Author: shinybiscuit

I made a playlist this week of all the songs that remind me of being 16 years old. I don’t usually like being reminded of being a teenager, they were difficult years for my whole family, but there’s a lot of election stuff in the news at the moment that’s bringing it all back to me anyway, so I thought — what the hell. Dive in.

I’m back in my old bedroom, in a small council bungalow in Aberdeenshire, miles from anything and anyone. I’m sat on the silver carpet (chosen by me to replace rotten lino from a discount flooring place in Montrose) playing Final Fantasy IX on mute, which was given to me, along with the PS1 I’m playing it on, by a friend from school. A copied disc spins in my CD player, the repeat button flashing to let me know that it’s not the whole mixtape I’m replaying, it’s Signals Over The Air by Thursday, track 2, the song I’ve been holding on to like a liferaft for the past few hours. My hands are cold because although the meter’s got a few quid on it, the house only has storage heaters, and when mine’s on it smells like burning hair. I’m wrapped in my duvet, engrossed in an ice cave level, and the hi-hat and snare counts us in again. 

I know I was rarely alone in this house, but I can barely remember being anything but. We were helped into this emergency life by friends and neighbours, my mum’s colleagues, my friends at school. We weren’t alone, but I felt it, so deep down in my bones. The wide window that looked out from my bedroom over the dark stubble of winter wheatfields and a distant line of forestry commission pine trees didn’t try to console me. I could see the nothingness for miles and miles. How did this happen to us?

It’s not the poverty I remember. It’s the loneliness. Money isn’t just about bread and milk and fish fingers in the freezer. Money stops people associating with you. It turns a simple gift into pity. It leaves you stranded in a council house a 12 mile walk from your nearest friend’s house. It’s a writhing pit of shame in your stomach. It’s the question “how did this happen to us?” Because you never think it could happen to you. Until it does.

Please do not vote for the Tories next week.

Other Stuff

(You made it through the darkest part — It’s pretty much all uplifting beer stuff from now on)

• Lily Waite manages to make Manchester sound incredibly romantic in this wonderful piece about Marble brewery for Good Beer Hunting.

• I really enjoyed this by Matt Curtis on the potential of a beer release saturation point in the near future(and the virtues of a good pint of bitter) in Fement mag so it was nice seeing it gaining some attention online this week too.

• Oh look, ATJ has written something amazing about Orval, one of the greatest beers in the world!

• It’s so easy to take cask beer for granted but it’s quite exotic and glamorous elsewhere in the world. I’m really enjoying reading about Adrián Materos of Cerveza Rudimenteria’s experiences learning more about English cask. English version | Spanish version.

• This piece by Boak & Bailey caused a lot of conversations this week. I have a complicated view on the topic of gentrification and I wish everyone did. It isn’t always bad. Or good.

• Thank you to Evan Rail for sharing this brilliant piece from the NYT about a historically important currywurst stand in Berlin.

• Beautiful, familiar paintings of brutalist architecture by Frank Laws. They’re of homes in East London, but they could easily be anywhere, and that’s what I love about them. Also, the first line has given me a word to describe what fills my head every time I leave the house: Sonder.

• A really insightful group of interviews with members of i-collective, a group of indigenous chefs and activists across America, who hosted thanksgiving dinners to “celebrate the resilience of their people and tell their stories through food.”

• A really fun read about the new A Christmas Prince film. A lot of people are trying to skewer the humble filmed-in-Canada, set-in-a-made-up-European-principality Christmas film but I wish they’d just watch and enjoy them like this.

• Marissa Ross has written “I was 18, clenching everything from the armrests to my ass as I experienced my first full-frontal male-nudity on the big screen” in an article about Merlot, because of course she has. I nearly spat out my impy stout.

My Stuff

• I received a commendation from the Guild of Beer Writers awards this week, which was lovely. I shared the pieces I submitted to the awards in a previous newsletter, but I’ve decided to create my first ever zine out of them. There’ll be more information, and probably a pre-order link, in next week’s newsletter.

• I got a few reads this week for my piece on how beer festivals become. Read it if you want advice on how to start an event from the people who run your favourite festivals.

• Still proud of my local football and local beer piece. Even if you don’t like football might enjoy it — I know precisely fuck all about football and I loved researching and writing it.

MONUMENT I — Frank Laws

This week’s newsletter is almost late and I’m sorry about that. I’ve been booking as many copywriting jobs as I can to make some money before Christmas, and it’s meant that instead of working on my book or the articles I want to finish before the end of the year, I’ve been writing about teeth whitening and lingual braces and the best places to shop on Northumberland Street.

