They came from the land of the ice and snow, and now they love hygge and ice cream.
Everyone from the Isle of Man I’ve met has asked me when I’m moving over. I’m not sure how much each resident gets in finders fees from the IOM government but they seem dead keen on keeping us here.
The arguments pro-Island are strong. Davison’s is the best ice cream in the world. The countryside is stunning. The beaches are clean and beautiful. There are puffins (!) and basking sharks (!!) and wallabies (!!!). Trad Manx pubs are great, and local fruit wine is tasty. People here eat chips with cheese and curry sauce. I’ve fallen in love with the way one road will feel like the Pennines, and the next view will be Pembrokeshire, until the hedgerows move into wide, rolling meadows and you could swear you were in Herefordshire.
“It’s the winters,” I say. I’m not scared of the cold—I’m scared of being isolated on a rock for four months of howling gales and horizontal rain.
The answer is always the same: you hunker down and enjoy the cosiness. You feel glad you’re dry and warm. You can still go sea swimming in all weathers. There is beauty even on the bleakest days, they say. They are hardy people, even the recent relocators. I don’t think I’m made of the right stuff, the heather and the gorse and the mist. But they’ll keep asking. And I’ll keep imagining my cottage in Peel, windows glowing in the midst of a cold winter evening, the rain blowing in over the sea from the west.
Thank you for reading Katie Mather’s The Gulp. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Where a beach can be two things, and a castle is a bird sanctuary.
Peel, on the west of the island, is a Viking settlement and fortress, with a ruined castle and interior chapel still gripping to the craggy islet of St Patrick’s amidst the foam and spray of the Irish Sea. Once, it was only connected to the Isle of Man by a causeway, but now the Fenella bridge can swing open or closed to let walkers visit and fishing boats out of the harbour.
Here there are fulmars and gannets, guillemots, manx shearwater and even puffins. Standing with my back to the castle looking out towards Ireland, which was out of sight under grey skies, sea birds scooped and speared across the water, and picked their way across the jagged rock.
Waking up to the sound of waves is a luxury, and when we moved the van across town to the Fenella car park for breakfast I watched the crashing and spilling over the cliffs from my cosy bed. An update from Race Control warned of rain later in the day and wet roads from a dousing overnight, so rather than speed back to Douglas we settled in for a morning on Peel harbour, enjoying perhaps the only few hours of sunshine of the day.
The night before, and the whole reason we came to Peel, the beach was dug into pits and peaks for the sand race. A 40 year tradition, we were told!
Black Dog Pizza, where thin crusts border on flammkuchen and the outdoor yard is a very cool place to sit and drink and eat and overhear people talk about the glass deposit system (recently imposed, apparently people were walking off and chucking their plastic cups into the sea.) We very much enjoyed our pints of Norseman lager and thyme roasted mushroom pizza, and I’d like to come back when the crowd is more typical (aka. I want to meet some genuine IOM hipsters. Do they exist? I’m intrigued.)
Pints before bed came from the excellent seafront pub The Marine Hotel, somewhere I’ve walked past maybe a million times, but never been inside before. I was cold from watching the sand races, I was thirsty for beer, it was perfect. Built in a sort-of pentagon shape with the bar in the middle, rooms are sectioned off for exploring, the front room being the busiest, the back room for dining, the side snug for pictures of Elvis, etc. etc.
We will be coming back here for food. The menu of pies and butties was exemplary, and there was black forest gateau on the pudding board. If you think I’m not eating pub black forest gateau, you are gravely mistaken.
After our first pints we were gently accosted by a man in a red bandanna and gold hoop earrings who wanted to discuss ghost apparitions. Only too happy to oblige.
The only way to eat breakfast in Peel, in my opinion, is to scoff a Manx kipper bap with cream cheese while walking along the front.
The Fish Bar, a little cabin in-between the castle and the prom, is where to get one. The lovely man will fry your salty, smoky kippers in butter in front of you while you look at the beautiful tubs of pickled shellfish you might snack on later. A bite is strangely like the best bacon butty you’ve ever eaten—crisp but meltingly fatty, salt balanced by creamy cheese spread, except with the scent of the sea all around. Eat on the move while the butter drips down your wrist and the fish is still hot from the pan.
This is my first foray into writing a newsletter on my phone, so if you notice any typos, please don’t tell me.
This past week has been seven long days of practice sessions, qualifying sessions, bike fixing, and a couple of races. The first Superbike and Supersport races roared over the island at the weekend, and after nights of hearing bikes screaming on the dyno I finally got to watch them take flight from the Grandstand and down Bray Hill.
