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50: Where Have You Been?

A lot of the directions my life has taken have been because of my political views and ethics. I studied journalism because I wanted to report the truth (lol). I’ve been an activist in many ways since I was a kid. Ever since I got a peace sign sticker at a bike rally that said “Ban The Bomb” across the bottom, and I didn’t know what it meant, and my dad made fun of the “hippies” I thought were cool who gave it to me. I chose then that I’d rather have worn the sticker and associated with them than with the person who couldn’t tell me why not banning bombs was cooler or better. I stuck the sticker on the wooden headboard of my bunk bed, and I thought about how big the world was, and how there was so much I didn’t know.

I haven’t been a vocal activist about anything for a long time. I’ve been barely-active in the most minimal ways — signing petitions, writing to my MP from time to time, RTing things I stand for. Calling myself anti-fascist. Sending money to charities. But I’ve been deeply afraid of confrontation. Something, I don’t really know what, probably a combination of complicated things, totally knocked the bravery out of me for years. And through that I dug myself into a huge guilty hole. I should be doing more. I could be doing more. On it went.

So, if you’re seeing a lot of noise from me this week and wondering where it’s come from, it’s because I’m back. I don’t know where I’ve been, but I’m here; for Black and Minority Ethnic people, for my LGBTQIA+ family, for feminism, for the working class, for the underprivileged, for the marginalised. A fire has been lit and I’m ready to show up for you and for the future. I’m sorry to have waited this long. And I’m hoping it’s not too little too late.

Getting to this point was not something I did alone. Hundreds of activists, some of them might even read this, who actually show up and do the work have shown me that speaking up against injustice is not inappropriate or somehow diluting or diverting the message. Getting it wrong is nothing to be afraid of — I just need to use my voices and my privilege for good, and educate myself so that I can learn from those mistakes.

Other Stuff

(I read and bookmarked a lot more features than this this week but I’m going to roll them over to next week because this newsletter is already overlong. Sorry to anybody who wrote something amazing about food and drink this week that I’ve not included.)

My Stuff

  • It was brilliant to chat to Jaega Wise, brewer, broadcaster and one of the busiest women in beer for Ferment magazine. I love it when interviews with beer folk move into topics of inclusion, gentrification, diversity and accessibility. Read it here.

Illustration by Jeremy Kai for The Torontoist

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The Gulp: Black Lives Matter Edition

I woke up to a text from my bank saying I’d wiped out my funds, but I’m glad. I’m glad I could support black protesters and community projects and bail funds, and buy books written by black writers and activists that I can learn more from, and pass on with highlights and dogeared pages where the good stuff is.

I’m privileged. I don’t live precariously.

I do not expect others to have this same privilege.

Instead of continually asking everyone to donate money (I will still be asking regularly, though, and there will be links in this email for you to do so), I wanted to put together some of the most useful resources I’ve found to arm myself with knowledge. Resources, writings and other content that helps make sense of what it means to be anti-fascist and anti-racist, so that it stops sounding confusing and impenetrable and becomes a natural habit. A way you live your life.

I also wanted to share ideas for other related readings. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Please use it to add to your reading list rather than to define it.

Read up, be safe, no pasarán.

#blacklivesmatter 

This newsletter would not have been possible without the tireless activism and work done by hundreds of incredible individuals online who have taken their valuable time to inform me and the rest of society. Thank you especially to Reclaim The Block, MFF, Black Lives Matter, blackfication, Bry Reed, Kate Neilan, Unicorn Riot, Know Your Rights Camp and therefore Colin Kaepernick, kamaraxtaurus, Heidi Massey, and to everyone who shares their knowledge. Knowledge is power.


Books To Read

(I know I’m adding even more caveats here but if you can, please try to support local independent bookshops and radical bookstores where you can. If you use Amazon, consider using Amazon.Smile and supporting activist and anti-racist charities.)

