Good reads and good feeds

The last week or so has involved a hefty amount of my two favourite things - good food and good books. Drummer Boy and I made our regular pilgrimage to Bristol to celebrate another year of tolerating each other - which we do by eating and drinking a lot, and allowing ourselves one moment of public affection on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, where it all began.

Obligatory "look at my dinner!" photo.

On a friend's recommendation (thanks Jen, we owe you!) we went to Bravas, probably the best tapas restaurant outside of Spain. The chorizo was smoky and sweet, the Rioja was smooth as velvet, and having utterly fallen for their aubergine fries, served with molasses, I never want to eat a normal potato chip again. DB tried them before I did, and stopped me mid-sentence with a look on his face that suggested he was about to impart the secrets of the universe - "you have to try these. Now." I don't know what they did to those aubergines, but bloody hell. They tasted amazing. So if you're in Bristol and want a stupidly reasonable, utterly delicious dinner, and you don't mind getting cosy with your dining partner(s) - it's pretty intimate, good place for a date - go directly to Bravas.


Sticking with the small plate theme, but swapping Spain for Venice, last night we went to Polpo. We'd agreed to escort my teenaged sister and her friend to Wembley Arena, so they could see 5 Seconds of Summer (no, me neither). Seeing hordes of young girls in eyeliner and tartan - some accompanied by parents wearing baffled but amused expressions, some giggly in groups, some with mums who were determined to make a night of it - brought on an attack of nostalgia. I remember the second stadium-sized gig I ever went to (the first was the Spice Girls; I regret nothing) - Green Day at Milton Keynes, Sunday 19th June 2005. It was a scorchingly hot day, made hotter by sheer excitement. I remember looking around the crowd of thousands, thinking it was strange, and brilliant, that live music is one of the few remaining good reasons for so many people gathering in one place at the same time.

Anyway, back to Polpo. Venetian tapas, essentially. I'd heard good things about it and since we had to be in London for the evening, I thought we might as well have a nice dinner. And it was nice - the service was impressively attentive for London, and the waiter explained the menu, which was helpful. The highlights were unarguably the polenta, which was filling and full of flavour, and the rabbit terrine (sorry, bunny-lovers). We shared a little tiramisu pot for pudding, which was perfectly pleasant but ever so slightly too sweet, and wondered if perhaps we needed to return at a later date, to explore the menu a bit more - DB had his eye on the calamari, I think. I'm not overly struck on eating things that have tentacles, so for once, he'll get that plate to himself.

On the Bambi bookshelf: Bristol edition

I put Owen Jones' The Establishment on hold, as I wanted something that felt a little less like a politics lecture - so I took Late Fragments: Everything I Wanted To Tell You (About This Magnificent Life). Not exactly bright and breezy reading for a romantic couple of days away, but still a beautifully-written book, chock-full of memories and well-chosen literary references, and, above all, love.





Next up was Hausfrau, by Jill Alexander Essbaum. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that it's the only thing I've been capable of talking about since I bought it on Monday. I'd been waiting to read this for a good couple of months, as it had been reviewed as this summer's must-read, and compared to Anna Karenina and Madam Bovary. As I've not read the former, and only made it halfway through the latter, I can't say if it lives up to that particular hype, but what I will say is: you have to read this book. It lives in your head when you're not reading it, and when you are, you forget to do things like eat lunch or go to bed at a reasonable hour.

I might be biased here because this book caters specifically to my own literary kinks, which are as follows:

- unlikeable yet somehow sympathetic protagonists

- unlikeable yet somehow sympathetic protagonists who are female*

- stories that explore female infidelity. We are so familiar with the "middle-aged man having an affair with his secretary" story, or the "man who feels trapped by marriage and family life so he goes off to be seduced by some broad" - these plots are thundering great cliches now. But women shagging around - that's still something that's rare. When a woman in a TV drama, or a film, or a novel, has casual sex, it will always be a talking point for reviewers: "here is a woman who isn't emotional about sex - guys, look! Gather round!"

*You still don't see enough women not giving a shit, or having affairs and not torturing themselves with guilt, or doing exactly what they need to do to get by. God, I love a female character who's difficult and selfish - go figure.