Usually I watch from the hedges, but we’ve been busy in the paddock all week so I’ve become a regular at Trackside, the fan park bar. I’ve never really spent much time there in previous years—it’s a great place for a pint while the racers cross the finish line, but I’ve tended to use it as a pre-drinks place until now. This year, I’m on my own a lot while Tom and the rest of the team fettle and clean and do complicated-sounding data analysis, so having somewhere to be right in the thick of it when I haven’t got time to travel to Hillberry or Ballagary or Ramsey has been a super bonus find. The screens show the live coverage, you’re right beside the track—as the name would suggest—so you can hear the bikes roaring out of the pits, there’s a wine bar run by local wine shop Vino, and it feels totally safe. I get a burger and a beer, sit down on the grass in front of the big screens and the stage (yep, there’s a stage) and live my version of a festival lifestyle. It’s ideal. It’s heaven.
Inside the beer tent it’s a different vibe, and I’ve decided I love it. At the back of the park the queue for beer is long, but it goes fast, and while you wait you can watch the race coverage and overhear race gossip and outlandish claims about tenuous links to racers, the gear they’re using, and who’s going to win. Stand inside the tent to watch the screens and you’re transported to a European sports bar, you know the type, where everyone is raising their plastic cups and cheering one minute, and shouting mean expletives the next. Groups of men in matching shirts buy Carling in rounds, and get increasingly demonstrative with each other, arms around shoulders, laughs getting louder. It’s been sunny and we’re all a little red, excited to be brought together watching a sport we all love. Except this is not usual, we’re not watching football. We’re at the TT, and we’re experiencing it together. A man slaps Tom on the shoulder and wishes us well—we’re wearing our Butterfields of Skipton Shaun Anderson team shirts. Davey Todd posts a faster lap than Dunlop—there’s an uproar. Dunlop comes back—more cheering. I’ve somehow found my people, and they are, inexplicably, unexpectedly, totally improbably, drunk middle aged men dressed in motorcycle merch.
It’s not easy to eat fibre in a world of burger vans, but I’m managing it.
In past years at the TT, I’ve been known to eat double cheeseburgers for breakfast. When you’re only visiting for a few days anything goes, but I’m here for nearly three weeks this year, and I don’t think my body can survive on alcohol, chips, and ice cream for that long.
I was absolutely jazzed to find a local fine dining curry place has a food truck at the Grandstand serving Indo-Chinese noodles with FRESH VEG in them. I saw them chopping it! With my own eyes! They also do a banging avocado and egg ciabatta in the mornings. I’ve been telling everyone. Nobody else cares. But I’m pretty excited, and their food is really good, so shout out to Kurries and Steaks for bringing proper food to a burgerfight.
I’ve been spending some time in the local Santander Work Café, which is as sterile and uninspiring as it sounds. It’s busy though—people in Douglas obviously need a shared workspace, and they’re making full use of it, which I think is great. I can’t help but sit here at my bench table listening to the aggressively meek playlist remembering when this was a cycling shop though. It used to have a big screen where they showed the Tour de France. Now there’s a sign for something called “Network Grind” which I think is something to do with coffee and work, but that’s not what it sounds like to me.
The reason I keep coming here is because the WiFi is good, I can spend hours at a time on a table without feeling guilty, and the plugs are plentiful. But the best reason by far is that the café part of the workspace is run by local coffee roastery, sourdough bakery and now brewery, NOA.
NOA have been part of the Isle of Man’s local food scene for a good few years now, and their operation expanded last year to include a larger café space with a brewery attached on the seafront. Their bread is amazing, and their pastries are intensely buttery. I’ve not had chance to visit their new place yet, but as soon as I do, I’ll be posting about it because I’m really looking forward to trying their beer. Oddly, it’s not been a very boozy trip so far. We’ve been too busy fixing bikes—it’s easy to let an entire evening get away from you when you’re fettling and tidying and trying not to get in the way.
Anyway, please behold NOA’s Turkish eggs, a dish so creamy and garlicky and satisfying it should be given to the sick to cure them. It could bring the dead back to life. It certainly makes my life worth living at the workspace.
Of course, I’m not eating that healthily. Not when there are church halls stuffed to the hammer beams with corned beef butties and homemade cakes. The best food at the TT is always found at church halls, where coffee is £2, and slices of secret recipe lemon drizzle were made with love and intended to raise the funds needed to fix the roof.
Seeing WI and church group ladies flirting with groups of bikers while they compliment them on their shortbread is an incredibly heartwarming experience. I recommend.
The roads are closed now ready for tonight’s practice sessions, so I’d better get back up to the paddock for scrutineering. Somebody needs to make the brews.