Non-Fiction

  • Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race — Reni Eddo-Lodge

  • The End Of Policing – Alex S. Vitale (Ebook is currently FREE here)

  • The Portable Frederick Douglass

  • Natives — Akala

  • Black and British — David Olusoga

  • When They Call You A Terrorist — Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele

  • White Fragility — Robin DiAngelo

  • White Rage — Carol Anderson

  • The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

  • On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life — Sara Ahmed

  • On Intersectionality: The Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw

  • The Making Of The Black Working Class in Britain — Ron Ramdin

  • How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — Walter Rodney

  • Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent — Priyamvada Gopal

  • Witnessing Whiteness: First Steps Toward an Antiracist Practice and Culture — Shelly Tochluk

  • Race Matters — Cornell West

  • How To Be an Antiracist — Ibram X. Kendi

  • The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century — Grace Lee Boggs

Fiction/Poetry/Essays/Speeches

  • Your Silence Will Not Protect You — Audre Lorde

  • The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House — Audre Lorde

  • Are Prisons Obsolete? — Angela Davis

  • Freedom Is A Constant Struggle — Angela Davis

  • The Tradition — Jericho Brown

  • Surge — Jay Bernard

  • The Hate U Give — Angie Thomas

  • From Caucasia, With Love — Danzy Senna

  • The Weary Blues — Langston Hughes

  • Beloved — Toni Morrison

  • Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi

Articles To Read/Speeches To Watch

If you are new to the idea of anti-racism, or find conversations about it confusing because of the terminology and language used, a good place to start is: 11 Terms You Should Know To Better Understand Structural Racism. 

Image via Brenda magazine

Resource Packs

If you are white, please take time to look through this impressive document filled with anti-racism resources for white people. It includes articles, podcasts, books and children’s books, films, TV shows and other resources. I don’t know who created the document, but I found it when Brittany Packnett shared it on Twitter.

This anti-oppression resource collated and organised over many years by Heidi Massey is a goldmine of information and knowledge for personal, workplace and wider use.

UK-based anti-racist human rights organisations to follow and support

Where to donate money to support black protesters, communities and projects

Check links to see specifics, but currently these funds are being used to bail protesters out of custody, provide health and aid support to protesters (such as masks and hand sanitiser, and first aid) and support anti-prison abolitionist activism.

(There is a LOT here and it seems overwhelming. How can you choose who to support? Please know that your vocal support for all of the groups posted below is greatly needed and appreciated, whoever you choose to back with your cash.)

Bail Funds and Community Action Funds

City-specific bail funds and details of legal help and attorneys willing to offer pro-bono for protestors can be found in this document. I do not know the author of it, and found it when it was shared on twitter by kamaraxtaurus.

Social Justice Action Groups

Activist Groups to Follow and Support

A public art installation as part of the Heavy Rag collection – Zoe Buckman
(This artwork was created to provoke discussion around the violence of domesticity and violence against women. Buckman said:
“It speaks to the concept that in this climate, inaction and apathy are tantamount to violence and that we all have a responsibility to do what we can to make this a safer and more just country for everyone.” 
I don’t wish to co-opt it’s intended message for another purpose, but I felt like it was appropriate on many different levels today.)

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47: Trade-Off

If this newsletter is my “good” notebook, Twitter has always been my scrap paper — torn envelopes and kitchen roll left all over the place that lay out terrifyingly truthful recollections of my life experiences and reveal more about me than I ever expected them to.

Social media helps me to generate ideas, but it whisks them away from me too soon. I can visit them, but when they are out, they aren’t mine to mould anymore. These instant, unstudied, still-forming thoughts belong to the commenters, who frame them with their own points of views and experiences, and draw meanings that I had not thought of, and add quips or edits I had chosen not to include in the first place. This is writing — I understand that. Words are taken in by readers in their own personal ways. That’s how it works. But Twitter has taught me, over time, that I have no control over what I create there. I have been feeding it with my raw, uncompromised self for over a decade, and it has given me career and comfort in return. It’s also taken thousands of ideas from me. It has been a part of my life for so long that I have trained my thoughts to form in attention-grabbing sentences, like a pointed foot used to uncomfortable shoes. Hundreds of stories are unwritten because I didn’t have the patience to do more than outline a base synopsis of them and send it out into my small corner of the world for instant gratification. That gratification makes me lazy. Why spend energy nurturing a crop when I could just eat the seeds?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I say I use Twitter for (jobs, friendship) and what I am increasingly using it for instead (vanity, distraction, comparing myself to others). It has been a constant in my life for so long that I find it hard to imagine living without it. What I have worked out though, is that I can’t use it the way I have been and do the work I want to do at the same time. So I’ve chosen the work. I’m not quitting Twitter altogether, but I’m using it less. I’m weaning myself off it. Twitter was the creative outlet I needed when I had nothing else. But you have to know when something good has become bad for you. I don’t know if the trade-off is in my favour anymore.

