s because of toxic masculinity. Finally, read this piece “Wine In Strange Times”, where wine legends talk about what they’re drinking right now. What pairs well with apocalypse?

• Get ready for a ton of art content from The Guardian: 

• First, a sensitive look at the late Kenny Rogers’ photography. I wish I’d been aware of his photography while he was alive. It’s so atmospheric and dramatic. I love it.

• I’m working on a History of Art A level at the moment — it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Maybe I’ll talk about it another time. That means I’ve started reading art and exhibition reviews. This week I was studying mythological and religious painting, so I read this review by Laura Cumming on Titian: Love, Desire, Death.

• The Museum Catherijneconvent in Utrecht is offering would-be visitors to their Miracles exhibition to call instead and hear about — or share their own — miracle.

• And some escapism: The best online galleries to visit, and download Smartify, who are making all of their audiotours free for the rest of the year.

• End of Guardian transmission.

• I read this poem and I really liked it. Is there ever a better reason to share a poem?

• I love, love, LOVED this piece by Josh Barrie on Vesta noodle nostalgia. I was excited at the thought of the weekly shop rolling out of bursting carrier bags over the kitchen countertops. Perfect, rose-tinted memories of the best time of the week — the day the fridge got re-stocked. I needed this comfy, cosy vision of simple domestic contentment, and I’m determined to replicate it in my house.

My Stuff

• I filed a piece last week! And I’m going to do another one this week! 

• I was invited to be a part of Brussels Beer City’s Cabin Fever podcast. You can find the episode I’m on here.

• I have been re-reading my Trossen piece a lot because it’s giving me serious escapism vibes.

• I’m stuck in a feedback loop of wanting to do more with my time, and seriously struggling to cope once I try to do more with my time. There’s no point to this statement, I just wanted you to know that I’m as *anguish noise* as you right now.

• I’m going to try and write more fiction. I keep saying that, but I’m actually going to do it. I’m trying to think of a way to get short stories out to you once I’ve written a few I’m happy to publish/share. Bear with me on that. (If you have any ideas, let me know!)

“West Coast near San Francisco” — Kenny Rogers

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

The thing I love about the idea of “manifesting” is that really it’s just thinking really hard about stuff you want, and occasionally saying it out loud to yourself while you potter about the house.

I’ve been seeing New Year’s Resolution speak bleed into the often manipulative world of self-care and motivational meme accounts online all year. Feeling sad? Have a bath (do I have to?) and write down five things you’ve achieved this week (five???). Anxiety flare-up? Keep a diary (oh great, another task to feel guilty about not doing) and make a list of everything that’s making you anxious (why? What a terrible idea!) and how you can solve those problems (omg you can’t). 

New Year can be super stressful, especially if your future is uncertain. Tom and I have a year of uncertainties ahead of us and that’s turning some cogs inside me, especially now we’re over the threshold of a new year. No self-help podcast or Instagram posi-post can help me now. So this year I’m manifesting in a different way. Of course I have career goals — I’m still me, come on — but the main things I’m putting out there as my serious 2020 energy are health, resilience and strength. So if you see me out and about and I’m muttering under my breath, this is what I’m doing. I’m probably not cursing anyone.

Other Stuff:

• This, on “nostalgic” dining and reactions against delicate food, modern ingredients and New Nordic by Jon Bonné is really interesting, and the illustrations are delicious too. 

• I learned so much in this, a beautiful story about how preparing osechi brings a Japanese-American family together to celebrate traditions handed down from their great grandparents.

• (I got both of these links through reading Emily Wilson’s brilliant newsletter Some Meals Considered. Sign up, you won’t regret it.)

• How the Cats musical has kept Faber publishing independent and solvent.

• You’ve probably read this already, but please read it again. The Guyliner’s Hogmanay Kiss. It’s an annual tradition.

• Dog walking created an unexpected support network for Rachel Charlton-Dailey, and that’s another good reason why dogs are great.

• The Pellicle Positivity Report is a great read if you’re interested in what we, the Pellicle people, enjoyed about 2019. I reveal my favourite beer of the year in it, FYI.

My Stuff:

• I wrote this silly thing about being a crap Kombucha parent and to be honest, I just want to write more silly things now.

Ladling chicken broth into heirloom lacquer bowls for ozoni.Credit…
Hilary McMullen for The New York Times

Despite the Mercury Retrograde (which I am absolutely, resolutely ignoring, this week has been pretty good to me so far), I’ve been trying a lot of new things. I started running again, I enrolled on a course (WSET L2), I did some public speaking and I’ve gone on a press trip by myself — which meant flying by myself too.