Speak soon
Katie xox
If you want to follow our team’s progress over the next couple of weeks at the TT, visit iomTTraces.com for clips and videos, check out the highlights coverage on ITV4, or visit the TT YouTube, Instagram and X accounts. Look out for Team Kibosh, the KHhire bike, and our racer Shaun Anderson, number 18. In the wise words of Charli XCX, “Vroom vroom.”
I’m writing the first postcard from the Isle of Man directly from the ferry. We set sail 20 minutes ago and we’re already almost out of sight of Lancashire—although Barrow In Furness is clinging to the horizon to our right. (Starboard? Is that right?) It’s turned out to be a beautiful day. We left in fog and rain and now the sky is bright enough to turn even the muddy sea around Morecambe Bay a respectable shade of blue. There are people in blankets, but it’s warm. I think they’re used to the horrendous conditions abord the Ben My Chree during more natural northwesterly weather.
Another benefit of not being on the Ben My Chree—I’ve got a seat. The bar on board the Manxman is just as bizarre and pleasant as I remember it, and I’m sat with a Guinness at a little round cabaret table surrounded by TT hats, jackets, and fleeces and the people they belong to. Almost everyone on board is travelling for the races, and we’ve already run out of Norseman lager, the local lager brewed by Bushy’s on the island. By the time we get to Douglas I’m sure we’ll be out of crisps too.
ITV are filming on-board, and despite running into them on the top deck I’ve managed to duck them so far. If I find out what they’re filming for, or if they end up cornering either me or Tom, I’ll let you know. Currently they’re right behind us talking to someone about Dean Harrison.
We’ll be arriving in Douglas this evening, missing the first day of practice, but just in time to crack open a bottle of Chablis at sunset that Tom hid in the van fridge before we left. What a guy. Managed to get the van finished in time for the trip, and brought excellent wine along too. Is there anything he can’t do? I’m especially excited about the fridge in the van. It’s so good. I’ve never had something so luxurious. Imagine—not having melted butter and warm cheese to make butties with before a day out! Milk that doesn’t go off in a day! Amazing, amazing.
If you’re interested in keeping up with “our” team, we’re with the Team Kibosh and WizNorton teams, and Shaun Anderson who’s racing. Check the TT Races X account for news, and keep a look out for these bikes:
I’m hoping that over the next couple of days I’ll have lots of time to send postcards, but I’ll also be updating the Substack chat/messageboard function more often with things I’ve enjoyed eating and drinking and seeing, so make sure you get the app if you can, and join in.
Two weeks on the island, loads of things to show you
It’s that time of the year again when I can’t sleep at night because thoughts of sunny hedgerows and shiny Fireblades are consuming every microunit of my brain. Next week the TT Races begins for me, and on Monday I’ll be heading over on the ferry (yes, the Manxman) to spend 17 days living in my van, enjoying the scenery, working in a cafe, and most importantly, watching motorbikes race very, very fast around the Mountain Course.
While I’m over there I’ve got a lot of interesting and exciting things to do—it’s not all bikes this year. I’ve decided to document the vibrant food and drink scene of the Isle of Man, as well as its beautiful landscapes and everything else I love about it, in a newsletter mini-series. Remember PROCESS? Like that, but free.
I’m hoping to write a short postcard of a post at least every three days, perhaps more often if I can grab enough time, with at least a couple of interviews with local producers sprinkled in there too. I want to show what it’s really like over there during the TT fortnight, from the total global chaos of the races to the parts of the island that never change.
I’m really excited about this project because I love the Isle of Man, and I hope this series can show how truly weird and wonderful it is—the epitome of tradition meets modernity.
Maybe I’ll also see a basking shark!
Of course, while I’m visiting the island anyway, traveling around while I’m there will take time and money, and although I’ll be working while I’m there—a freelancer never holidays—I really would appreciate your support to make this series a success.
If you’d like to chip in for any bus fares (honestly the buses on the island are great? how do they do it?) and parking fees and the like, it means that I can do even more while I’m there, and write even more stories about what I get up to.
Apple’s latest advert for the new iPad is a big mistake.
Viewers are complaining, en masse, that the depiction of musical instruments, art materials, finished compositions, and various other tools being crushed into one iPad singularity by a hydraulic press is deeply disrespectful.
Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I’m really interested by this reaction. Clearly, Apple meant to show that everything you need to make art is held within the iPad. How this was interpreted was very different.