Other Stuff

  • The Washington Post begin this piece on the names of all the streets in every state of America with a two-pronged pre-empting of the critiques they expect people to have about the article. The article itself is pretty cool and has a great map infographic, but I found that aspect just as interesting.

  • Out of nowhere I remembered that the first long feature I can ever remember thinking “wow, I didn’t even care about the topic but that was super interesting” about was a Kings Of Leon article in Rolling Stone. I found the piece after some Googling (it’s from 2005.) I still really enjoyed it!

  • The New York Public Library has released an album of ambient sounds called “Missing Sounds Of New York”. You can take a cab to 110th and 3rd, go to a busy bar, hang out in a park with real New Yorkers, or sit on a stoop and people watch as skaters fly past in front of an impromptu parade. It feels like an important document of our time and I’m expecting some great sampling to be taken from it. (Find it on Spotify. — and please listen out for the guy in the library that says “patience and fortitude” because that’s my favourite bit.)

  • Rebecca Solnit talks about how fairytales have given her context to live in during this weird, unrealistic time.

  • This BBC documentary on colours in art is some excellent brain-burnout salve.

  • Lots to share from Pellicle this week: A great playlist from cidermaker Tom Oliver who seems to be the coolest man in the world, Lily Waite’s wonderful profile on Ross On Wye and Eoghan Walsh’s story on Antidoot, all of which are perfect for a touch of escapism. Even though Eoghan’s reminded me that we were meant to have drank some of that Antidoot together by now. That virus has a lot to answer for.

  • It was meant to be Eurovision this weekend. I love Eurovision. There will be a weird celebration stand-in show on Saturday instead that is meant to include, among other things, “crowdsourced karaoke” which I can’t wait for because I can’t imagine it’s going to be anything other than terrible. Here’s a run-down of what this years’ artists are doing instead of performing in Rotterdam via The Guardian.

  • I bought Rutger Bregman’s Humankind last week and in it is the story of a “real life Lord Of The Flies” — only in this version the boys worked together and survived. One of the boys, Mano, is now 73 and sharing his story with more people than he ever expected to.

  • Big thanks to Rachel for introducing me to Alicia Kennedy’s insightful, excellent, excellent, excellent newsletter on food, food politics, the food industry, eating, and everything else that overlaps the complex world which we either work in or are in some part exposed to at all times.

  • This new track by Booka Shade has repeatedly destroyed me this week. If you’re allergic to earnest people saying positive things over prog house music, please don’t bother listening to it because you’ll hate it and feel compelled to tell me about it and I couldn’t care less.

  • Look at these Big, big waves by ocean photographer and super positive guy Ray Collins.

Oil by Ray Collins

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46: Sky Ferry

I can fool myself that the white-painted wall of the back of my house is the sunbaked stone of an unfamiliar place, for a moment, when I wake up in the garden. Dredged resisting like ocean mud from groggy sleep, I squint confused at the chalk-white tower rising on my right, and the box of clear blue above, and feel the buzz of high UV, pollution-free sun, and momentarily I am elsewhere.

At this new perspective, wispy clouds drift across the blank blue sky like the exhaust fumes of an island ferry and I remember I am trapped here.

Other Stuff

  • The Hay Festival is cancelled, but sometimes good things happen to bad times. It’s heading online for Hay Festival Digital from the 18 – 21 May. This actually makes it more accessible to me, and I assume, for many other people too. You can register for any of the online events here.

  • I have become a huge fan of Elizabeth Taylor’s writing (the novelist, not the actress) and this biographical piece from the New Yorker archive is particularly interesting because it speaks about her apparent conflict and refusal to choose between home and creative burdens.

  • I love sitcoms, and I love detail, so when I noticed that the pigs in Brooklyn 99 (sorry Amy) were drinking the same beer as Ultimate Man Nick Miller from New Girl, I had to investigate. It turns out that Heisler is a totally invented beer brand, designed by a prop company. This article on TV’s favourite fake beer by TV writer Shannon Carlin is fantastic and full of great quotes and I urge you to read it. “You can do anything with Heisler, and that’s part of the joy of it.”

