Love in the extremities

A friend has recently started a social media project about peri menopause, as my generation is the first to encounter every phase of life with a terrifying kaleidoscope of physical horrors of womanhood projected annually onto the Sydney Opera House at Vivid.

To be a woman is to be endlessly subjected to a narrative of biological frailty, a meandering pick-a-path of portentous foibles and malevolent corporeality. It begins when you’re about 9 – the whispering hints about periods and ‘developing’, then there’s the reality of dealing with menarche, and then, for the Gen Xers, the ongoing attempts to convince any and all medical professionals that whatever is wrong with you, from rashes to heart failure, probably won’t be solved by going on the Pill.

It’s not just the simple story of contraception, although that is enough of itself. It’s the rise in the preoccupation with this stuff, the deafening roar of body-fear. We are taught to fear every single aspect of our womanhood, to approach it with something between trepidation and naked dread. Limitless news articles warn of the nuanced chaos that our hormonally responsive bodies are plotting against us, a constantly evolving foe just waiting to bring us down.

Obviously some periods are worse than others – pregnancy is a particular nightmare. The culture of pregnancy, in case you didn’t know, provided an early model for all social media – the most dramatic stories are nourished, sensationalised and amplified. In my early motherhood days, surrounded by women who were pregnant or trying to be, I found myself surprised at the reaction to my ‘birth story’, precisely because it was completely ordinary. I’d say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, it’s really painful, but let’s face it, we’re in a modern western society with free healthcare. If it all turns to shit, and there’s a good chance it will, it will still be OK. in my case, it turned to shit and it was OK’.

I truly believe much of the trauma associated with birth stems from the fact that women fear it, or that they have ideas about ‘the right birth’ and then feel ripped off when it doesn’t happen. These are all emotional responses. They have nothing at all to do with the actual physical reality of birth. If you can keep your shit together you will have a ‘good birth’, no matter what happens. If you lose your shit, it’s going to be awful. To be sure, there are women who end up with injuries from birth, and it’s reasonable to expect that this is difficult to adjust to. I’m not dismissing the fact that women can experience trauma but I think the way we go into this stuff makes us our own worst enemies. And we are encouraged to do so.

I’ve digressed. My point, I guess, is we live in a culture that is increasingly presented as a dualism – either we’re constantly scared of our bodies in a low level way or we’re ’embracing our bodies’ and completely ignoring the fact that they can kill us (the ‘always homebirth’ crew, I’m looking at you).

I don’t want to receive an upbeat blog-newsletter with meme-ified 90s pop references that forewarns me about the next reign of terror my body is plotting against me. For instance, apparently changing hormone levels in the next stage of life will alter my gut biome [problem] and change my metabolism [problem] and also my hair might fall out [problem] .

But I simply don’t give enough of a fuck because I’m now old enough to realise that this, like all of the ‘techniques of the body’ is nothing more than marketing and control, and, moreover, I’ve managed to work out all the other female-body shit that has happened so far without much incident. The first time you give birth your overwhelming observation is, ‘JFC none of that is ever going to come right’ but it does, and quickly. This is the thing about being a placental mammal.

And, without wanting to get too philosophical, I have a dear friend who is in her early 40s and is in the final throes of breast cancer. She will not experience these, ‘horrors’. Her hair has already long since disappeared. It feels so utterly wrong to be fuming about the minutiae of peri menopause or whatever it’s called this week when you’re chatting with someone who is actually dying, someone with children, someone who is so unbelievably loved. It’s just rude.

So, if you are a young woman, perhaps a woman who is thinking about having kids, or is having problems with your female arrangements, I would recommend only reading medical papers, if you’re really flummoxed, you could try WAITING IT OUT. Because the one thing that no one ever fucking says, with all the female-body-doom-scrolling is that things do change, and often, it’s for the better. You have a baby and your body heals. I read somewhere the other day that ‘birth trauma’ is defined as, ‘not fully healed after 3 months’. Who the fuck decided that 3 months was the cut-off date? This only makes sense if you think of this as part of a medico-marketing scheme to convince you that normal things should be pathologised. Another example – I can’t tell you the number of women I know who had terrible migraines throughout their childbearing years that remitted with menopause and yet I bet that if I googled, ‘menopause’ and ‘migraine’ I would get a litany of articles about how migraine is worse with menopause etc. etc.