Being a copywriter is something I didn’t know I was until I’d been doing it for about five years. I went into marketing pretty much immediately after graduating (as it turns out, the inverted pyramid really is the ideal way to write marketing copy.) I remember seeing a joke on Twitter and realising that I wasn’t a writer at all; I hadn’t written anything I’d cared about in years. I was actually a copywriter, and I wasn’t enjoying it either. “An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, the best bar in town, a bar near me…” It was like seeing a penny at the bottom of a dark, algae-thick pool. It was a decent job, and I was doing a version of the thing I wanted to do, but I was lying to myself if I said it was fulfilling my dreams. 

Every now and again I rely on copywriting to dig me out of financial holes. Writers don’t say thing like this in the hope you’ll find their poverty compelling. At least I hope they don’t — I certainly don’t. Being paid to write is hard. There are a lot of writers. There isn’t a lot of money to pay for their words. When you do get money for your words, they become something else, and you have to work even harder for them to feel as smooth and weighty in people’s hands. So by flipping that shiny little coin over to its grubby, riverbottom side, I can find work I’m not proud of but that pays the bills. And I wanted to share this thought because it’s easy to think everyone is doing better than you. Stop. Everyone is working through something just as much as you are. Everyone is reaching for something they want.

Other Stuff

• First up, something insanely geeky and therefore amazing. Lars Marius Garshol shares from his Twitter account this week: “An Italian guy was so fascinated by the Stjørdal, Norway malt kilns he decided to make his own. Excellent video, with extra photos/footage from Jørund Geving in Stjørdal“

• A very thoughtful and well-researched look at Liverpool’s changing restaurant scene from Alice Burns for Liverpool Guild Student Media. 

• This great piece by Ed Yong about how he actively began fixing gender imbalances within his stories was sent to me by David Sun Lee. It’s something I think about and discuss with people a lot,k but I know I can still do more — not just with gender imbalance but by promoting minority voices more in my work across the board. This is me promising to so. As David said when he sent it, “It’s on all of us!” 

• Andrew Dickens interviewed Jeremy Corbyn for Penguin about books, reading and how vital our libraries are (and how he will save them) and it is wonderful.

• Art of the Score interviewed Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (Bad Seeds, not that one) about the jusic they’ve made for film.

• Something unfamiliar and bizarre in its mundanity, so obviously I really enjoyed getting into it — “Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class“.

• Mel C — the best Spice Girl — frankly discussing her life with Laura Snapes, one of the best music journalists in the world right now. 

• We expect beauty from Pellicle and the standards keep rising. This by Hugh Thomas on the Faversham Hop Festival is, frankly, amazing, and Grace Helmer’s illustrations are just as evocative and beautiful and heartstrings-tugging.

• Jay Raynor’s review of Live Seafood on Ashton Rd, Manchester. It’s a good one.

• Jeff Alworth went to Brewery De La Senne and Yvan de Baets spoke to him about yeast as though it was the darling love of his life. Because it is, of course.

• Hat tip to Evan Rail: This piece on Tokyo denim in the NYT had me totally enthralled.

• This really was interesting, I know I say that about everything, but it really, really is worth a read. Especially if you love language, numbers or both. (I only like language.) “Why You Might Be Counting In The Wrong Language” by Aanand Jagatia.

My Stuff

• I’m really, really proud of this piece I’ve written on local beer and lower league football giving communities a combined sense of identity. It’s also called Home Turf, which I love because I like the word “turf”. 

• Amphora. What are they? Why are they? I spoke to a few experts because I was genuinely interested, and then I wrote about it. Which is how I wish all my articles went.

• I’ve got two articles in the Pellicle in-tray at the mo. Expect one to be published in the near future. As I said before, they’re raising standards all the time over there. No pressure. No pressure at all.

A section from Grace Helmer’s illustrations for

Hugh Thomas’ Faversham Hop Festival piece
— originally published in Pellicle Magazine

I feel like I’m on the cusp of something at the moment. Like I’m waiting for something to happen. The nebulous forms of life goals collect and disperse inside my head constantly, their colours and shapes taking different forms as they drift and merge, getting louder and brighter at night when I’m trying to sleep.

We have plans for our life, Tom and I, and they’re creeping up on us. Soon we’ll have to make decisions and take leaps. Maybe we’ll have to ask people for help — the scariest thing of all. But everything is always about work. Career. Direction. Meaning. This is what happens, I guess, when two Capricorns get married.

I am going on holiday tomorrow with an old friend, a long weekend away, to somewhere hilly and rainy and ancient, with no internet, a log fire and an orchard full of tiny sheep, windfallen pears and peach trees. I’ve been hanging a lot on the thought of this holiday and how separate from real life it will be. On the first night I want a blank, starless sleep. After that I want to go full Crow Crag — rant in local tearooms, shout into the indifferent overcast valleys, drink from the bottle, detach. I can’t wait.