  • Starting an article in this current climate with a quote from Day Of The Triffids, is it? Describing swallows as “dark scythes”, are we? Okay I’m into it. “Finally, as if a veil has been lifted, people are noticing that – even in the heart of the so-called urban jungle – nature has found a place to live.”

  • Lian van Leeuwen at Bikepacker.com writes about the eerie, empty streets of Amsterdam, and thinks about what positives could be gleaned from the epidemic. Her photos are incredibly resonant, but rather than empty, they seem to turn the silent streets into her private playground.

  • Sarah Perry, being more honest and wise than any of us put together. “What I felt when I looked at my shelves was not consolation, but contempt. What good were books, in the end?”

  • I read “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” by Carson McCullers this week, and I was stunned by it. It seemed so perfectly timed in that moment. And I wasn’t even drunk at the time.

  • Mayukh Sen has written furiously and eloquently about the tragic death of chef and restauranteur Garima Kothari for Eater. In the process he asks why the industry focuses on polishing halos rather than seeking out and championing new and undervalued talent. (I found this article really interesting for many reasons, but the parallel between some of his points and what has been said about the beer industry over the years stood out. Adding media and PR skills to your armoury may get you further than talent and graft alone, but should they? It’s a tough one, and as a marketing and journo hypocrite, I don’t have any easy answers.)

  • Sports writers, including my fave Jonathan Liew, talk about how they’re writing about sport when there is no sport to write about.

  • There are some gorgeous exhibits to scroll around at the BALTIC. Abel Rodríguez’s botanical illustrations come from his role in the Muinade community as “el nombrador de plantas” in the Colombian Amazon. 

  • I spent my Sunday morning reading The Wish For A Good Young Country Doctor by Allan Gurganus and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. Midwestern Gothic meets folk horror in a dark tale of human nature, betrayal, mass hysteria, fate and shadows falling on the long, slow passage of time. Oh and for relevance’s sake, it’s also about a cholera epidemic. I’m gonna read it again just now, just quickly.

  • Once you’ve read that, you might like to read why Allan Gurganus finds epidemics so fascinating, and what drove him to write it in the first place. “…if history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it sometimes stutters. We all think it’s happening solely to us. It never is.”

  • Let’s round off with a snowskating cat. Why not.

My Stuff

  • Remember when I used to write stuff?

  • That was alright wasn’t it

  • Don’t worry there is stuff on the way in the next issue of Ferment. 

  • Also I’m working on a couple of things for Pellicle.

  • I’ve been working on fiction a lot this week too, I have a new schedule and it’s working well for me. It’s based roughly on Ursula K. Le Guin’s.

Abel Rodríguez — Photo taken by Rob Harris for BALTIC

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The Gulp Beltane & Pellicle Special!

It’s Beltane today! Happy Beltane!

*Pagan BS incoming, if you’re not predisposed to Pagan BS, please skip to the next bolded section*

Usually this is a celebration of putting the worst of the darker seasons behind us but… let’s try something else this year.

I have yet another upheaval coming my way next week, so I drew some cards last night and turned up the two of cups (useful, supportive), the tower (okay, everything is fucked and I need to “use this opportunity to” build something new out of the rubble, got it) and the Knight Of Wands. This guy gets shit done. So I was pretty happy to burst into Beltane with a combined attitude of “you know what? Fuck it. Nothing is good out there. I need to make things good in here instead for now, and for the future.”

So today that’s what I’m doing. Instead of celebrating the end of winter, I’m rebuilding and setting hopes for the future, and focusing on what I’m grateful for — my health, my family, my friends, butter, full cream milk… I’m planning to head outside and take notice of spring happening, despite every other poisonous thing raging on in the world. I’m also going to light the fire in the garden because even though I can’t jump over it, it’s always cathartic to burn stuff. (I found this article on celebrating Beltane during lockdown if you’re struggling for inspiration.)

By the way, if you’re not feeling it at all and you’re angry and sad and couldn’t care less that spring is here and you found all of the above incredibly infuriating and childish, don’t worry. I found the perfect poem just for you. I’ll be reading it a lot in the coming weeks when I’m too mad to leave the house.

*Pagan BS section over, regular service resuming*

Thanks for staying with me.