Men do not get this shit, and partly it’s because their biology is different, obviously, but it’s not that different. Men’s hormone levels change over time. They enter different phases, their metabolism changes, they find themselves losing their hair, or at a higher risk of reproductive cancers. Where are the endless instagram accounts chirpily warning of their imminent demise?

So, my feminist anthem remains the same as it always has – fuck right off with that.

The Lamb Bomb

Story-time this morning, for no other reason than the fact that I was ruminating on how poorly adults can do things.

When you’re a kid, you think that adults are more than just sensible. You think they’re omnipotent, and that they know everything, that their views are more than just legitimate, they’re quite literally the unshakable orthodoxy.

And then there comes a period in every child’s life where the thin veneer of adult-truth evaporates revealing wobbly gnosticism. For me that happened quite early on, because like a few other kids in the 80s, my parents divorced. This is not a post where I re-litigate the poisonous immolation of two boomers at war – it’s all very predictable. What I will do is to tell you a story about how adults use kids to get at each other, for no other reason than to marvel at the fact that I am now older than my parents were at the time, and still marvelling at some of my contemporaries who are engaging in exactly the same behaviour. Some things never change.

By the time I was about 8 my parents had both ‘re-partnered’ and ‘the children’ would visit my Dad and his partner in the school holidays, twice a year.

Now, without getting too maudlin I’ll say I was not a happy kid. Things were not going well with my Mum’s partner. And, it was the mid 1980s. I was tall and skinny, an effect amplified by the fashions of the time. Bedecked in pastel ‘stirrup pants’ with my short hair shellacked in gel I resembled a pissed-off toilet brush. Socially, it was a bit of a low point.

So, I looked forward to holidays with my Dad, who was mostly working while we were visiting, but a comforting presence nonetheless. Dad lived in a pretty remote area and at the beginning of the holidays I acquired a sickly lamb from a neighbour that was immediately dubbed Schizo.

Being a miserable, introverted girl I latched onto that poor little animal like an organ transplant. Four times a day I’d mix up a giant bottle of powdered “Anlamb” and gently cradle Schizo while he bobbed his nugetty little head against my chest, slurping down all the milk, often shitting it straight back out again. Schizo had what my Mum referred to later as, ‘the scours’. This lamb was not destined for term three.

But Schizo kept me occupied for the two weeks of the school holidays which was undoubtedly the point. When the time came to go back to school I cried and cried at the thought of leaving Schizo behind, but was assured that he would be taken good care of, and that my Dad, who had never cooked so much as a plate of baked beans for his own children would assiduously stir up warm bottles of powdered milk several times a day for an undercooked lamb.

I hated returning home. Mum would attempt to soften the blow with a nice tidy bedroom and sometimes some new undies, such were the excesses of 1980s New Zealand. The following evening, after I’d returned from my first day back the Ritual Shaming Institute (school) Dad called. Pretty much the only time we had any contact with Dad was in person, twice a year. So when he called I knew something was wrong.

Dad had bad news. Schizo was, of course, dead.

I was devastated and cried for three days.

The beauty of his “play” never occurred to me until last night, when I was furnishing the latest episode of Epic Fails of Pet Husbandry for my daughter with the tale of Schizo the lamb whose only characteristic was attempting to shit himself inside-out every day.

I realised that My Dad and his partner had sourced the sickest lamb in the South Island for me to keep on death’s door, until five minutes after the car pulled out of the driveway at the end of the holidays, at which point they no doubt tipped the Anlamb down the plughole and left the animal outside for nature to tidy the ledger. And then they waited until I was home from school to deliver the news to my Mum so she could relay it to me after they were safety out of harm’s way. The Lamb Bomb.