Other stuff

• In this week’s Red Hand File newsletter, Nick Cave said: “…I sometimes wonder if anyone actually listens to my lyrics, and whether the enormous amount of work I put into them may in fact go unheeded.” Highly relatable because of the gloomy, “does anyone care” part, of course, but I laughed because it tiptoed between being honest and being vain.

• Nicci Peet has had her excellent Diversity In Beer project featured in Vice. Having her work seen outside of the Bubble is a huge, huge deal.

• I really liked this by Matt Curtis on how sour beer “recovered from the brink of extinction“, especially looking at how these trad Belgian beers have inspired some of the most exciting brewers in the UK.

• I love Slow TV (oh my god, shocker) and I remembered the extremely interesting but supremely soothing Retreat: Meditations From A Monastery this week. No dialogue, just shuffling, beekeeping, weaving, chanting and the occasional shake of a thurible. Here’s the Pluscarden Monastery in the Moray highlands.

• Radio is important for independent scenes to thrive. That’s something I really believe in. This piece from The Guardian back in July looks at indie stations in the north and how they survive without the same level of funding or sponsorship of London-based stations.

• You’ve probably seen it but this interview with Amy Sedaris about her essential things from the NYT is hilarious.

• Lost Industry Brewing aren’t a brewery I’m super familiar with, but after this interview, I want to be.

• More monk stuff — must be the time of year for it. This, by M. Carrie Allan on Chartreuse looks at the secrets behind its recipe, and how the Carthusian monks who make it square its popularity with cocktail making hipsters with their faith and devotion.

• This by Boak & Bailey about the Dog and Bell in Deptford is wonderful. I want to go there.

• When I read Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker, she says repeatedly how important it is to smell everything in order to truly understand your senses and the world around you. Maybe that’s why I absolutely loved this olfactory map of Brussels by Brussels Beer City aka. Eoghan Walsh.

• Francis Bacon on the differences of earths.

My stuff

• I’ve been busy working on a few chunky pieces I’m really excited about this week, but nothing published yet.

• I’ve also been suffering really severely with anxiety this week, so I wanted to say to anyone else who suffers, take care of yourself. Know when to stop. Rest.

• I read (and hugely enjoyed) Normal People by Sally Rooney and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh this week which may have something to do with my somewhat altered mental state.

Lighters in Dum Dum lollipop wrappers – Amy Sedaris

Since I never made it to galleries, and when I did I felt as though I shouldn’t be there, I never saw much art throughout my teens and 20s. I never interacted with art. Even the word was fairly meaningless to me. I never thought about artist interpretation, or style, or choices. I thought people were born with a talent for deciphering the hidden messages behind the paint; you either got it, or you didn’t. Some people understood art. I didn’t. I assumed it was because art was not made for someone like me.

I’ve always liked certain pieces — I like Monet’s studies of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament for eg. — but I’ve only ever used them as Facebook headers, or phone backgrounds. I felt guilty about this. Like somehow I should be appreciative in a more respectful way.

I’ve decided I was wrong.  If the most accessible way I can be inspired by great artists, and express myself through their work, is through a photograph of a painting on Instagram, then that’s what I’m going to do. Looking at and trying to understand art has become something I do every day now, because of Instagram. I’ve gone from thinking art was unfathomable and for other people to enjoy, to appreciating it every time I scroll through my updates.

There are gatekeepers at the entrance of every possible hobby, but when I look at paintings on my phone and get lost in the intense detail, or the beauty, or the abstraction, I feel like I’ve been shown in through a side entrance. In front of the non-judgemental glare of my phone screen I can soak in the textures of brushstrokes, or spend a moment experiencing deep feelings about light. Here I can learn and look and experience without feeling out of place.

(Kindof related, huge coincidence: This week I saw that the National Extension College announced they will be running an online History of Art A Level starting in January 2020. I signed up immediately.)

Other Stuff:

• Ashley Rodriguez at GBH shared this by Victoria James at Eater on how the lack of diversity in wine buying is affecting the industry and, ultimately, pushing more diverse winemakers further into obscurity.

• This thread introduced me to Fayum portraits of Egyptian mummies and I have been transfixed ever since. (More on them here.)

• Sorry but Rod Stewart was on the cover of Railway Modeller magazine with a ridiculously intricate model train city this week. I’d been talking about model villages a lot this week, so I found it really weird for this to be trending this week. “I find beauty in what everyone else sees as ugly – rugged skyscrapers, beaten-up warehouses, things that are very run down.”

• This piece by Hollie Stephens about McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York has compounded the issue that I need to go to New York.

• “In Star Trek I saw a future worth investing in” — a really, really, REALLY great piece about how Star Trek has been saving fans’ lives and giving people hope for decades.