Despite my severe fear of flying (I might have mentioned it) I was more concerned about the public speaking. I’m never a fan of being treated as an authority. I’m a journalist. I do research and collate it; I get other people to give me authoritative quotes, and I fan around them with decorative waffle. Giving my opinion on anything makes me extremely uneasy, especially because my memory is notoriously bad and I can’t stand up to further questioning. I’m also very willing to please, and hate getting into arguments. Everything unravels. Give me an hour and a sheet of paper and I’ll give you a decent explanation.

I think this is why I do things like enrol on official courses (see top paragraph) and all my books have annotations and bits of post-it sticking out of them. I want to learn. It would be nice to be an expert on something instead of a potterer in everything. But then people would ask me for my opinion, and I’d hate that.

I’m in Dublin now, which is why this newsletter is so early. I’m getting to spend an hour in Guinness’ archives. I think the stout festival should be more exciting — and I’m looking forward to it, don’t get me wrong — but an hour in the archives? Dream. Living it.

Other Stuff:

• Mothercare, yes, the baby shop, had a huge impact on music throughout the 80s, 90s and now. This tweet thread goes through it step-by-step.

• West Kerry Brewery has had a tragic and difficult recent past. Breandán Kearney’s emotive, heart-achingly sad, beautifully written piece on how owner Adrienne Heslin got through and how the brewery is succeeding now had me very literally in tears. No internet hyperbole for you there. I was crying in an airport Burger King.

• Staying with important music discoveries, Pellicle has begun a new series of mixtape features which I am fully on board with. The first is by editor and co-founder of Pellicle Jonny Hamilton and it starts with Arab Strab and I love it.

• This month’s BEER magazine (CAMRA’s monthly mag) was a really good read. I especially liked Matt Curtis’ piece on the new wave of cider. New wave cider? Nu-cider? Neo-heritage? Someone stop me from creating these horrible non-genres. Anyway, it’s great and really, really exciting to see in such a publication.

• According to Jacob Dean for Vinepair, local businesses are gaining solvency after economic decline in rural Japan. I met this in rural northern Spain too, and it’s super interesting to see hop growing taking the form of a cash crop and bringing craft beer to areas which may not have been into it to begin with.

• In photos: New Yorkers on their lunch breaks in the 1970s, captured by Charles Traub. A joy.

• Great timing for this piece for me — Beth Demmon talks witchcraft and brewsters in this interesting and informative piece about the ties brewing has always had to magic, and the brewers who use it in their everyday processes. 

• Caroline O’Donoghue is a peach on twitter, but she’s also a fantastic writer. This interview with Richard E. Grant from January earlier this year shows she’s also a warm, informed and incisive interrogator too.

• I liked this deep dive into the book Cork Dork because I just finished it this week and had So Many Thoughts… and because it’s a couple of years old, someone else had already laid them all out with answers for me. Useful!

• Hello to everybody who was at Salford Independent Beer Festival last week. What a wonderful festival, and what a warm, welcoming atmosphere. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

My Stuff

• If you subscribe to Beer52/Ferment mag, you’ll find two pieces by me in there this month — one about the amazing Abbeydale Brewery Funk Fest, and one about the history and relevance of amphorae.

• I put out a tweet earlier this week asking what you’d like me to write. I’m interested.

Unnamed Woman — Charles Traub, 197?

It’s my 20th newsletter. Something I started out as a trial has turned into a regular ritual. I like that.

I like milestones and I hate them too. My life is filled with them, arbitrary as most of them seem. Some of them seem to exist to taunt me, but some of them show me how far I’ve come. The date I should have been at my graduation. The anniversary of my move to London (complete with ceremonial one-way train ticket). The anniversary of me moving back North. The day I quit my day job. I don’t note them down and I don’t celebrate them, I just know them. Which is strange for a person who does not know any of her friends and loved one’s birthdays.

I’m notoriously bad at keeping up routines. Writing these emails every week reminds me of when I learned that I wanted to write, when I would (and could) write on anything about any subject, because the outcome didn’t matter, I just wanted to feel the freedom of letting my tangled thoughts connect. I corrected a bad book in its margins. I wrote an album review on catering blue roll. I didn’t think about what I was writing or who it was for, just that I was creating something. For a long time I’ve missed that feeling. Having this newsletter gives me some ownership back, and has made me work harder to make my Job Writing more personal, and less interested in who it’s for. So thanks for being a part of that.

To celebrate 20 editions, I’ve donated £20 to First Story. Please follow the link to find out about the amazing work they do.