Now, my Mum grew up on a remote sheep station and so her regard for sheep in general was murderous at its most generous. However, she also possesses a studied, impenetrable calmness that I like to refer to as, ‘The Rock’ and it was The Rock that listened gently as I recounted spending the entire holiday tipping endless bottles of powdered milk into Schizo’s warm carcass, his demise no doubt apparent to her from the moment I burbled out the teary words, ‘his Mum didn’t want him’. By the following day she was presented with an inconsolable child to deal with, whilst managing all the other usual crap that comes with full-time work and parenting.

I’m painting one team as the villain here but as anything who has had any experience with an acrimonious separation can tell you, there is always give and take. All parties covered themselves in glory during The War Years, but the lamb was a particularly apposite example.

The story about The Richardson’s Guinea Pigs was funnier.

Post Script; If you find yourself in a similar situation, the correct response is this; The next time the child visits (months later) you take the child to a paddock full of sheep and point at the happiest one and say, ‘There he is! With his flock! Isn’t he happy!’

Parenting is two parts wiping and one part lying.

Avocado digression

I seem to begin many posts with, ‘I haven’t posted anything in a while’. This is true, again, however, it’s also dreary. Usually, I launch into some diatribe about the latest assault on our collective cultural intelligence, but I’m all flamed out at the moment. So, I thought I’d write about something that occupies an inordinate amount of my time and imagination; Our two avocado trees. [Warning: boring content].

Many years ago, when our kid was a baby and before we had chooks or a compost bin, we used to dig our compost into the back garden like wholesome, sandal wearing troglodytes. It was annoying and usually resulted in an overflowing kitchen compost bin as we waited each other out to see who would bury the festering pile.

While weeding the garden (which makes it sound like a much more orderly arrangement than just a patch of knee high vegetation) I noticed a small, sprouting sapling, right in the corner of the raised garden. For some inexplicable reason I left it there. Over the next year it grew to be over a metre tall, and two years after fatefully I’d ignored it, we had a large, bushy avocado tree. I redoubled my efforts at ignoring it, and it dutifully responded, growing taller than our two storey house. And then, nothing happened. For years. No flowers, no fruit – nothing. At some point I had a flash of attentiveness and noticed that there were actually two trees growing next to one another, almost in the same hole. They were, in all ways, identical.

Avocados grown from seed are usually root stock (if you’ve planted the sprouted seed from a commercial avocado, which we had). We were unsure if we would get any fruit at all. And then, in its 7th year, it produced massive amounts of pretty yellow flowers, all of which fell off. Tree #1 was one ‘type’ and tree #2, the ‘other type’. Avocados are dioecious, which means the flowers open in the morning as one sex, close again around midday and then reopen in the afternoon as the other sex. It means that avocado trees are self pollinating. Good taste precludes me from making sport of this quirk of nature.

The following year both trees flowered and produced a couple of tiny fruits that fell off, the year after that, about 30 fruits and the following year about 200 fruits. During these three ‘fruiting’ years, only one tree produced fruit. Or so we thought. On closer inspection we discovered that in the most recent fruiting, tree #2, known as the B Team, produced a small number of absolutely gigantic fruits. They are smooth skinned, perfectly formed and delicious.

The B team. Huge, smooth(er) skinned fruits.

So far the trees have both flowered in late August, early September. They need a quite specific set of conditions in order to flower – it’s something like an average temperature of 28c over 3 days and nights (I can’t recall the exact numbers). By August we usually get a few runs of warm days, interspersed by colder wintery weather, and this kicks off the flowering. Of note: every year the trees burst into flower the morning after a huge party or music gig. Science, you see.

