Posted on

38: "In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion"

When I quit my job, it felt like a snap decision. In the days afterwards, I started to feel differently. It felt like I had swam up from the depths of a lake and finally broken the surface. I didn’t know I’d been kicking underwater for so long.

Even though I was excited to be free, I was worried about working without a workplace. I had worked at home before, and it had been a disaster. Once I left my job, however, it turned out that self-control is a much easier skill to learn if you’re using it to achieve something you actually care about. An important point I’d somehow never appreciated before.

Sitting at home all day seems incredibly easy or unbelievably hard depending on how you look at it. Your home is where all your comforts are. It’s where your stash of Nissin noodles is. It’s also hard to relax in your living room if you’ve spent all day sitting there with your head in your hands because something you need to write just won’t come out of your head.

This weekend marks two years since I packed my desk belongings into two Lidl bags and then threw it all away when I got home. Every weekday since, I’ve sat at my kitchen table surrounded by piles of magazines and notebooks and felt like I was achieving more than I’ve ever achieved in my life. Instead of living up to my fears: too lonely, too quiet, too sad, too distracting; working at home has made my house a protective space where my mind can grow. I solidify my ideas here. I’m not beholden to anyone else’s moods, tempers, derision or dependency. Under my roof I only have to answer to my own expectations. I can use this lookout point to try and understand the world better.

Other Stuff

My Stuff

  • Not much to report, I’ve been busy studying all the things I unwisely signed up for at the same time and trying to get some other writing done.

  • However, I have been busy working and will have some articles coming out in the near future!

  • Sadly the wine fair I was heading to in Cologne is postponed this weekend. I hope everyone is keeping well and that I can see some of you there soon when it is reorganised.

  • I am going to Wales this weekend and decided to learn some Welsh (because of course I did). I found this gem of a YouTube channel and now I can say various greetings while imagining a man waving a shoe around. (Watch it and you’ll know what I’m on about.) Hwyl!

Matt Saunders
“Yorkshire Dales“

Posted on

37: Idea Mist

I entered a short story competition last week. The story I entered was the first piece of fiction I’ve ever put anywhere near the career part of my life. I wrote it quickly out of nothing, and it reminded me of writing in school. Our creative writing classes were always silent. For 55 minutes I had the time and space to write absolutely anything I wanted. I wrote so many short stories then, and I can’t get my head around how I had so many ideas, and where all the unused ones went. A couple of my friends told me every week that they hated those classes. For them it was almost an hour of a clock ticking, a blank page. At the moment, I can sympathise: that’s how my days feel. I’ve been stuck for a while, no ideas, no motivation. So writing a story and sending it to a competition was more surprising to me than to anyone else. I don’t know how it happened. 

But it did. And that has proven that I can do it again. What a sneaky trick.

If you tipped me via Ko-fi last week, thank you very much. I used that money to pay the competition entry fees.

Other stuff:

My Stuff:

  • I’ve been working on a few things this week (hurray) but nothing new to share here yet.

  • I’m going to Cologne next week for the natural wine fair there unless the government strictly forbids it. If you’re going too, let me know so we can drink something nice together.

  • I’m very excited to be brewing at Thornbridge tomorrow with the legendary Alice Batham!

  • I’m also very excited to be brewing with Cloudwater and the very brilliant Charlotte Cook next week!

Idea Mist, Pretend Store

Posted on

36:

Good morning.

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

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

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

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

Other Stuff:

My Stuff

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

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

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

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

Sega, by Liam Wong

Posted on

35: So Metaphorical

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

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

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

Other Stuff

My Stuff 

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

Posted on

33: The number of books on my "currently reading" pile

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

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

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

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

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

Other stuff

My Stuff

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

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

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

Posted on

32:

It’s the end of January, the month everyone hates. A month of poverty, of cold, grey days and dark nights that arrive too early and drag their feet as you push them out of the door. Well, all I can say as a January-birthday-haver is just you wait. Just you wait until February sets in. February’s the real villain.

February will still trick us with warmer days and bite us with snow and floods and frost, just when we think we’re almost through the worst of it. But this last part, the most fickle, harshest month, can’t hold forever. Imbolc takes place on Saturday 1st February.  The soil is warming up. The snowdrops have started meeting in their cabals, in open defiance of the iron grey sky. I’ve seen them. We’re nearly there.

Other stuff:

  • We’ll start with this. Kat Eschner put off reading Consider The Lobster for a long time, and when she finally read it, she liked it. But her essay about reading it is about so much more than just reading a book.