We live in a world where AI is touted by evangelist users as a way to make art without the need for artists. “It’s accessible for everyone!” they say, while also complaining that their prompts are more sophisticated and therefore make better results… No, I don’t get it either. Is AI being developed to make life easier for everyone, or is it just a way to make certain people’s approximation of what art is—a token with inherent value to be made and sold? I am an outspoken critic of AI, and while I find certain aspects of it useful in my other role as an SEO consultant to take away the monotony of repetitive and laborious keyword research, for example, I doubt I’ll ever be convinced of its merit in the fields of creative writing, painting, drawing, poetry, and music. In my opinion, it should be used as a powertool. It makes boring, labour-intensive jobs easier, in order to enable the creative and skilled work to be carried out by people who have the talent to do so. We are all good at different things. AI Art is not a leveller, it is a thief.
Anyway. What struck me about the advert was how tone deaf it was, and how this showed that everyone involved in making it—who must have been, themselves, in the creative industry—thought it was a good idea to show traditional creativity being destroyed by a single electronic gadget. It’s edgy, of course. But is it crossing a line?
The Japanese audience in particular thought so, with many of the complaints coming from Japanese accounts. Here are some of the responses on X (some translated by Google.)
“Many craftsmen value their tools… Musicians value their instruments, architects value their rulers, painters value their brushes and painting materials more than life itself. The video you presented “all in one”, but it will only disgust them. They may never want to engage with your company again. Your predecessors showed us their dreams, you showed us our nightmares.”
“I can’t relate to this video at all. It lacks any respect for creative equipment and mocks the creators.”
“It is a heartbreaking, uncomfortable, and egotistic advertisement. When I see this result, I’m ashamed to buy Apple products since nineteen years.”
“There are a lot of memories, emotions and spirits in there. These things are people’s ‘selves’ that have been smashed. You have smashed those extensions of people’s selves and made a thin, cold something out of it, so it has no emotions or spirits. “
Maybe they didn’t mean to make an advert that seemed to promote the destruction of craft, care, and passion. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it looks like they did.
Macklemore has made a legit tune and it’s about Palestine and you need to watch the video now. All proceeds from streaming and downloads go to UNRWA. “I want a ceasefire/Fuck a response from Drake”
Proud member of your favourite independent food and drinks mag.
This week, the magazine I assist in editing, Pellicle, turned five. We’re having a party to celebrate this milestone—come along—but this week, it was all about sharing our achievements. I think Pellicle has earned the right to be a little boastful.
Pellicle was the first publication to take my wine writing, and was therefore the first place I was ever paid to write about wine. Since then, I have helped create and then edited national wine subscription magazine Glug for almost two years, and still write for them regularly. I have written some of my favourite stories for Pellicle, and their open-mindedness about how far I can take an idea has allowed me to stretch creatively, write personally, and improve, improve, improve.
When Matthew, the owner and editor of Pellicle, asked me to join the team as an associate editor, at first I was concerned I wouldn’t have the capacity to give writers the attention they deserved—I was still running my bar Corto at the time. I shouldn’t have worried. It turns out editorial work is as close to a true calling for me as I think I can get. I absolutely love working with writers to polish their work into something they can be immensely proud of. Editing at Pellicle isn’t a simple glance-through, neither is it a strict adherence to brand guidelines. It’s a symbiotic relationship between writer and editor. A beautiful SCOBY that becomes a delicious literary kombucha, if you like. I feel immensely privileged that people bring their best work to us and I can read it before anyone else, and then have conversations that might take that work even further.
Pellicle is fully independent and can only pay contributors and our little team (Me, Matthew and Lily) through generous donations, Patreon subscriptions, and support from Pro Patreons and our sponsors.
Please, if you value what I do, what we do as Pellicle, and the writers, photographers, and illustrators who we publish—sign up as a Patreon. We are hoping to put up our rates for contributors soon, and we can only do that with the support of our Patreons!
I believe that Pellicle is pushing food and drinks writing forward. I believe it’s a special and important publication, unique in its offering and essential if we want stories about food and drink that don’t follow the preceding narratives of traditional media. Pellicle gives a platform to new and newly-discovered writers when others rely on celebrities and critics for their coverage. Pellicle shares the unique and insightful opinions, experiences, and perspectives of writers, not just press releases or reviews of the products they consume.
I am incredibly proud to be able to call myself a member of the Pellicle crew, and I intend to spend the next five years working hard to make Pellicle as successful as it deserves to be—as a publisher, as a platform for talent, and as a space for creativity and thought provocation.
Thank you for getting us this far. Here’s to Pellicle, and all who made it.
Buy Tickets to My Tasting Session at the Pellicle Birthday Party
On Saturday 11 May, the Pellicle 5th Birthday Party will take place across the Piccadilly Trading Estate’s rich seam of brewery gold. I’m thrilled to be hosting a tasting session at Balance Brewery at 2.30pm on the day, pairing their delicious beers with vegan nibbles provided by their lovely selves.