• From the Ladybird Shell Guide, 1955: “Between the mild days, November frosts strip the coloured leaves of the shrubs and climbers of the Headrow so that all the fruits of early winter show more vigourously against a paler sky”

• This review of “Tropical Malady” by Tash Aw for his new column on Asian cinema in the Paris Review is especially fascinating to me because he talks about how confusing it is that forests to him mean danger, but in Europe, they are places of “manicured… rustic pleasure”. 

• The first paragraph of this really hooked me, because it’s so completely different to my own experiences of beer. It might be about bar food in the Bay Area of San Francisco, but it shows what we could have in the UK and Ireland too. Or what we might want to avoid.

My stuff:

I was shortlisted for the British Guild of Beer Writer’s Long Live The Local award for writing about pubs this week, which I am very chuffed about. I thought this week I might share the pieces I put forward in my submission to be considered for this prize.

• A Sense of Belonging

• What Makes a Pub Great

• Pump Country

• Maybe We’ll Stay In

• The Knack of Snacks

Fayum portrait of unnamed man, artist unknown. 
More reading: John Berger on the nature of
Fayum paintings.

I used to be an atheist, but the raw, dull thought of a world without magic was just too depressing to bother with.

I’m a semi-practising pagan. A wavering wiccan. I used to make up spells when I was little, mixing bright red poison berries with dark, sludgy mud and puddle slime in the hollow of a tree stump in my grandad’s back garden. I saw a fat, greyish frog underneath that stump once, and I was convinced a labyrinth of magical kingdoms lived underneath it like a reversed Faraway Tree. A more interesting Faraway Tree. Fewer fairies, more goblins.

I went through a Christian phase during my teens, and insisted on going to Church once a year, at midnight on Christmas. I wanted to recognise why we celebrated, and underline with ritual what I felt was important to my life at the time.

Then I was atheist, staunch and stubborn, laughing in the face of faith. It didn’t last long. Soon the creeping sensation set in that even if there wasn’t more to life than atoms, I wanted to believe there was. Years later, a wise woman called Jean (who changed my life forever in lots of different ways) taught me about The Wheel and about Imbolc — the beginning of spring. A time of energy and delicate, cautious excitement for a fresh new spring. It grasped me and that was it. The world made a fraction more sense. My new ritual. A comforting glow just for me.

Today (and tomorrow, if you like) is Samhain, the end of harvest and the start of our darker months. What I love about pagans is that they find a reason to celebrate even in the darkest times. There’s a always a new beginning just around the corner. The Wheel continues to turn. This faith began as a coping mechanism, but it’s become much more than that. 

Other Stuff:

• When I have writer’s block, I read Nick Cave’s books. When I feel low, I listen to Nick Cave’s music. When I want to know what love is, I read what Nick Cave writes about Susie Cave.

• This might be my favourite thing I’ve read all year. Henry Dawson went to university and missed the caring, compassionate feeling of his home kitchen. He wanted to reach out to his new friends, but he didn’t know how. So he learned how to bake for them. Don’t, I’m welling up again.

• To be a witch is to disrupt capitalism, according to Silvia Federici. I particularly like Niki Seth-Smith’s idea that the reason so many people are lunging for otherworldly crutches in these dark times — myself included — is because the universe is compelling them to.

• Gorgeous writing by a gorgeous person. No lie, I do love Lily Waite. Almost as much as she loves Kernel’s Table Beer, which she sent a love letter to via Pellicle this week.

• On Twitter this week, I called this piece by Katherine Miller for Buzzfeed “essay as art”, or something like that. I’m standing by that. It’s a long, long, longread on how our concept of time has been knocked out of sync, potentially forever, by Instagram, American politics and the slow crunch of gears as life continues as normal despite it all. It’s made even better (I think) by the disorientating gifs dotted around the page. See. Art.

• Stop a minute and have a drink with Tony Hawk.

• I may have sent this link already earlier in the year, but it doesn’t matter. It’s worth re-reading. I thought to myself “what was that great little doc I watched about passing through the disjointed, vast landscapes of America on the train?” last week. Turns out I was just remembering the sights I imagined while reading this article. 

• In Barcelona, the council is trying to protect the city’s bodegas against gentrification, to a combination of applause and cynical shrugs. Read this for fascinating details of bodega owners and their regulars, what they reckon about the new safeguards and how vital bodegas are to local culture.

• Natural wine is now huge in Barcelona. Paula Mourenza talks to the owners and founders of L’Anima del Vi, Bar Brutal and Vella Terra about why natural wine is important to them.

• From the vaults: Matt Curtis shared a piece he wrote about beer culture in Manchester almost exactly three years ago, and it’s amazing to see how much has changed in such a relatively short length of time — and how much has stayed the same. I also love his photography in this piece. It shows the real, sometimes grotty, sometimes beautiful Manchester I know.