What haunted me most about Hausfrau though was the way it crept inside my head - for all her passivity, Anna's voice and mood somehow get into the reader's bloodstream. Only two other books have done this to me - when I read John Niven's Kill Your Friends, my inner monologue became even more scathing and expletive-ridden than it usually is, and when I recently re-read the gorgeous, whimsical I Capture The Castle, I couldn't fathom why I spent three days in a strangely wistful, not-really-on-this-planet mood. And then I realised - I'd caught it off Cassandra, the story's narrator. Turns out, I'm not alone in this; a friend - who is one of the nicest, cleverest people I know - told me he became a complete arse while reading Martin Amis' Money.

Once I'd finished Hausfrau, I was in the mood for some Jilly Cooper or similar - pacy but fun, nothing too dark - so I tried Horsham library, thinking they were bound to have something suitable. Annoyingly, they didn't, but I did find The Good Girl, which came out recently and has been on my to-read list for a couple of weeks. I'm expecting good things, given its topical subject matter. I'll let you know.

Eat, drink and be merry

This was an amazing dinner. Food guilt? What food guilt?

Can everyone stop wanging on about 'clean eating' please? (When I say 'everyone', the people who'll know who I'm referring to will be the people - probably women, yes - who, like me, spend their internet time flitting between Twitter, the Guardian, and Instagram. No, I don't have a life.)

Hadley Freeman puts it excellently - as always - here if you need a quick catch-up.

So yeah, if your internet habits tend towards the shallow, as mine do (an assortment of beauty/lifestyle blogs, the afore-mentioned Instagram, the lifestyle sections of various news sites), you'll know what I'm talking about. Glamorous, photogenic young things with impractically long hair, painfully stylish food blogs and frankly insulting book deals. The ones who extol the virtues of baking cakes using avocado and sweet potato and cacao powder, instead of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, like normal people.

I'm not against eating healthily - of course I'm not. I'd go so far as to say I'm strongly in favour of it, in fact. Cooking from scratch (or in my case, having a boyfriend who does, anyway), eating lots of vegetables and fruit and grains and pulses and so on, drinking plenty of water, getting a little bit of fresh air and exercise every day - all good things. I bloody love avocado - but on toast, not in cake. I have no desire to be the kind of person who says things like "yah, I just feel so amazing since I gave up sugar." It makes me want to say, "I feel amazing now I've given up sounding like a tedious, insufferable wanker. Custard cream?"

I just feel that the whole 'eat clean' thing is geting a little bit fetishized, and I worry. Young girls need role models (the feminist line about "I cannot be what I cannot see" is frightening in its accuracy) and will find them online - on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. If all they're seeing is incredibly thin women banging on about the evils of dairy, giving up sugar forever-and-ever-amen and baking with vegetables, then, well, I'm scared for them. I want to claim back some normality and say, "it's OK if you don't know the difference between spirulina and a spiralizer. I had to look it up."

Plus, it's easy to source almond milk and coconut yoghurt and white chia seeds if you're a full-time food writer/part-time celebrity and live in a city - a) you can afford it, and b) there's probably a branch of Whole Foods a stone's throw from your front door. It's not so easy to do if you live in a small town in the middle of arsing nowhere. I spent an entire morning trying to find white chia seeds in Horsham, and despite the achingly middle-class population of this town, I couldn't.

I have been down the calorie-counting, obsessive not-eating route, and the overarching memory I have of being sixteen and unhealthily skinny (though I didn't know it at the time) is that it's really fucking boring. It is so dull to constantly be doing the calorie maths, to be denying yourself tiny bits of pleasure just because you want to be bony instead of healthy. And what kind of a goal is that anyway? The goal of someone who's slightly tangled in the head, that's what. It's exhausting to maintain and it makes you rather hard work to be around. Take it from someone whose mother orders a salad every time she goes out for lunch or dinner - I don't think she's eaten a potato for over a decade.

These days, I've probably gone too far the other way - my "fuck it, who cares?" days far outnumber the days where I'm "good" (but again, what does being "good" mean? It's not like there's a reward scheme where you can collect prizes for managing to get your 5-a-day for 10 days straight) - but at least now I exercise regularly. When you know you can knock off about 400 calories by going for a good run, you start to become quite relaxed about shovelling a hearty helping of risotto into your face afterwards.