Please come along: tickets are £20 and you will get four drinks and four amuse bouches included.
Last weekend my longest-serving friend (god bless her) surprised me with a short holiday. I’d not been away on a holiday—a proper holiday, where no work was done underneath hot sunshine—in years, and it didn’t take long for me to remember just how good it feels to relax.
I thought what I missed about holidays was swimming in the sea, and sure, that was gorgeous. The cool, clear Atlantic washing my stress away. But what I really missed was gossiping on the beach, or by the pool, or on the apartment balcony, a can of Tropical Limón in my hand. €1 a can, ice cold from the Superdino fridge, the flavour of malty local lager mingling with zingy, cloudy lemonade. Unlike a Bitter shandy, which is the ultimate northern post-hill walk shandy, this shandy is the only drink that perfectly matches the specific mood elevation of a Spanish holiday, the sunshine, the blue of the ocean.
I’m not expecting the weather in England to improve any time soon, but when that annual heatwave appears, here’s how to replicate that sensation. Get a big glass and pour in 200ml of lager, I’d say Northern Helles, or if you’re going authentic, Estrella Galicia should do it. Flatten the lager a bit with a straw, then pour 200ml of lemon Fanta on top. Sit outside and raise your face to the sun. Enjoy with ready salted crisps and the scent of sun cream in the air.
Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Pubs are places to socialise, why should children miss out?
It’s not a new debate—God knows it’s been the favourite boring rant of grumpy pub-goers for as long as I’ve been drinking. Children shouldn’t be allowed in bars. People have opinions on this. Very big feelings about it. It results in some acutely unhinged discourse that only social media could germinate, as seen here in this incredible exchange.
Yes, it seems that people who don’t mind children in pubs and bars are obviously paedophiles. I honestly feel like X can’t shock me anymore, and then someone else with a sock account goes ahead and flummoxes me beyond prior flummoxation.
The thing is, I don’t have a problem with children in pubs, and I’ve never understood the common misanthropic personality trait of pretending to hate kids (to the extremes of calling them “crotch goblins” in some cases, a truly curséd term used only by total fucking idiots.) When you think of a child-hater, who do you think of? An older gent, trying miserably to enjoy a beer while an admittedly annoying little brat runs circles around his table? Fair enough. But in my experience, the people who claim to hate children, and make a big deal out of this fact about themselves, are younger. They are around 20-35 years old, and they invariably claim to like dogs better. Of course, personal choice is absolutely valid. It shows that they prefer unconditional love. Who doesn’t? What I find distasteful is the absolute disdain for children and their existence anywhere near their personal space. It’s brutally Victorian. It’s outmoded. It’s—I’m going to say it—it’s selfish.
Selfish in the true sense of the word, of only thinking of one’s self. The problem is, pubs are not made just for one individual’s comfort. They are places of socialisation and congregation, where groups of people of different ages, cultures, classes and education bump shoulders, relax, and enjoy themselves. Many adults of drinking age have children. Are we saying they should never visit the pub in case their child, who is still learning how to act within the convoluted and mostly-unspoken sphere of English societal rules and norms, makes a noise?
But some children are badly behaved!
Yes! They can be little shits! Guess what? So can adults, especially drunk adults. Both can be asked to be quiet, and to leave. If a bar or pub is not dealing with a badly behaved child “running around” (as is normally suggested by child-haters) then that is a safety issue, and the child’s adults should be asked to take responsibility. If that is not happening, if you have raised your concerns and nothing has been done, I’m afraid you are in a bad pub. Just as when I threw out a man for belligerently ranting anti-LBGTQIA+ nonsense from my bar, and just as when I had to ask somebody to leave because their dog was harassing everyone for food, bad behaviour isn’t cool and it should be properly dealt with.
Children are mostly not bad. In fact, most children are really sweet, polite, and caring. If you speak to them, not across them or over their heads, they have interesting things to say. My bar would not have been the same without our child customers. I would not be the same without my childhood pub visits. It’s where I learned to love them, and it’s where I learned to talk to people, and to listen to their stories. There doesn’t need to be an active appreciation of the children in or near your space—basic tolerance and human decency will do. Ignorance works too, especially if they are nowhere near you. If you ban children from these formative experiences, from spending time around adults of all ages outside of their family unit, they will not use the pub when they are old enough to, believing they are off-limits. And they will continue to close. And you will only have yourself to blame.
Thank you for reading Katie Mather’s The Gulp. This post is public so feel free to share it.
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