  • Hot dogs! I long, occasionally, for there to be hot dog carts in Clitheroe. Sadly this seems to be a major city thing only, but this run-down of the most average hot dogs in New York helped me out of my cravings. For a short while, anyway.

  • I had no idea the creator of Ren & Stimpy was such an asshole. The documentary about the cartoon looks like it’s going to be pretty intense, if this piece on it by Tom Grierson for Mel Magazine is anything to go by.

  • This week I learned (thanks, Isabelle O’Carroll) that noisy restaurants and bars aren’t just a personal preference thing, they cause serious accessibility issues for many people. Read this Vox piece by Julia Belluz. It’s really informative and positive — it shows how things can be changed for the better.

  • “…instead of swiftly removing himself or divesting, Friedman remained tied to the Spotted Pig, roping the fate of his employees to his own.” The Spotted Pig has closed. This Eater piece by Hillary Dixler Canavan expertly dissects what that means.

  • Here’s something so on-brand for me it may as well be wearing a Yeastie Boys hat: an evocative, luxurious essay on the Latin American women persecuted in colonial times for mixing magic with chocolate.

  • Cave diving, ice-shelf swimming, deep-sea freediving — I am fascinated and terrified by all of these things. See amazing photographs of Lewis Pugh’s swimming expedition through an ice shelf in Antarctica alongside his own words about the experience, which he did to raise awareness of the melting ice shelves. He shouldn’t have been able to swim through it. That was the point.

  • Foeders! No, not vats, FOEDERS. Lily Waite has written an immensely interesting longread about the brewig world’s new favourite old thing, and there’s a lot in there that made me smile.

  • Glou-glou. What is it? Why is it called that? This article by Aaron Ayscough from exactly two years ago, if you haven’t seen it before, is probably the best thing I’ve read on the subject. (Please feel free to send me your favourite writings on this controversial topic!)

  • Amazing words and photographs by Nicci Peet here on two equally amazing women grinding coffee and smashing the patriarchy.

  • “Heard but not Seen” is about the dissonance the author, Tre Johnson, feels when they walk into unfamiliar spaces (in this case, white run and owned restaurants and bars) and hears hip-hop being used as instant “cool” wallpaper, or as they put it: “a soundtrack to gentrification and displacement.”

  • I already said this on Twitter but this interview with Hildur Guðnadóttir is a masterclass in interviewing, placing the artist firmly at the front and gently coaxing them to reveal how special they are, with a few well-researched, well-placed facts and highlights. In awe, I am. And taking notes.

  • I’ve read this article a lot since it was published. Jemma Beedie talks about taking children to the pub, and how it’s a feminist issue, and how family friendly pubs are vital to communities. It’s brilliant. Read it, especially if you think children shouldn’t be welcome in pubs. “One of the most efficient ways to cut women out of society, leaving them to fend for themselves, is to ban children from public spaces. Spaces like pubs.”

My stuff: 

Lewis Pugh swims through a gap in an
Antarctic ice shelf
Photograph: Kelvin Trautman

Posted on

31: Beyond Texture


[CW: Food, Meat]
This week I read a tweet by someone who had been researching futuristic non-animal meat-like products for an article. They said that thinking about the texture in detail was making them queasy. The fake meat had been created so faithfully in meat’s image that its structure was exactly like that of animal muscle. For this person thinking about this in a synthesised food product is what tipped the balance from an expected texture into something grotesque.

While I treat meat as a luxury rather than a necessity, I do eat meat, and meat and what it represents doesn’t gross me out. I’ve realised recently that these two things don’t necessarily always go hand in hand. The idea that meat is something that was once alive, now dead for your enjoyment, is something people try not to think about. Understanding that the fibrous textures of a chicken breast are direct evidence of the use they once had is difficult. It demands, immediately and uncompromisingly, that you pay attention to the fact that what you are enjoying was once living its own life. That’s a difficult thought. 

What’s been turning around in my head all week is the idea that made-in-a-lab plant-based meat substitutes could be what turn some people off meat altogether. The naturalness of tissue and sinew, which we see on a daily basis everywhere we go, when given the stark backdrop of scientific intervention suddenly becomes a form of biological horror. And the idea of this really fascinates me.

[CW: The food/meat part is now over, thanks for bearing with me!]

Other Stuff:

  • The Go Compare opera singer is actually the nicest man in the world. Read this interview where he talks about online abuse, dealing with a difficult career and being happy with your life and you’ll see.

  • What do you know about sperm whales? This thread on their daily grind by one of Twitter’s best people really is beautiful.

