Seed Blog

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

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

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

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

Other Stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Stuff

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

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

Unnamed Woman — Charles Traub, 197?

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

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

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

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

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

Other Stuff

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

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

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

• Don’t drink Founder’s beer.

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

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

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

My Stuff

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

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

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

“The Demolition of Bow Brewery” by Elwin Hawthorne

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

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

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

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

Other stuff

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

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

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

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

My Stuff

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

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

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

Photo by Nicci Peet

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

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

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

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

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

Other Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My stuff

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

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

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

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

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

Section of mosaic from Zeugma, Turkey.

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