Other Stuff

• Marissa A. Ross’ Unfiltered column for Bon Appétit has quickly become one of my favourite ever things on the internet, but I hadn’t read this, her first piece about it, until this week. And I love it. Her frank and honest enthusiasm, love and joy and total lack of inhibition or pretence is a breath of fresh air in wine writing. She is, and I’m not exaggerating here, a hero.

• If you need a moment of calm, please put on Glue by Bicep and think about the sea. This week on Twitter someone asked what song, if any, “kept you alive”. This one did for me. (But also the video is great and beautiful and so I want you to rewind once you’re done and watch it from the start.)

• “The Demolition of Bow Brewery” by Elwin Hawthorne made me feel all kinds of things, especially since Thwaites’ is currently in the process of being demolished in the centre of Blackburn. (HT to East London Group and Boak and Bailey for sharing it in the first place).

• Don’t drink Founder’s beer.

• This piece on Rekjavik’s beer scene and violent stormy weather is a real beauty. Look: “This peninsula of water and concrete and black beaches of volcanic sand reaching into the distance like photographic negatives of a Caribbean paradise was its own intoxication.” Yeah. See.

• Speaking of milestones, Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver talk to Gilly Smith about 25 years of St. John, trotters, moving AA Gil to tears, Marchella Hazan, Anthony Bourdain, Fergus’ pioneering surgery, and “cosmic restaurants” in the Delicious podcast. “If you have a whole room full of people eating happily, it’s music.”

• A series of pieces on how maps have shaped people’s lives. I love maps. I love personal stories. This is a great and highly emotional series. My faves are (and they are all good but these are my favourite two):
  Darran Anderson escaping to the 16th Century using the Carta Marina and all its myths and monsters during The Troubles; I mean jesus, look at this for an intro: “My grandfather was a cartographer, though not in an academic sense. For decades, he earned a living on the sea, primarily as a fisherman but also as a smuggler, a minesweeper, and a retriever of the drowned.”
  Suchandrika Chakrabarti found an old tube map in her mother’s wardrobe after she died, knowing that she would have used it to navigate London as a new immigrant from Kolkata. “When I was a teenager, she confessed to me that the loneliness of early motherhood had surprised her, and made her question the decision she’d made to move so far away. As I moved my eyes over the map, I recalled that confession.”

My Stuff

• ICYMI: A piece I wrote for Ferment about social clubs.

• Not much published recently — a lot on the submitted and currently-working-on pile though.

• I’m heading to Leeds next month to speak at Leeds Trinity University’s Journalism Week as an alumni. Writers: What would you tell aspiring journalists and writers about the job?

“The Demolition of Bow Brewery” by Elwin Hawthorne

I had a poster of a Radiohead concert on my wall when I was a teenager. Nothing weird about that really, except that it wasn’t of Radiohead. It was a photo taken from behind and slightly above and to stage left of them as they played to a huge crowd, and the lights revealed faces in the crowd. It fascinated me. Seeing all those expressions staring up at the band I loved, and nobody was looking directly into the lens. I used to lose myself in it, imagining being there, imagining being one of those people, or being stood beside them and hijacking some of their energy.

Even though I took that poster down when I moved out in 2006 and it ripped and I put it in the bin, I can still remember some of the people on it. Their total happiness, or how overwhelmed they were, or how their eyes were closed and their arms were outreached towards the band who were just shadows to me. It was my favourite poster, and I used to think about why that was all the time.

Surely I would, if I really liked Radiohead, prefer a photo of them performing Creep for the first time (a song I’ve never really liked), or a framed piece of their artwork, or even a shot of the band doing one of those 90s/00s band-photo things like standing around a battered old oil drum in a warehouse car park while wearing moth-eaten jumpers. But why would I want that, when what I had was something that showed thousands of people feeling the same way I felt about the band that I loved? It makes sense to me now.

Other stuff

• Please read this by Nicci Peet for Pellicle on Roger Wilkins the cider king. Gorgeous photos — of course — but a poignant story well told too.

• This piece on how brewers move on after their flagship beer becomes defunct is interesting, but it’s also kinda sad in a way. I don’t like it when things disappear.

• “We’re all friends with each other, and I don’t know how to define that in a business structure,” is probably the nicest sentence I’ve ever read in an industry-based article. Read this now on natural wine-making in Santa Cruz.

• A history of Lake District climbing on slate because why not? It’s my newsletter and I wanted to read about Hodge Close.

My Stuff

• I’ve been revisiting my piece about Black Hand Wine this week because it has shaped where my life has gone ever since. Meeting Sam Jary changed my perspective on wine, and it’s down to his stories and passion about his own harvests that I even considered doing my own this past week. So from mid-Mosel, prost Sam.