  • Stained glass! We’ve not had much of that on here lately, have we? Southwark Cathedral’s website has a perfect section on their stained glass windows, with tons of info on each of them. 

  • This piece on servers still having nightmares about waiting tables ten years prior really resonated. TREAT YOUR STAFF BETTER. BE NICER TO SERVING STAFF!

  • If there was anyone in the world who’s article on crisp flavourings I’d want to read, it’d be Amelia Tait. And oh as luck would have it, she’s written about crisp flavourings this week.

  • Reclaiming rural queer culture in the USA with trucks. TruckSlutsMag is awesome. [h/t Lily Waite]

  • 11 ways women are the future of Philadelphia’s food scene. Thanks to BeerDetective who has been showing me good things about their hometown of Philly. I love hearing about good things from people’s hometowns. Please do this more.

  • This Twitter thread was my favourite thing I’ve seen on there in ages. A dad showing their son how photoshop works, incorporating a love for search and rescue vehicles.

  • Why is food in Berlin bad? I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been. But this article makes me feel like I’m an expert, and I love an article that makes me feel smarter after having read it.

  • A story about Roberto, Helen Rosner’s bean, sausage and kale soup. I make a similar soup (without the sausage) every so often and it’s lovely to read about how something so simple and comforting has tied so many people together online.

  • I feel like if you don’t know about a place, finding out what beer they drink there is a good place to start. Lucy Corne is such a champion of S. African craft beer and her first piece for Pellicle is a great deeper look into one of the bastions of her scene.

  • I really loved this idea of a “wine school”.

My Stuff:

  • This week I failed to hand in a short story for a competition because I got the deadline date totally wrong. I’m still really fucking angry with myself about it so every time my brain tries to show me a positive (“look on the bright side! You’ve completed a short story!”) I’m still getting even more mad. But I suppose now is as good a time as any to say — and therefore commit myself to the idea — that I’m writing a collection of short stories themed around food, drink, greed and lust. It’s still early days yet, but I’m excited about cracking on. But I’m still pretty fucked off about the competition.

  • I tried to make kombucha and instead started freaking out about responsibility. And then I wrote about it for Ferment mag.

  • ICYMI: I wrote about my sheepish forays into wine a couple of months ago and actually, I really like this piece. So here it is again.

Lepanto cycle (with a lifeboat)
Cy Twombly (and Andy Doe)

Posted on

30: Three Hundred

Three is an odd number, and so I don’t really like it. I prefer two. It’s rounder, friendlier. But three is something I use all the time in writing whether I like it or not. The rule of threes is a perfect joke format: two normal things and a silly thing. An ideal list length. A natural way of laying out of ideas. See.

This is my 30th newsletter, and totally by chance, I’ve just reached 300 subscribers. (Thank you all. You have no idea how much it means to have 300 people willingly ready to read The Gulp.) It’s made me think about the number three, and why we naturally fall on it, and why three things are better than four — unless those things are mini scotch eggs. Then four is better.

I have three sisters. I am in my thirties. Also, because it’s now 2020, I’ve been writing about beer — and therefore regularly and with some sort of direction — for 3 years. That means this year counts as three years since I went to bed and lay there in the dark and thought: “You aren’t a writer. Why not?”

[I don’t know what I should do to celebrate 30 newsletters and 300 subscribers, it seems like a big fucking deal. I’m going to open a bottle of wine and make pizzas. Why don’t you reply to this email with ideas?]

Other Stuff:

  • I love Detectorists and this interview with Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook about it from a few years ago is so perfect. It really lays out exactly what it is about the show that I love so much.

  • This piece on two unique souls making wine in Catalunya by Lucy Lovell really captured my imagination (Spain, wine, of course). It’s sunny and fun and free, but it’s also packed with juicy info and has tons of details to geek out on. Loved it.

  • A frank and moving piece about anxiety and how writing about beer has become a way to battle through it.

  • Did you know that garlic isn’t as beloved in Italy as it is elsewhere in the world? I didn’t. This piece by Danielle Callegari looks into “the great garlic divide”. (I just made a huge batch of marinara sauce and if I paid attention to classic sensibilities, I used about twice as much garlic as I should have. Oh well.)

  • I watched this BBC 4 documentary over the weekend because it was too grim to go outside, and it was perfect. Tales of Winter – The Art of Snow and Ice.