There are so many moments in life that involve food, and it's a shame to choose to miss out on them. The decadence of ordering pizza to a hotel room and eating it in bed, for example. A cold beer at the end of a day in a stuffy office. A roast dinner with all the trimmings, plus crumble and custard for pudding (feeling stuffed just thinking about it, to be honest). Champagne to toast good news. Smoked salmon because it's never not a good idea.

The last thing women need - and it is mainly women that this shit gets aimed at - is another thing to spend money on and feel guilty about. Let's stop giving ourselves a hard time, and just try to inhabit something like "normal".

Strange situation

It's hard to write about looking for a job in 2015 without sounding a) more than a touch defeatist, and b) like a whiny "millennial" with a raging sense of entitlement. The trouble is, the whole job-seeking process - from firing off application after application, to the cold-sweat awkwardness of interviews - is the most evil of all necessary evils, and everyone has to go through it at some point. There's no way round it, but it is soul-grindingly bleak.

And the most frustrating part of it is the fact that once you've got a job, and are happily tucked up at a desk with a computer and a phone and a stained mug, you realise how easy it is to have a job. All you need to be is 1) not a psychopath, and 2) able to follow instructions. And if you're aiming to be CEO, I wouldn't worry too much about the odd psychopathic tendency, tbh.

When you take a moment to think about it, it's a strange situation we're in - and by "we" I mean those who've graduated since around 2008. We spent most of our academic lives being told "you're bright, and you work hard - so keep doing that; do well in exams, go to university, and you'll be able to choose what you do with your life". It's strange, when you've done pretty much everything you were told to do - you've done almost everything right - it's strange for it to not be enough, not even nearly enough. In darker moments, it makes you think - well, I wish I had gone off the rails a bit. Had myself a proper teenage rebellion. I don't think I'd be any worse off. When you've had some sort of employment since your early teens, you've got a degree and maybe a Masters, and you want more than anything in the world to be starting to put some sort of career plan together, knowing you should feel lucky to have a job at all is a little jarring.

I remember it so clearly: watching the news in halls in the early weeks of first year, seeing the financial crisis unfold. I remember thinking, so naively, "it's fine... I've got three or four years before I have to deal with the rest of the world; they'll have sorted it out by then. We won't be utterly fucked." And then coming out of uni after doing an MA that put the love I had for the intricacies of language into a pretty serious coma - that it's only just coming out of now - and trying to find some kind of employment. Taking a couple of stop-gap jobs because I wanted the money and needed a reason to get up every day - even if it was to go and sit in a tanning and beauty salon - and on days off, sending out applications and CVs and cover letters, only for my mother to tell me on a weekly basis that I wasn't trying hard enough. (Mind you, she still says that - maybe that's just mothers. Or just her.)

But how many times can you explain that yes, you're applying for retail/waitressing jobs too, because no, you don't think you're too good for jobs like that, but potential employers know fine rightly that you won't be sticking around and will subsequently take a 16-year-old over you, because they'll get at least a couple of years' work out of them? How many times can you explain that trawling round the town centre with copies of your CV is, largely, not the way it works anymore? How many times can you summon all the enthusiasm you possess, channel that into an application that makes you cringe yourself inside out, only to not even get a "we have received your application and will be in touch in due course" email when you do submit it?

At the moment, I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do. I really don't - I think I'm quite good with words and writing things, but at this point, I'm not even sure, because my life is taken up with an admin job that's turning out to be more stressful than it sounds when I describe it. And that's OK - I can deal with being in a busy, pressured workplace - but it's not quite what I want to do long-term, and I feel that at 25, I should be thinking long-term, and making big, grown-up plans. I want to move out - to Bristol, as you're probably sick of hearing by now, but God I adore that city - but how do you find a job in a city you're not in? If I were more of a free spirit type of person, I'd just go. I'd hand in my notice, find myself a little flat in Bristol and take it from there. Start temping to pay the bills, and then figure things out. But I'm more of a caged spirit, really - I like the routine and structure of work, if not the actual job itself - and let's be honest, I like the money. You can't do much without an income, and I've never been good at doing nothing. The general consensus is that it's rather silly to give up a job without anything to go to, and I agree. Especially now, under a Conservative government - I do not trust there would be much in the way of support if things didn't work out for me. I might be wrong, but I'd rather not have to test the theory.