• I wrote a blog post last week about the Spanish craft beer term “cerveza artisanale” and how it means much more than “craft beer”.

• I didn’t just watch the TT when I went to the Isle of Man. I also drank really delicious cider made from local crab apples. And now I’ve written about it for Ferment mag.

Photo by Nicci Peet

Last week I started writing something and the words just fell out. It was scary. I usually find trying to force myself to work on a personal project difficult, especially when it’s something I really want to do. Perfectionism is a hell of a drug.

When you’re told you’re a perfectionist, but your hair’s a mess and you’ve got 14 books on your “now reading” pile (it’s actually 16 now) and you got a 2:1 in your degree, it sounds laughable. But then the truths come. You’re afraid to start things because you won’t be able to carry them out perfectly. You don’t finish things you’re not 100% happy with because there’s no point in completing something that’s flawed. It’s better not to try than to fail. 

I didn’t like this. I don’t like it when anyone tells me a truth about myself to be honest, but this was a particularly hurtful one. What do you mean I don’t try hard enough? Are you saying I can’t be bothered to succeed?

No. That’s not what perfectionism is. It’s about not wanting to shovel effort after effort into something and it not turn out exactly as you wanted it to. Perfection isn’t attainable. It doesn’t stop me from fearing that everything I do won’t be perfect.

That’s what this newsletter is, by the way. I send it out knowing it’s not perfect. It’s terrifying, but it seems to be doing me good. I’ve written almost 10,000 words of something I’m tentatively calling a novel and I’m nowhere near stopping yet. Perfect is bullshit.

Other Stuff

• Meet the Algonquin Hotel cat, a polite and friendly concierge who can’t validate your parking, but may validate your existence. His name is Hamlet VIII and he’s got four oil portraits of himself.

• Todd Phillips is a slurry puddle of a man but everyone has used up all their meaningless swearwords on him already. This skewering of him is fair and eviscerating.

• Finlay Pringle is the hero sharks, and the rest of the world, needs.

• Cookbook tester and editor JJ Goode has written about what chefs do that home cooks definitely shouldn’t bother their arses doing. And it’s so relieving.

• Garrett Oliver has written about pairing beers with art for the MoMA and it’s brilliant. So thoughtful and playful. That bit about IPA and Boat Ride, Rye Beach and toxic male energy? Yowch. The Double IPA paired with Elaine de Kooning’s vibrant, explosive “Bullfight”. And he admits he likes Newcy Brown too, which I massively approve of.

• A beautiful and sweetly funny look at the tolerant, inclusive, diverse country of Jordan, and its emerging drinks scene. God I want to go drink Carkale’s beers.

• A fascinating look at the breweries of Palestine’s West Bank by Robin LeBlanc. I was pleasantly surprised to read in this that one of the brewers studied in Preston. It’s a small world.

• Scientists are finding that the most accurate records they can use to chart climate change are from wine grape harvests. Wine history is climate change history, from its trends to its disasters.

• Quite a tongue in cheek one here from Outside magazine linking the history of civilisation alongside rivers, using beer label art. It’s a reach, but I enjoyed it.

• The beautiful mosaics of Zeugma, Turkey, rescued from flood damage.

• Parenting in the American beer industry — a vital and revealing look at how little support there is for parent brewers. As well as being a great piece on an important subject, please click the link for adorable photos of Danii Oliver, owner of Island to Island Brewing’s, beautiful kids.

• Spiders can fly. I don’t mean to alarm you, but it’s true. And the way they do it is by drifting off on celestial electrical currents. Newfound respect for spiders, to be honest.

My stuff

• If you subscribe to Beer52 or get Ferment magazine, I’ve got three articles in there this month — one on wine, one on cider in the Isle of Man, and one on playing pool in a social club. Have a butchers.

• The Elderberry Porter Tom and I brewed at Moorhouse’s last month is now available at Holmes Mill in Clitheroe and the Thirsty Fish in Bury.

• I’ve written a blog post about how they’re not as squeamish as we are about defining “craft” in Spain.

• I’m heading off to Mosel on Sunday. My luggage is now mostly books. Currently running on 98% fear, 2% brandy.

• I handed in my notice with several of my marketing clients this week so I can concentrate on writing my book. God, writing that sentence was difficult. While I’m sure this wasn’t a terrible idea, if you enjoy receiving these newsletters please consider sending me a pint via Ko-fi. I need support and encouragement now more than ever! Reaching out like this feels horrible! Yikes I am bad at this! Thank you!

Section of mosaic from Zeugma, Turkey.