I wanted to take some time today to say Happy First Birthday to the wonderful Pellicle Magazine.

A few years ago, when I first locked on to the idea of writing for a living, I didn’t dare imagine that I’d be welcomed onto a platform like Pellicle to share my odd stories. Pellicle — Jonny and Matthew — are supportive editors and have pushed me to continually hone my skills to a level I never thought I’d manage. On top of that, they’ve become good friends, which is all I ever want, if I’m being honest.

I believe in their magazine with all my heart. The stories, photography and illustrations they publish are pushing UK food and drink writing forwards, and I am perpetually honoured to be part of their crew.

Here’s to you, Pellicle. Happy birthday.

My Pellicle articles… so far

Sam Jary in his shop, Black Hand Wine by James Pinder

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45: Betterment, Brutality and Beauty

I started learning Spanish last March. Although I might still only be learning how to say what times of day I eat sandwiches for my lunch and what I did for my birthday last year, I’m seeing more about the way the language moves and forms itself through its own unique culture into phrases. Food is often at the heart of it. The eccentricity in how it problem-solves it’s way around communication makes my brain pop. Everyday phrases are frank with emotion and unburdened by lacy politeness. I couldn’t love it more.

I’ve always been bad at doing my homework. It’s not that I don’t care about the work. I spend a lot of my day thinking about Spanish, and about how fantastic it’ll be one day to speak it fluently and demonstratively, perhaps while holding a glass of wine, or even while driving us (I’ve invented a car full of Spanish friends here) to a brewery somewhere up a pine-lined mountain road. But still I don’t do the work. I’m doing well, but I could be doing better. A legendary Katie school report.

This is why, as well as with many other things I’ve had time to think about over the past few weeks, I’m going to try my best to do better. Last week I spoke to a friend who said they were using this time for “self-betterment”. I didn’t feel up to it then, but I think I do now. And I’m starting it off with 15 minutes a day of Spanish revision. And listening to Rosalía while I scroll doesn’t count anymore.

Other Stuff

Mamgu’s (Grandma’s) Boxes – Katherine Jones

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44: The Sea

I had no idea how much I would miss the sea when all this began. The cold reaching fingers of it brushing my toes. The deep and mottled turqouise of its depths, hanging like a veil over ancient volcanic rock. The peaks of it, rising grey and dirty against a low, steely horizon. Lashing waves crashing in protest against the confines of gloss-painted promenade railings. A loose grip around my ankles. A glossy suspension of reflecting sunlight.

I woke up on the morning of January 1st 2020 totally calm. I’d dreamed of tideless Mediterranean water, and in this dream I’d swum out from a cove carpeted in sand made from tiny particles of pearlescent shells into the wide, flat ocean, and I’d lay on my back and been carried. I had no idea then, and why should I, how far away the sea was.

Other Stuff

  • If you have been looking for ways to help support people in hospitality who have lost everything or who are struggling to get by, this article has a useful list of charities who are doing good work within the industry.

  • A heartfelt paen to Pliny The Elder, by Matthew who has given us so many escapist landscapes to rest in recently.

  • Have you ever noticed that Spain’s wine and cheese is rarely seen as equal to it’s European counterparts? I have, and it pisses me off. So finding this piece on Franco’s push for mass production was really interesting and gave some clue as to what held Spain back, and how artisans are leading the “second golden age”.

  • Sugar Creek Malt are clearly malt artists and this story is so evocative I can almost smell the lavender smoked malt (although that might be my burning lavender sticks.) PS. Malt is cool.

  • Jesus god do I want some curry bread right now.

  • “Honk once for “Amen,” twice for “Glory hallelujah”” — church from the car park, captured by photographer Mark Peterson.

  • I’ve spoken to a lot of people with a lot of different accents this week, and as well as proving to me that speaking to people is usually how to get myself out of writer’s block, it made me wonder why my accents shifts and changes depending on who I’m speaking to. I found no conclusive answers (and one article that flat out told me I was imagining it) but I did find this really weird article on a BBC website about how your accent influences how people feel about you, and within it is a fun photo of Cheryl Tweedie and Prince Charles. I didn’t know what to do with the information it taught me, so now I’m giving it to you.

  • As I was just about to buy a label-maker on eBay last night, I felt like this article was directly attacking me.