• Amelia Tait, Amelia Tait, I think you’re great, Amelia Tait. It’s her ideas that get me. Who thinks of writing articles about this stuff? I’m jealous. This week she wrote about the rise, and rise, and rise of foil balloons shaped like the alphabet this week. The main thing I want you to read by Amelia though, is this piece on the people who develop lost photo films of total strangers from July this year. I came back to it this week. There’s something eerie but so comforting at the same time about it. Lost moments in time, captured, forgotten, and then remembered by somebody else — who didn’t experience the moment in the first place. Oooh I just love it.

My Stuff

• I wrote about how I started getting interested in wine, and how other beer drinkers can chip away at the secret world of grapes too.

• 12630 words of the book done now. Bit tired.

• Not much else to report. See above.

Photo (anon) taken from “Why do some people develop the lost
camera films of total strangers?” by Amelia Tait

Hasn’t this week been the strangest? I’ve not been in a field once. My hands have been clean 99% of the time. I’ve not stood in a torrential downpour for a single second. I have not held a bunch of grapes up to the sky and commented on how lovely it looks. I miss being at the harvest.

I’m not dwelling on it because a) I’m writing an article about my time in Mosel for Pellicle but also b) I am still very much the sad potato about having to leave one of the most peaceful and relaxing weeks of hard work I’ve ever experienced behind me. I didn’t have to think of one single thing. Wake-up time was pre-determined. Meals were presented to me at allotted times. The work was hard but rewarding. My hours of free time were packed and used efficiently rather than frittered away. Naps were valuable instead of a waste of time. Sleep was easy; I was tired.

I had no idea how much of my life is spent worrying about the minutiae of my routine. I was scratched and stung and bruised and sore but I was refreshed. There’s a joke here about doing some actual labour and suddenly realising how much harder I make everyday life to compensate for knowing I do bugger all, I’m sure of it. It did me good. Hire me to pick your fruit.

Other stuff:

• Great piece on Blackbook Winery in London here on Pellicle. Love this guy’s attitude.

• “I took medical speed and played the deadliest catch game”. If the title hasn’t grabbed you, YOU’RE NOT ALIVE. This rusted, creaking, salt encrusted, lonely virtual trip to the Behring Sea is one of the most interesting ways I’ve ever read about an adult ADHD diagnosis, and as well as being a deftly-written and silly-af laugh-riot, it’s captivating as hell. 

• Conversely, this supremely unhelpful piece on motivation and fear showed me just how useless a good percentage of articles on the internet are. It’s about how a simple marketing slogan can help you get things done. CAN_YOU_GUESS_WHICH_ONE??? There are some real gems in it. “No-one is bored anymore” the author says. He tells a definitely not-true anecdote his hypothetical dad told him about a truck and an automatic gear-box (I guess you had to be there?) Then there’s something about a dog chasing you until you die. A full admission that he has no qualifications in psychology or any idea what he’s talking about follows. Honestly, most articles on Medium these days are LinkedIn blog post-level psychotic. Next time you’re suffering with imposter syndrome (which definitely exists no matter what that Guardian article says), give the Forge section on “personal development” (gross) a whirl. It turns out nobody else knows wtf is going on either.

• This is a great primer on wtf spontaneously fermented bevvies are — and includes a cute reference to “gas station IPAs” meaning maybe IPAs are just super normal now.

• This by Evan Rail on the New! Hops! Coming! From! The! Old! World! is really interesting and characteristically full of detailed, chewy info. In particular learning that German farmers are far more into growing new breeds than Czech farmers, who apparently just want to grow Saaz. I want to know why that is.

• A nearby local council website has a folklore section especially for people to look up what the carvings on their doorframes or found items in their knocked-through chimneys might mean.

• I loved losing myself in Claire Nicolet’s “contemplative”, “idyllic” paintings of holidays, landscapes, water and architecture.

• Matt Curtis describing Abbeydale’s Jim Rangeley as a brewing Bootsie Collins might be my fave mental image of the week.

My stuff:

• My heartfelt ode to the late-Saturday-aft social club pool game. Contains bad pool.

• ICYMI: My profile on the Isle Of Man’s Apple Orphanage, a natural cider making team creating delicious drinks from found and salvaged fruit.

• Do you like sad but rapid electronica? Here’s my current everyday playlist.

• I found this on my blog from around this time last year about autumn, winter and alcohol-based rituals.

Claire Nicolet –
9 juillet, 22h et des poussières, 2019

It’s harder and harder to escape the feeling that something is very wrong, everywhere. 

I’m sorry to start this week’s dose of escapism with a total void, but I can’t lie. Every which way there is a disaster, a crumpled, leaking wreckage or a sinkhole about to open up. It’s harder than ever to “appreciate the good things”. But it’s more important than ever before to do it. I know this, so I’m trying to find them and keep hold of them.