Last year (2021) it rained. And rained and rained. La Nina had an absolute lend of us. The trees were quite late in flowering and when they did, it rained the entire time. I can’t be sure, but I think the lack of wind and the endless rain kept the birds, bees and bats tucked up in their beds and not pollinating our trees. The macadamia tree, which sits about 10 metres from the avocados, also experienced a low pollination (it flowers at around the same time).

Usually, when there’s little to no fruit on an avocado tree it’s because the tree is ‘having a rest’ – Hass avocados (almost certainly what our A-team tree is) alternate their seasons in some climates (usually places that are cooler than ours). In this case, they don’t produce many flowers. Or, they flower, set fruit but then all the fruits abcise (drop off) at about pin-head size. This is a normal thing anyway – usually an avocado tree sets millions of fruits but only about 150-200 will turn into fruit. When the tree is stressed it will drop all the tiny fruitlets. None will mature into full sized avocados.

The two varieties. Hass (small) and Mystery (maybe Shepherd?)

I think our tree didn’t pollinate because of the rain. It flowered, but set almost no fruit. I was surprised because avocados like water. Their position in our garden is in a free draining, elevated corner – avocado trees like water but will die if their roots are submerged for more than 4 hours. Fickle bloody things.

In the year leading up to ‘The Fires’ I fretted that our trees might die due to lack of water. They were receiving nothing more than the greywater from the shower. And yet, they produced a bumper crop. Last year, however, as we lurched from one catastrophe to the next (pandemic) the rain set in, and the trees went on lockdown.

It’s now been 12 years since both of these seeds sprouted into life. They’ve grown like the kid, providing just the right level of climbability as she ages. Hopefully, in about 2 months, they will both flower again and we’ll get a good crop.

On the difference between being and doing

• 

Pistol River, Oregon. The grainyness is attributable to every atom of sand being blown sideways at a freezing 40 knots. Those people in the foreground are leftover from a storm in 1976.

Almost exactly but not quite ten hundred and a half years ago, I was living in the Bay Area, California. I’ve realised, since I am trying to write something every day, how much of my daily observations are informed by previous experiences. And so; California. My time in NorCal was oriented largely around kitesurfing, as was my want at the time. During one summer I travelled up the PNW coast in a rapidly disintegrating van (a theme that has punctuated my life like a recurring case of the shingles), to Hood River, Oregon. 

Perhaps I’ll write more about those experiences at some point, but I’m reminded today of being offered a job teaching kitesurfing, in San Francisco, the epicentre of extremely expensive and well educated brains tucked inside ridiculously thin skulls. The model was simple – I would work for cash in hand, use the kite school’s equipment and infrastructure to teach people to do something that is easier than driving a car, but with a more consequential and vastly wetter learning curve. 

I declined. I was in the US legally, with long-as-you like residency (can’t recall its real name) but I did not have a work permit. Perhaps more importantly, I did not have any sort of insurance. The school did not seem to think this was a limiting factor, but I was nervous. The scale and scope of kiteboarding injuries makes 17th century Caribbean piracy look like a wellbeing check-in session on Zoom (although personally I’d prefer the former). I’d only recently watched a young man get dragged sideways into a carpark bollard, shearing his pelvis cleanly in two, the harness holding him together like a rolled roast. Or, the chap at Oostvoorne, in the Netherlands, who snapped his neck hitting the water from an unseemly height. 

I could just imagine stage-managing some kind of salt-water flensing and being subsequently sued for both kidneys. When we talk about predatory labour practices this isn’t the kind of thing that springs to mind, but in a litigious environment like California, the potential fleecings are terrifying. Like everyone, I periodically assess the odd poor decision I’ve made along the way, but it’s good to also keep in mind the rare moments of perspicacity.  

This puts me in mind of another peculiar trend I discovered while living in the US; egg harvesting. A good friend, Stanford educated, with enormous student loans, was considering ‘donating’ her eggs. Tall, blond, healthy and in possession of a Masters degree from Stanford, she breezily informed me that her eggs would attract around a $100k price tag. Egg ‘donating’ was casually discussed and seriously undertaken, although not by anyone I knew closely. One ‘cycle’ would pay almost all of one’s student debt. That’s a significant inducement to young graduates, many of whom have had to work as (unpaid) interns in their holidays. For these women, aged between around 28-32, egg harvesting looked like an onerous but lucrative undertaking.