  • I wrote about synthetic meat a few months ago. But have you heard of synthetic wine? No grapes, no gravel, no winery: a totally lab-built drink. It sounds pretty disgusting to tractor-and-straw-hat-preferrin’ me, but then again it could bring down carbon emissions compared to mass-produced wine you already think is bad. A quite-interesting read, and it’s not about the virus, which is also probably why I leapt on it. Oh and the techies that made it say things like “we think this is the last frontier of digitisation” which is both hilarious and awful.

  • I discovered Tapas magazine this week, and with it this optimistic speech from winemaker José Moro.  “Wine unites us.” I’ve heard people say that about beer in the UK. (I’m not going to pretend that I am fluent in Spanish, but I try to read it anyway. And google is right there with the translate tool after I give up on the second sentence.)

  • Adnams Brewery, spun in golden yarn by ATJ. Plus some beautiful pictures of Southwold. Escapism. You deserve it.

  • Something to do: On May 2nd Gabe Cook is hosting the world’s biggest cider tasting. Should be fun!

My Stuff

  • This week I was invited back to the Cabin Fever podcast and had a lovely time chatting about writing and tuna with Claire Bullen, Lily Waite and gracious host Eoghan Walsh. Find the episode here. I was surprised to hear myself talking with some degree of sense about creating art during a time like this when everyone is already so self-aware, so please give it a listen if you can.

  • I did writing this week, so expect some published pieces in the coming weeks.

  • I post every day (pretty much) on my book-based instagram, so if you like books, why not give me a follow?

The Iles d’Or — Henri-Edmund Cross

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43: Smoking and New Leaves

I have wanted to smoke every day since lockdown began. Smoking is something I gave up because I knew I should, but I never gave up on being a smoker. It’s a disgusting habit, but I loved it. I still smoke occasionally — I’m allowed a single packet at Christmas, if I feel like it, but for the past two years I’ve not bothered. The thought has become more satisfying than the nicotine rush now. I steal a one from a friend on a night out maybe once a year. I don’t miss the rush of nicotine. I miss standing in glittery velvet clothes, darkly linered eyelids lowered as my cigarette is lit by a friend’s slender chipped-nailpolish hands, warm, happy bodies standing close together, a moment of surreptitious bad behaviour away from the busy bar. Or sat on a wall like kids, sharing one rollie back and forth, comfy in similar jackets and old stories we don’t even have to tell.

*

The leaves have sprung out suddenly and my house is surrounded by colour. The black jagged shapes of trees reaching up to white winter skies changed while I was indoors and on Monday before dusk I was shocked by soft green on branches I had remembered as austere and foreboding. Spring comes every year, but every year I’m surprised by the effect is has on me, and how grateful I am for it. I’m not about to say it’s making The Situation better but I’m finding it helpful to remember that spring reminds me that I’ve made it through winter again. And that’s always reason to celebrate.

Other Stuff

  • Patti LuPone on sparkling form in this New Yorker interview talking sex scenes, how stunning she looks in new series “Hollywood” and being known as “that roaring bitch”, (plus a weird bit about aliens starting the virus????)

  • A sad but vital and interesting piece on British farmhouse cheesemakers and how The Current Situation is affecting them. We’re ordering local beers and supporting local offies, but can we support local dairies and cheesemakers too?

  • The internet isn’t just a place to scroll through. It can be your only safe space. It can be connection. It can be lifesaving. Lily Waite has written these very true and important things in her recent piece for Good Beer Hunting, and you should read it.

  • A stunning thread on the history of Bradley’s Spanish Bar in Fitzrovia/Soho depending on whom you speak to. Greek wrestlers! Flamenco guitarists! Dr Death! Skiffle! It’s a ride.

  • Matthew Curtis had a very busy week this week, and two of his articles published this week were on malt. Fascinating, vital, highly overlooked malt. Here’s his manifesto on why us, the drinkers, should care more about malt. And here is something much more complex but very interesting — the ongoing development of malting technology that’s happening right under our noses to continue making beer better than ever. Malt is cool!

  • A beautiful meditation on the little freedoms we all have if we look up, and getting to know the daily routines of the birds that pass the window by Richard Smyth, who you might know as the nature writer who writes The Guardian’s monthly Country Diary.