One thing I’ve been clinging to harder than ever is education. The more I study, the better I feel. I might be going overboard though. I’m studying grape varieties and the history of bread, geography, politics, dialectology and social history. I’m working every day on my Spanish vocab and learning about aromas and flavours, and trying to teach myself about the intricate, seemingly infinite world of yeast. Learning more about the things I care about is giving me purpose. I feel steadier and less like I’ve been coloured in with a run-out felt tip pen.

Up until now I’ve usually only ever written about the things I can see and feel in the here and now. But in a world that’s constantly changing, and often terrifying, poring over solid books and arming myself with knowledge feels like the most secure thing I can do.

Other Stuff

• A sweet piece in Grub Street on looking for, but not necessarily striving for (who has the time?) home cooking perfection

• Two Friend’s-based stories from Vulture (no, they aren’t problematic like the show). First: What it’s like to own Central Perk when you had no idea it was Central Perk. Second: A lovely and fun and generally smile-inducing story about what happens when you make Rachel Green’s beef, peas and ladyfinger trifle. I really like the line “What did I…have to add to the Möbius strip of the Friends discourse?”

• Artists don’t just have pudding. According to Elephant, puddings can represent pleasure, socioeconomic commentary, titilation, consumption and excess, class, gluttony and elitism. But also they do just like puddings.

• Yeast is great. I love it. This article about everyone’s favourite fungus on the equally wonderful Artful Amoeba section of the Scientific American is satisfyingly detailed and really easy (and dare I say it, fun?) to follow. Even if you think you’re a yeastfluencer, this is bound to teach you something new.

• Black — yes BLACK — chardonnay. The goth in me approves.

• I swear there won’t be a skate video every week, I’m not cool enough for that, but this from July this year is awesome. A must-see if you like ridiculous skating and disused water parks. Ideally both.

• I really, really, REALLY want a big jug of federweisser thanks to this by Evan Rail.

• How being bedridden as a child taught Ben Myres how to write.

• Stop what you are doing and read this piece on the beer scene dialect by Jonny Garrett now. It’s amazing.

• And finally — walk through the rainy streets of Manhattan without getting out of bed. Perfect ambience.

My Stuff

• No. Nothing published this week. I’ve started two blog posts but been too busy scrolling through the apocalypse to finish them. Sorry.

• Off to Germany next week to harvest grapes. Already terrified about the aeroplane.

• What with the Cask Report coming out today it seems totes appropes for me to dig this piece about northern cask out of the archives.

• Heading to Moorhouse’s tomorrow to finish off the elderberry porter as part of Cask Week 2019. I’ve got a good feeling about this one!

Marcel van Eeden, Cat 2.8: Desserts

I’ve cooked Pad Krapow twice in five days, and I’m thinking of making it again tonight. It’s not really Pad Krapow anymore though. It started off that way, about two years ago, when I first got a craving for something I’d eaten on holiday. I was pretty faithful to the most authentic-sounding recipe I could find back then.

A few months later I went vegetarian for bit, so I used soy kibbley bits instead of pork mince. Of course, it’s hard to find Thai holy basil in the Ribble Valley, so I swapped it for regular basil and a couple of crushed fennel seeds — apparently that’s a good approximation, according to a recipe I read on the internet that I’ve never found again.

Online recipes are like horoscopes to me. I live them and I love them, but essentially I just search for one to tell me what I want to hear, so that I can go about my life with confidence. It’s nice to read that I’m heading in the right direction, even if I might as well have written the predictions myself. So, if a total stranger on the internet writes that today I should “take chances” and another says “forget the basil, use dried oregano instead”, I’m not completely ruining a classic Thai dish. I’m simply living my life according to Fate. 

(For what it’s worth, and if you’re as haphazard a home cook as I am, Quorn mince works really well, especially if you use some Kecap Manis to thicc-ify the savoury-sweet oomph.)

Other Stuff

God there’s so much this week, hence the warning in the subject/title. Deep breath.

• Fuck it, let’s go. Chef Mark Spence talks about his life, and his life is pressure, heat, flame and food. I fuuuckiinnnggg loooovveeddd eevverrryyy wooorrdddd.
  “I need life that blisters and scars. I spend enough of my day-to-day trying to avoid doing something wrong; I need an outlet that lets me create something great.”

• An estate riven by one of the busiest motorways in the north. I love reading pieces about communities and this is a good one.

• Life lessons from John Waters. I don’t need to say any more. This is wonderful.

• Mark Johnson’s latest blog post on supporting local football and visiting pubs as you do so is great, and struck a chord, because Tom and I are doing this very thing for the first time this weekend! Stanley here we come.

• A true-crime-style article from the MEN about a pub landlord in Oldham who also happened to be a local executioner known as one of the best in his field.