I'm not expecting it to be easy - of course not. I know that a lot of people dabble in and out of a few things before they find their niche, and having a "not thrilling but it pays the bills" job is pretty much a rite of passage. I'm just scared that by continuing to believe that something better will present itself, I'm setting myself up for disappointment. I know I'm still young, but time only marches on.

This woman couldn't sound more perfect if she tried.

This is a song I should probably take to heart.

And I've just stumbled across this, seems pretty good. That voice. Damn.

Election reaction part 2: still mad as hell

It took me six days to find a bright side to the election result. It may take longer than that for me to find something else to write about, mind, but I have at last stopped wandering around saying "that election result...jeeeez..." to every man, woman, child and pigeon that happens to cross my path.

In that six days, I felt a genuine sense of despair. A grey cloud, the nagging fear that the UK just got a little more selfish, a little colder, a little more unforgiving as a nation. It's been hard not to take the result incredibly personally - but maybe that's always the case when the party you vote for doesn't get in. I can't tell you how many times I Googled "how to start a political party" and "emigrate to Sweden" last weekend - my internet history suggested I was writing the next Nordic noir sensation, with a political slant. I couldn't keep away from the news, from Twitter, from the analysis, the think-pieces, the reaction articles. I positively wallowed in the doom and gloom.

Articles like this made me furious – and though I've calmed down considerably since I first read it, I still think it’s far too simplistic a response. To conclude that the reason a huge number of voters are incredibly upset by the election result is because they are merely bad losers is plain wrong. No-one is disputing that the Conservative party won fair and square. We absolutely believe that they were democratically elected – you can tell this because no-one is calling for a nation-wide recount of the ballot papers. We have the right to vote exactly how we choose, but we also have the right to ask questions. The right to freedom of expression. We have, in short, the right - and the reason - to be angry.

Why? 

Because at the very heart and roots of most anger lies fear – it's fear that’s been backed into a corner and brought to the boil – and there are plenty of reasons to be fearful. It is not as if the Conservatives don't have previous when it comes to instilling fear in people, unintentionally or otherwise. How many more times to we have to bring up benefit sanctions, food bank use, "anti-homeless" studs in city doorways, corporations being able to skip the "tax-paying" bit while the young, the poor and the vulnerable have crucial, life-saving support ripped out from under them? Forgive me, but I am still a little baffled as to how a vote for the Right can be anything other than an "I'm alright Jack, let's keep things the same" vote.

This thread has helped a bit - a lot of the responses refer to good local MPs, and voting for them, rather than ideologically. Which I can respect; it makes a lot more sense than "well, my parents voted Tory so I do too".

In a way though, this could be the best thing that’s happened to the Left. (I hesitate when using the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ because most people don't think in those terms any more – at least not among the younger generations – but we don't really have any other words yet.)

Best case scenario: this could be the thing that moves people from online activism to real action. Sharing articles and signing petitions is great, but it's ignorable. You can't ignore several thousand people marching in the streets (well, you can try, as was shown last Saturday, but it comes out eventually). At least one person I know has joined the Electoral Reform Society as a direct result of the election. A number of good friends are planning on going on the People's Assembly End Austerity Now demo on 20th June (myself included). The test will be in maintaining that sense of urgency, that restlessness, that desire to bring about change, and sooner rather than later.

The 'Left' are perhaps always going to be at a slight disadvantage because real change involves stepping into the unknown. We can, in theory, go anywhere from here - it is, to quote Sara Bareilles, all uncharted.

I've said it before but it can withstand repeating - the people that have brought about real change in this world are the ones everyone else thought were mad to even try. The people who were, in short, way ahead of their time. I think the next two or three years might see a slightly angrier, more vociferous, more obviously politicized generation start to emerge. People will step out from behind their screens, having absorbed all the stories and information and other points of view that the internet has granted them access to, and will be all the more open-minded for it. And it will be them - well, us - who are the driving force for genuine change, fuelled by impatience, bored of waiting for the older generations to catch up.

It's not that we were bad losers, you see. We're just ahead of our time.

In the spirit of defiance and not backing down and whatnot, have this.

And I don't know if I've completely missed the boat with this track - the fact that I keep hearing it in Dorothy Perkins suggests, yes, I have indeed - but I am obsessed with this dark, sexy, mildly-threatening-in-the-best-possible-way little number.