  • Rack & Return are doing a daily wine quiz in their Instagram stories and they are a lot of fun (and difficult).

  • Are you interested in the chemicals that make things smell the way they do? Check out this Smithsonian article on the various chemical compounds that make durians smell as… interesting as they do.

  • I’ve been listening to a lot of Bill Withers since his sad passing the other week. This piece from Rolling Stone is a soft, caring portrait of a man that enjoyed his time in the spotlight and has no regrets in choosing to leave that part of his life behind him.

  • Two Easters ago Vogue published a piece on agnelli — traditional Sicilian marzipan artworks — and how the number of artisans creating them are shrinking, they’re still around in New York if you know where to look.

  • A poignant but ever-so-sad look at Brussels during lockdown from Brussels Beer City. “We do not know when they will open again, and some of them never will. But for now, they are in stasis, neither living nor dead. They just wait. And the waiting is the hardest part.” That noise was my heart breaking like a Jupiler glass hitting a tiled floor.

My Stuff

  • As you’re probably aware, I’ve not been achieving much lately. I have a few pieces that should be published in the May edition of Ferment mag, and I’m working on some other things, just very, very, very slowly. I feel like I’m at about 30% efficiency at the moment, and the rest of my brain is powered down, working away dealing with stress and routine change. I’ve never been good with routine change.

  • I should have been at a Libero tap takeover at Altrincham FC today, so instead please read this piece I wrote on craft beer and local football bringing communities together and maybe buy some local beer and send some support to your local club too.

  • Fancy reading even more about malt? I wrote this back in Jan 2019 about heritage malts, and it features one of my fave ever beers, Govinda Chevallier by Cheshire Brewhouse.

Villabate Alba, Bensonhurst by Nikki Krecicki

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42: Comforting Mundanity

When I work at the pub I can see people stop by the estate agents across the road, pointing at the photos of someone else’s living space, glazed by the perma-glow of a shop that sells nothing. I wonder if it helps gauge a place for them — how much it costs to live there, the sorts of people they could be (or might have to become) if they moved in. If they come in for a drink afterwards, I like to think they’re imagining us as the potential local they’d visit if the house they’d picked out was theirs.

I’m nosy in a different way, because I read the local paper. It was a habit forced on me at university — “all good journalists read the local papers” — and now it’s one of the first things I check on my phone when I go somewhere new. Push aside the car thefts and speeding fines abundant and just as boring everywhere and you’ll get to eccentric opinion columns, restaurant reviews and heartwarming stories about fundraising for the coastguard/hospice/playing fields. Reports on new housing developments. Demolitions. Repairs to bridges and road closures. The comforting mundanity of everyday life, different, but seen through the same clichéd headlines and newspaper jargon. It takes the edge off, somehow.

Other Stuff

  • This feature on poet Cynthia Cruz is so powerful it took me a while to get through it all. She talks about the shame of poverty and, really interestingly to me, the confused ideas of self-improvement and self-commodification. “Aspiration to me is like this neoliberal thing… improve myself… make myself a brand, sell my persona. Especially as an artist, that’s what everyone is doing now.”

  • How experts at isolation deal with isolation. Plus a very good intro full of every feeling I’ve had so far about the lockdown by Anna Russel.

  • Always got time for a food writer’s love letter to their favourite food from their favourite restaurant and this on Taka’s tuna from Yoko’s in Portland by Andrea Damewood is just pure happiness.

  • Something different and delicious: Craft dairy in Athens.

  • In a season with no sports, sports radio hosts in America have become the unexpected trusted voices of the pandemic. This is a super interesting piece looking at how broadcasters are holding up an increasingly vital line of communication, and how it no longer makes sense to carry on as normal in the name of escapism. If people want to talk about what’s happening, why wouldn’t they want to talk about it with the people they let into their ears and hearts on a daily basis? (I came across this piece because I was hoping to find something along similar lines about radio presenters. Radio 6 has been a lifeline for me this week, and I might have to write about that at some point.)

  • It’s April and the weather is cheering up and we need some escapism. May I recommend reading (or re-reading) The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim? Here’s a review of it. It’s perfect.

  • I miss going to the pub. That’s not strange. I specifically miss going to The Old Fountain after reading Johnny Garrett’s piece on the Old Street institution. That’s very strange — I’ve never actually been there.