• There’s a doc about chef Gary Usher (Sticky Walnut/Wreckfish) on Ch4 tonight (Thurs 19 Sep). To prep, here’s a great feature-interview about it with director Dan Burns. (It’s an advertorial, if you mind about those things.)

• Lily Waite’s latest piece on Berlin and it’s craft beer scene made me desperate to go there. And you know what? About a million people have told me to go to Berlin and I’ve never really fancied it. So this is actually a massive endorsement.

• Lily was also mentioned in Vinepair’s 10 Biggest Beer Stories of 2019 and named an “LGBTQ Icon”. Absolutely yes, Lily.

• Cooking a one-pot masterpiece in the forest on a canoeing adventure on the Root River, Minnesota. Beautiful stuff from JD Fratzke — and there’s a recipe too.

• Does a het audience dilute drag? Follow Cheddar Gorgeous around Manchester and its rich drag scene that straddles “bills” and “art” gigs in this brilliant piece (for Vice, a pre-warning if you’re boycotting). Although the writer calls Albert Schloss’ lager “overpriced” “craft” which I’d have to disagree with. It’s copper tank Urq!

• Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts Pt.3. Found by Jonny Hamilton, I must have watched this mesmerising, brain-melting skate video a dozen times by now. Just watch it. It’s unbelievable. It’s pure creativity. It’s art. And the music is lush too. (Also take a look at the comments underneath, there are some real heart-warmers.)

• Even more skating: This oral history of Tony Hawk Pro Skater is completely stuffed with details and anecdotes and it’s absolutely amazing. Did you know it started out as a Bruce Willis franchise?

My Stuff

• Nowt to report published-wise, but plenty going on behind the scenes.

• Working on a mega-monolith of an article about bread which is taking up a great deal of my time.

• I’m also reading A LOT of books about wine because I’m heading to Mosel in two weeks to help with the harvest and I’m suddenly aware that I know SO VERY LITTLE.

• I read Convenience Store Woman on Monday and I need everyone else to read it so I can talk endlessly about how weird it has made me feel.

• Don’t send me links about the Bourdain auction because I thought I was fine and then I thought about someone buying his knife and not using it and letting it go blunt and it made me cry.

• Something from the archives: Sam’s heading over to Burgundy soon to harvest and vinify his 2019 vintage. Here’s my piece on Black Hand Wines from when I visited him back in freezing, frosty February. See you next week.

​Still from Matt Tomasello in “Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts: Round Three”

My favourite recipe book at the moment is Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger.

I was warned — well, not so much warned as prepped — that it was almost unbearably wholesome. A Famous-Five-without-the-bigotry, warm-potatoes-in-your-pockets romp through some of the most delicious sounding dishes you can think of. What people in the 1930s would have considered “all good things.”

Well, I thought. Isn’t that what I bloody well need right now? A distraction from the hellish waking nightmare that is the world at this moment in time? I mean, yes, we’re getting all our favourite jumpers down from the attic, but everything’s going to shit, right? So why not pore over a deeply personal, beautifully illustrated cookbook that’s not a cookbook but a food-based memoir? It’s very sad at the end, but the rest of it exists to remind you that you’ll be alright. You’ve got the time to go back and look at the best bits. It’s chucking it down out there.

Another thing I love about this book is that Ella remembers all the things about food in books that I remember too. All the delicious descriptions of steam rising from a jolly teapot (they were always jolly, somehow), or pale butter being slathered onto great hunks of bread (never slices). Food is always so much more tantalising in fiction, I think. I said earlier in the year that when I read The Mask of Dimitrios the only part I really loved was Eric Ambler’s satisfying descriptions of a tiny cafe in the back of a shop somewhere in Morocco. Was there intrigue and suspense and murder? Yeah, I guess so. But that cafe had fat sausages and cured meats hanging from the ceiling and I could almost smell the broth they were served coming up through the pages. That’s what I want from a book.

Other Things:

• I really liked Jonathan Nunn’s short review of Banaadiri for Eater last week, especially because of his recognition that there is often some over-romanticism (or say, patronisation) around immigrant restaurants (which he admitted to being just as guilty of in his own work on Twitter).

• This short news story from British Columbia is fascinating and sad, and it’s an odd topic too: a teen boy finds a car in a lake with his GoPro. But rather than running it straight, it’s written beautifully, with not a word to spare. Don’t you love good local journalism?

• Can’t tell you how much the intricate form and detailed horror of this piece crept into my thoughts this week. It’s basic job was to outline the everyday nightmare of surviving sexual harassment and abuse. Creating shock from this subject that sadly has become so commonplace due to the horrifying word we live in (sorry to mention it again) is not easy, but framing it using the vaguely-connected tales of One Thousand And One Nights was a stroke of genius.