I’ve found myself thinking about my time in the US a bit lately, as I reflect on the polemics of the pandemic response in the US – the varying concepts of social contract, bodily integrity, sovereignty, history, slavery and the commercialisation of risk and flesh and blood. How to account for such vastly different approaches? Medicine and science gets you only so far. Anthropology, surely a little further. 

Mothered

I don’t often write about parenting. Actually, I don’t write about much of anything anymore, except books,

Lately though, I’ve been receiving cute videos of my niece, and remembering the days when we took videos of our toddler all day long. And then, just like that, we stopped. Kids stop being ‘cute’ in the simple, heart-melting way. But they keep being wonderful.

My kid is changing right now. She’s nine, and there’s an appreciable acceleration in her maturity and approach to everything. She’s just entering the cusp of adult-ness – peering into the exciting world of self-direction and mastery. I recently recounted her terrible sleeping habits as a toddler and small child to a friend. And then I remembered how when she started school she grew out of them.

First, there were the years where I would gently wake her up for school and help her get dressed, and then one morning I woke up to the sound of drawers being opened. She emerged, wooly haired, in her school uniform. I thanked the tunic’s designers for their oversight with the zipper – she still needed my help to get dressed. (There are multitudinous times that I reflect on my own childhood – mornings in my childhood house were dominated by getting out the door for my Mum to get to work. I had to dress myself and now I take simple pleasure in finding a pair of matching socks or brushing my kid’s hair).

After a change of school, she really got into springing out of bed, ready to charge into another day of tearing around the playground and crapping on about unicorns.

And then, about a month ago, she started hopping into bed with me in the morning, just for five minutes or so. Just to lie there and look at me, to trace her finger down my nose, to ask me gentle, silly questions about the day, or to tell her a story about goats, ‘in a funny way like you do’. My best guess is that she is calibrating herself for another busy day, and, after a quick cuddle, we get up and crack into things as normal.

Parenting is not always the same. I felt acutely aware of my role when she was a baby (obviously) and then a young toddler. I was a full time Mum and although her Dad was very involved too, I felt like she was oriented to me in a very basic, essential way. And then she grew older and more independent. I started working more, and her life was more structured around Dad. And now, as she grows into a new stage, she is reaching out to me more again. Partly this is for added security (I’m guessing this explains a bit of the morning cuddles) but partly I think she is watching me to see how it is to be a woman.

None of us are the perfect woman – I’m a bit of a shambles, I get distracted easily, I’m always going off on some bender about some random thing. I’m both focused and unfocused. A lot of the time I’m not well (physically that is. Mentally I’m SANE AS A FUCKING JUDGE).

I study lots of different stuff – sometimes all at once. Sometimes I worry that I’m not providing a very good model of being ‘focused’.

And I feel her watching me when I’m around other people – to see how to be with them, how to make friends, how to manage other people. Sometimes I’m troubled by this – as women we’re trained to consider the emotions of others constantly. But then again, I don’t want to erase my femininity, just to hold it to account.

The other day she asked me about a friend who kept trying to be nice to another girl who sometimes bullied her. I told her that if a boy is mean to another boy, he just thinks, ‘Well that guy’s a dick, I won’t play with him’. But when a girl is mean to another girl, the victim thinks, ‘I need to make this mean girl like me, because making people like me and affecting their emotions is something that I should do’.

How else can you explain why girls go back to their abusers, be they schoolyard bullies or loseroo boyfriends?

I’m going nowhere with this, other than to suggest that this parenting thing changes massively over time, but it’s pretty fabulous.

 

 

 

Gen X The First Generation to Have Worse Fountain Pens Than Their Parents.