  • Allan McCollum’s Ongoing Collection Of Reassurance is everything for me at the moment. I even find how he created the collection — by watching endless episodes of TV shows on a laptop and screenshotting the iamges as he saw them — highly relevant and somewhat bleak, but only in a relateable way. 

My Stuff

  • Some news: this week I found out I was shortlisted in a short story competition run by The Writer’s Retreat. My story, The Barometer, will be published in their anthology later this year.

  • Tom took over the kombucha this week — and started making kimchi, sauerkraut, sourdough and a number of other things in bubbling jars and sealed bags. My story about making kombucha has an ending, finally. I gave up, and Tom is now the mama.

OK457 by Allan McCollum, taken from 
An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs With Reassuring Subtitles

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39: Kieran Hebden's Birds

The coincidence that I’m sat in what essentially amounts to quarantine listening to a song called “Harpsichord” while a plague ravages the world outside is slightly amusing. I’ll admit it. 

It’s from Four Tet’s new LP “Sixteen Oceans”, which is packed with birdsong. It flits from track to track, above in the snares, chattering around sliced samples. I especially love it in Baby, a track you’ve no doubt heard enough to get sick of (not me, I must be on my 3000th repeat) where parakeets throw down morsels of tropical fruit from their sunkissed branches in a moment of pause that’s there, I assume, so we can spend a moment looking at a breathtaking coral sunset. 

Here’s Lush, one of my all-time favourites. It’s delicate two-step makes me feel warm and light, the hang stumbles and then gets into its bop and it’s like finally learning how to hula hoop, you never want to stop, you just keep going and going and going. The whole track moves on a breeze; it’s summer, the air is sparkling, in the distance calm seas ripple and you’re so gently and perfectly happy.

Other Stuff:

  • This week I finished reading The Offing by Benjamin Myers. Set (mostly) over the course of a long, glorious, life-changing summer, it’s about so many things, but mostly I thought it was about choosing to live your life. Or at least, understanding that choosing to live your life doesn’t mean going through with things simply because of duty or stubbornness. (And the nature writing in this is detailed and beautiful, if that your thing.)

  • Two architects chose to live in Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower for a year to learn about what it achieved, and what were its main failings. (via the excellent Lecker podcast‘s instagram account)

  • I really liked this piece by Lily Waite for Pellicle on Our Mutual Friend brewery in Colorado. It’s really upbeat and positive and they sound like really cool folks. “We just want to be kind to everyone, treat every single person with respect, and if you don’t like us, fuck off.”

  • I also enjoyed David Nilson’s piece on Two Hearted Ale for Pellicle. It made me really thirsty, and to go paddling in an icy cold river.

  • Now’s not the time to ask what happiness really is, but it’s the perfect time to wonder about all the different ways a person could be happy. The Glossary of Happiness concerns itself with collecting and understanding cultural concepts of joy from all over the world that have no direct English translation.

  • I do love a Marissa Ross interlude, and this one involves Cab Franc and a party sub.

  • I visited Conwy last weekend (which feels like a million years ago already) and I particularly loved the castle and its stained glass. The stained glass is actually a new commission installed in 2012, and includes short couplets written by Welsh writer Damian Walford Davies.

  • Short stories are the best, and I’m really happy to see more and more of them on bookshelves in people’s houses. Yes, I look at your bookshelves when I come over. Here are 50 of the best short stories, chosen by writers like Hilary Mantel, Joyce Carol Oates (yes, obv she chose an Edgar Allen Poe), Kevin Barry and Yiyun Li.

  • Chef Sabrina Ghayour has taken it upon herself to create daily easy recipes on her Instagram channel and to write about storecupboard meals that use fewer ingredients on her blog. Of all the ways people are trying to help each other at this difficult time, I really like this practical way. I’ve been doing a lot of baking and cooking this week and it’s definitely helped.

My Stuff:

  • Hoping you’re all getting by and keeping safe.

  • I’m not using Twitter for the foreseeable future because it’s a non-stop carousel of self-perpetuating anxiety and I need a break from it all. If you need to get in touch with me, or just feel like saying hi, my email address is katiematherwrites@gmail.com — please don’t be afraid to use it.

  • I’m using my bookstagram account a lot at the moment because it’s so calm and nice over on that side of the internet. Find me at @shinybookscuit.