• Fancy some melancholy Americana? Lana Del Rey’s new thing is out, sure you do. This photo project documents the people who visit the Elvis Presley festival in Porthcawl.

• I have never been to Berlin and I don’t know much about it’s modern beer scene. Through this piece by Lily Waite, who clearly loves the city deeply, I feel like I’ve visited and seen it for myself now — although she believes it’s impossible to ever understand it, and I can quite believe that too.

• This, on Le Grappin, is one of my favourite ever pieces by Anthony Gladman. It’s a profile but it’s just so… fun! And even so, still packed with his penchant for facts and treasures. Yes Anthony.

My Things:

• Not much to report, I’m afraid! Got a bunch of things lined up but as I am terrible at spacing things out, I’m doing them all at once. You should see my to-do list.

• I’m looking at an interesting project with the makers of The Lancashire Cook Book but it’s early days yet so keep it under your hat.

“A little girl from Tennessee who was visiting Elvis’s house with her family.”Photography Clémentine Schneidermann

Coming back from Blackburn on the train the other day, I saw an apple tree out of the window.  It was heavy with fruit, RUDE with fruit (what a saying). They were perfect globes of gold and red, and they were growing straight out of the unloved ground between the tracks and the countryside.

Maybe someone had thrown an apple core from the train window as it passed. I thought about this for a while. Given the size of the tree, it must have been some time ago. I imagined a smartly-dressed woman in a pea coat, with a respectable-yet-towering beehive and white musk perfume sliding the partition across and pushing the core out of sight and into the brambles. I imagined what she might have been doing on the train, and who she might be. Or whether she’d actually been a schoolboy in one of those unfortuante caps they still make them wear at the private school nearby, or a businessman in a pinstripe suit, or a farmhand, or a shopper, or a vicar.

And then the tree grew, blossoming in the spring, bearing fruit in the autumn, shedding leathery leaves before the frosts came, and perhaps the woman (I decided it was the woman who did it) saw the tree without realising she’d planted it. Or perhaps she never came this way again. I wondered if anyone had ever eaten the apples off that tree, or if it created them every year for birds and worms and compost. I kept thinking about those apples, ripening in their nowhere-place, and about the person who might have thrown their ancestor there.

And then I got home and wrote the first chapter of something I’m tentatively calling “a book? Maybe?”, and the thought of those apples kept me writing and writing.

I think this is why I’m bad at listening to audiobooks on trains.

Other Stuff

• This profile on Iliana Regan, a Midwestern chef who focuses on foraged, local ingredients is a beautiful and, very importantly, incredibly interesting insight into her life and why she cooks the way she does.

• The very first paragraph of Phil Mellows’ piece on beer in the Faroe Islands is gripping, and from there it just gets better. Related: I need some Rinkusteinur in my life, and I need to take on the term “mountain beer”.

• Lilias Adie was imprisoned for witchcraft in the 18th Century, and when she died she was buried on the Fife seashore, her soul weighted down by a huge sandstone slab. She was the only so-called witch to be buried in Scotland — all others were burned. Her bones were pillaged during the 19th Century, and now councillors are seeking out her remains so they can give her a proper burial, and create a memorial in her honour to mark the needless cruelty inflicted on those charged with Witchcraft. This sad story of persecution and rabid superstition never gets any less shocking or pertinent to me. Read the whole article here.

• I found this blog post by Alfonso Cevola on how wine influencers make him feel stupid and patronised really insightful and incredibly useful. Yes, I agreed with him to some extent. Then, I wondered how I could use his thoughts to improve my own writing. Then I hurriedly wrote down all the writers and “influencers” he recommends in his excellent list.

• This has been shared a lot already but it really deserves your time — Sanjeeta Bains for Birmingham Live has taken an in-depth look at how British Asians have rescued many of the area’s pubs from closure and turned them into thriving community hubs, and it’s a joy. 

• Tony Hawk Pro Skater is getting a documentary. I cannot wait. Here’s the trailer.

• I absolutely loved this piece on how the year 2004 changed California wine forever. It somehow manages to be packed with data and details, but be thoughtful and engaging too. I guess that’s why Esther Mobley is one of the greatest.

My Stuff

• Not much to report this week — I’m working on plenty, as usual, but none of it is visible to the naked eye.

• Grab this month’s copy of Ferment magazine to see my piece on the Carnivale Brettanomyces homebrew festival. I’ll hopefully have a link to an online version next week.

• I wrote this profile on Harbour Brewing recently and I loved Adam Sergent’s attitude, so here it is for a bit of escapism.

 Stained glass depicting Malcolm X visiting a Workers Association
meeting in Smethwick at the Red Lion in West Brom
// designed by artist Steven Cartwright as part of the Creative Black Country project