Children born between 1976 and the mailbox are three times more likely to suffer from badly malfunctioning ink pens than the generation that came before them. Not only will GenX have a disproportionately high rate of stained handbags, they also have up to 18% more chance of experiencing at least one disappointing Club meal before retirement age.

Can we please stop comparing the economic prospects of Gens X and Y to the Baby Boomers’ fortunes? This is not a linear progression.

Baby boomers experienced one of the greatest increases in ‘life everythings’ the world has ever known. John and Sue were born at the thundering apex of the late industrial revolution. Their greatly enhanced wellbeing galloped in on ten thousand flaming jets of fossil fuel. Of course their lives were going to be better than their parents.

On masse, baby boomers have mostly avoided being blown to bits in war, filleted by heavy machinery or turned inside out by some hideous biological liquifaction. Certainly, when viewed alongside the long and dramatic list of their undoings presented in the media – from mesothelioma and heart disease to adult men in velcro sandals, it’s easy to lose sight of their clear run. However, the fact remains, baby boomers experienced an extraordinary growth in human comfort and material wellbeing.

The grumbling statistician deep within my soul would prefer a more fruitful question – how can we explain the revenge effects of the Boomer’s economic flourishing? Given the cornucopia of food, medicine and elasticated waistbands, shouldn’t the Boomers be a bit better off than they are, stumbling towards their 80s with fistfuls of Lipitor?

I would suggest that Gen X and Y might be economically poorer than their parents and grandparents, but will realise wealth in other ways. For starters, they will recognise the shortcomings of the Boomers’ exceptional wealth and prepare for them. Information is a resource.

Conversations

Yesterday

Kid gets off bus buzzing and happy.

K. N says I’m her friend and she gave me this friendship ring. It’s because we’re friends!

M. Cool.

K. She also says I should wash my hair and conditioner it, because she said she could smell a funny smell and she thought it was me. She said I would look heaps better with shiny hair.

M. Well, you have a shower every day, and you’ve been swimming a lot, so I doubt you’re stinky. But OK, you can use conditioner if you want.

This morning

K. Mum, can I wear talcum powder today?

M. No, we’re walking out the door, it’s too late for that conversation Wait, is this cos N said you smelled bad yesterday?

K. Yeah, she said I should wear perfume, but I told her that my Mum only lets me wear talcum powder, and that’s only sometimes.

M. Ok, let’s get this straight. Sometimes girls tell one another that they should change something about how they look so they look prettier, or that they should smell different. They seem like they’re being nice and being your friend, but it’s actually called; ‘Being a bitch’.

[perhaps could have toned this down a bit, but the kid is used to this kind of straight talk chances are she’ll survive]

M. It’s a bit like bullying where someone tries to make you feel bad, but in this case they’re not necessarily trying to make you feel bad. It’s just a thing that girls learn to do to make other girls feel like they’re inadequate and that they need to do something to themselves to improve themselves.

K. But why do they do it at all?

M. There are a couple of main reasons. The first is that it makes money. Companies do this thing where they tell you there is something wrong with you when there isn’t. But then they make you think there is, and then they tell you they have a product that solves the problem. But there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Have you got two legs? Are you tired of having two perfectly operational legs? Are the bottoms of your legs always in shoes? Yes! Well, we’ve got the solution, the new Suzuki 1000!

K. I don’t know what you’re on about Mum [exasperated but increasingly common look]

M. Look, companies tell you that something normal about your body isn’t normal. And then they sell a product that will change it. And then they become rich, by solving a problem that wasn’t a problem in the first place. That kind of thinking has become quite normal, so that’s one reason that girls think it’s OK to tell other girls that there is something wrong with them when there isn’t. Make sense?

K. Yep

The other reason is a thing called sexism. Have you heard of sexism?

K. No.

M. It sounds like sex, but it’s really just the old fashioned idea that girls should be pretty and smell nice, and play with dollies, and that’s all they can do. No science. No Operation Ouch. No maths. 