This is not a selfish anger

God, it's been a strange day. Personally, I've wandered round in a headachey daze - when I wasn't in the office - unable to meet anyone's eye in town, because I know that over 20,000 people in the Horsham constituency voted Conservative. Of course, I knew Horsham was a safe Tory seat, but when you see the figures in black and white, you have to accept that the people who surround you in the leafy streets, in Boots, in Sainsbury's, have voted for another five years of... well, you know. It's an odd thing when your hometown becomes hostile, as @florencedora put it so excellently on Twitter when the exit polls were announced:

@gutter_flower I am so so baffled by that poll. Feels like the country just turned a bit sinister.

— Flo Holt (@florencedora) May 7, 2015

And Twitter was the place to be last night - if only for writer John Niven's timeline, who needs to be awarded the title of "Most Creative and Inventive Swearer in the Known Universe", and who did a tremendous job of articulating the collective sense of frustration and anger. It was reassuring, really, checking Twitter at intervals throughout the night - everyone was as confused and worried and angry as one another (I mean yes, it helps if everyone you follow agrees with you). Say what you like about social media; if it helps people feel less alone during dark times, I'm all for it.

And it has been a dark day, really. I don't know what I was expecting - a non-decision of some sort, I think; days of confusion followed by a coalition. The one thing I've been saying as the election campaigns have gathered steam is "another five years of a Conservative government genuinely scares me". It's been hard not to stop people on the street today, and grab their arms and say "do you know what you've done?"

Let me be clear - this is not a selfish anger. This is not the sore-loser sulking of people who voted for a party that didn't get in. We're all adults here, we can take losing. I am not worried for myself - I'm fine, I have a job and a supportive family; money coming in, friends, a stack of books to read. I'm worried for those who can't work, who do not have supportive families, who have physical and/or mental health problems that mean life is that little bit harder for them than it is for other people. For those who are currently unemployed, for young people who have not grown up with loving parents in warm homes, for all kinds of minorities. It feels like everyone who voted Conservative yesterday voted selfishly - "I've been OK for the last five years, and that's what matters". I understand that it's a human tendency to stick with the familiar when the alternatives seem like a gamble, but come on. Five more years of increasing food bank use, of benefit sanctions, of cuts to health services? Where's the compassion? As DB said, "how can you expect compassion from people who support a party whose very name means the opposite of progress?"

Scarier still is the rise of UKIP, who received over three million votes. Mind you, it does make you think - if that tweedy racist rabble can call themselves a political party and gain actual seats, surely we could start something at a kitchen table, based on kindness and good ideas and intelligence?

And I'm OK with seeing the Lib Dems become largely irrelevant. I hope it becomes an example to other parties - if you're going to u-turn so blatantly, then by God, you will pay.

There's three things we need to take from this. The first is this - can we agree, here and now, that if they try and dismantle the NHS completely, we kick up an almighty stink? We get revolutionary. If shit needs to burn to keep a national health service, so be it. It may currently cost the best part of a tenner for a prescription, but you don't have to pay to see a doctor in order to get it - for the love of the NHS, let's keep it that way.

Two - we need to remember this feeling. The anger and the disappointment - remember it. I have a wine-soaked, half-baked theory that it might, in a strange way, be good for us, like flossing. We will remember how it felt to not get what we hoped for, and use that feeling to motivate ourselves to always always always vote. And to encourage others to vote, and to tell our children to vote. We mustn't let how we feel today turn into apathy and disillusionment when we're forty. You know what changes when you sigh, sit back and huff, "ah well, nothing changes, they're all bastards anyway"? Nothing.

And three. The most important one. We must all be very, very kind, and much, much slower to judge. For the next few years, we're going to be governed by a party that has, time and time again, shown itself to be so very UNkind, UNcompassionate, UNcaring. We must make up for that. In spades. The next time you catch yourself thinking something judgmental about someone, just think "their life is different to mine. They had a different upbringing" and leave it at that.

I still believe that change is going to come. We’re just going to have to hang on a little longer than we thought.

 

But I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t say that it’s what happens in the meantime that worries me.


This track and its video fill me with joy. And this song - by the same artist - might cheer you for a few minutes.