  • I’m obsessed with photographs and paintings of New York at the moment, and trying to trace how its layout and buildings have changed over the years. These beautiful paintings of the city from 1910-1920 by Samuel Halpert, a Polish immigrant, really took me by the hand. I love the perspectives, colours and shapes he uses, and the sense of fun in some of his work. It’s a totally different feeling to the serious black and white photographs that (to me) show an unwelcoming, intimidating city of change and skyscrapers.

My Stuff:

  • Not much to report this week — I’ve got something I’m really proud of on an editor’s desk at the moment, and a few other things in my drafts pile. (I use the American spelling. I’m not sorry. “Draught” is such an ugly word, I don’t like it at all. It looks like I should be pronouncing it “Droauuft” and no. I won’t.)

City View — Samuel Halpert

Posted on

28: Food, Honesty and Christmas Dinner

I love watching food travel shows. They’re obviously ideal for a bit of escapism, and the best ones teach you something about local food and drink culture alongside gratuitous shots of bountiful market stalls. Unfortunately they’re inherently problematic too; you can’t show everything about a particular country, or even a region within an hour or so. Something’s going to be simplified, something’s going to be missed, something’s going to be sensationalised for effect. There are some great ones, and some terrible ones, and I’ll watch them all, hearing over and over again about the wonder of food in context, looking at flights on Skyscanner as the presenters crack crab claws by the glittering ocean.

Over Christmas there will be hundreds of re-runs of fake-kitchen how-to cookery shows and they’ll encourage me to write out shopping lists of ingredients I’ll never buy. There’ll be thinly-premised travelogues stringing together cheese eating and wine drinking: I’ll watch them too. Because deep inside the cold mashed potato structure of every perfectly-lit food programme is a sliver of truth. When people travel and eat food, those are the best times. Things happen to them. They say stuff they believe is meaningful with a mouth full of spaghetti. They get emotional about dips. They hold a bottle of beer, enlightened by knowledge they’ve received telepathically, transmitted to them by a bowl of broth. I relate. Hard.

Whenever I see a remotely poignant moment of honesty on a TV show, it’s usually when food, and a tiny bit of exhaustion, is involved. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for Christmas dinner.

Happy Christmas!

I hope you all have a wonderful and restful Christmas week and don’t get stuck behind too many tenner-wavers at the bar! I’d like to say that I’ll definitely be writing up a newsletter for next week, but I don’t for definite that I’ll be able to, or want to for that matter. 

If you enjoy reading this and you want to buy me a Christmas drink (I’m on the sauce as we speak, actually) you can do so via www.ko-fi.com/shinybiscuit, or find me at The New Inn. Thank you very much for reading this newsletter and supporting my work, and see you in the New Year (probably)!

Other Stuff

My Stuff

“My father’s collection of 1940s and 50s cheese labels“
by Julian Tysoe

Posted on

27: Tiny Hope

There’s something about tiny little model houses that makes my heart feel warm. I get the same feeling looking at the painstaking detail of that sweeping rooftops-of-London scene at the start of Muppet’s Christmas Carol, or the Jolly Pocket Postman books. Like an aching nostalgia for somewhere I’ve never been.

I don’t imagine myself there — I think of the alternative lives that could exist inside those warm yellow windows; the people who might find a place like this and call it home. The best model homes have suggestions of lives being lived inside, just out of sight. In a local department store near my house there’s a Christmas display of perfect festive homes, shops, a cobbled high street, churches with little stained glass windows and even a couple of pubs. A train chugs around the town’s perimeter every minute or so — I suppose I am jealous of their transport links — and a hot air balloon with two little people inside, one holding binoculars, dangles over the pond where locals are ice skating. My favourite tiny buildings have silhouettes of people sat around dinner tables, or dancing, or drinking a beer. I like thinking about who they might be and what brought them to such a perfect little place. It’s incredibly soothing.

I like this article where they try to understand why tiny things are so appealing to us, but in a way, I also wish nobody was trying to undo the magic. Let me have my little worlds, where there’s always a light on in the window somewhere, and someone’s always baking a cake.

Other stuff


My Stuff

  • I have started making my zines. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here’s why: I received a commendation at the Guild of Beer Writers’ Awards last week for a number of articles I submitted. I’ve decided to make a zine out of the pieces, plus an additional BONUS piece I couldn’t submit because it was published outside of the time frame. They will be £5 plus £1.00 shipping, and you can pre-order one now if you like by replying to this very email (or if you prefer, email me at katiematherwrites@gmail.com) telling me your full name so I can keep a note. Thanks!

Hometta-style gingerbread house — uncredited.
Via Present & Correct.