K. No maths? Whaaaat? But we all do maths at school.

M. Yeah, but with sexism girls think it’s OK to not be good at maths, because what’s really important is that they look pretty and smell nice. Imagine if you couldn’t go to the Physics Learning Labs because you were a girl.

[Look of abject horror as this freaky alternate reality sinks in]

M. Yeah, so that’s sexism. The important thing to remember is that N probably isn’t trying to be horrible when she tells you there’s something wrong with how you look or smell. It’s just something some girls are trained to do. So you can still be friends with her, but just be aware that you’ll hear this kind of stuff from time to time. What’s important is that you are aware that there is nothing wrong with you, and you get to decide if you want to change something about yourself. 

A good thing to ask yourself is; would this friend still say this stuff to me if I was a boy? Would N tell a boy that he smelled bad or should use conditioner in his hair?

K. No, I don’t think so.  

M. Ok, that’s sexism, consumerism and body politics covered. Now, try to remember to get your jumper out of your tote tray please, and have a look for missing containers. Here comes the bus.

 

500 words; nothingness

I know, I said I would post 500 words every day. Some days, however, are more chaotic than others. There are days when everything works, sure. Days when I write things and research things. Days when I get shit done. Other days are like intellectual fire-damp.

Today is a bit like that. Here are the things I have engaged with today;

– The rise of fashionable individualism and its effect on trade unionism

– The stochastic nature of airborne fluorine poisoning

– The budding cycle of avocado trees

– Lady Gaga being a man (hint; it’s in the name)

– Why people still listen to early Beatles music, despite its anodyne repetitiveness

– Why people enjoy anodyne repetitiveness

– The socialisation of labour market elasticity and the NAIRU and why people still talk about the Phillips curve as something that works even though…stagflation.

– KFC? Why?

– Pneumo-thorax tubes

– What to make for a solo exhibition that bumps in in one month’s time that I completely forgot about.

 

As you can see, today is shaping up into some kind of cerebral clusterfuck. 500 words can wait.

Why I don’t follow recipes

Victims of my cooking often remark on my lack of respect for recipes. I have respect for them, sure, but I can’t read them. I have recipe blindness.

Put this another way – I cannot read something that is three pages long, remember where I am up to, go back, read the same bit again, remember where I was up to, go back again, read the same bit but a little bit further, remember where I was up to, etc., etc.,.

And I’m beginning to wonder who can? Who are these rare and delightful creatures who can maintain their attention on something as endless as a recipe?

Honest to Christ, the idea of having to go back and look at the same bit of paper over and over and over and over and over again makes me want to embrace the pro-ano movement with open, wavering arms. I just can’t do it.

So I read the recipe, and then I try to memorise it, because I know I won’t be able to go back and read it again and again and again and again and a-fucking-gain, and if I do I will get confused anyway – did I already add the sugar? Perhaps I’m at the bit where I already put the flour in? Perhaps I’m at the bit where I lost my mind with the fucking endless fucking instructions? Did I eat my own hair already? Where is all this smoke coming from?

This is why I am good at roasts. And bread – there is no recipe for sourdough.

 

Here is my favourite recipe for everything I can cook;

Place all ingredients in the thingo together

Do the one and only thing that needs doing until it looks right

Bake 

Check it

Bake it some more

Think about doing the dishes. In the morning.

There is a prequel to this recipe, if the main ingredient used to have a beating heart.

I’d buy food at the shops if it weren’t completely comprised of paint thinner and sawdust or whatever the fuck Miracle Food Co. is pushing down the ‘human chute’ this year.

Roast it is!

Six things my mother told me…

 

1. You can get sunburnt from the sun’s reflection on the water.
2. Try to make sure you can always get a job. Just the idea that a relationship might be based on need is corrosive.
3. The jandal is faster than the eye.
4. A cup of tea is the only treatment for shock.
5. All waterskiers should have a solid understanding of angular momentum.
6. All children are weird