42: Comforting Mundanity
When I work at the pub I can see people stop by the estate agents across the road, pointing at the photos of someone else's living space, glazed by the perma-glow of a shop that sells nothing. I wonder if it helps gauge a place for them -- how much it costs to live there, the sorts of people they could be (or might have to become) if they moved in. If they come in for a drink afterwards, I like to think they're imagining us as the potential local they'd visit if the house they'd picked out was theirs.
I'm nosy in a different way, because I read the local paper. It was a habit forced on me at university -- "all good journalists read the local papers" -- and now it's one of the first things I check on my phone when I go somewhere new. Push aside the car thefts and speeding fines abundant and just as boring everywhere and you'll get to eccentric opinion columns, restaurant reviews and heartwarming stories about fundraising for the coastguard/hospice/playing fields. Reports on new housing developments. Demolitions. Repairs to bridges and road closures. The comforting mundanity of everyday life, different, but seen through the same clichéd headlines and newspaper jargon. It takes the edge off, somehow.
Other Stuff
This feature on poet Cynthia Cruz is so powerful it took me a while to get through it all. She talks about the shame of poverty and, really interestingly to me, the confused ideas of self-improvement and self-commodification. “Aspiration to me is like this neoliberal thing... improve myself... make myself a brand, sell my persona. Especially as an artist, that’s what everyone is doing now."
How experts at isolation deal with isolation. Plus a very good intro full of every feeling I've had so far about the lockdown by Anna Russel.
Always got time for a food writer's love letter to their favourite food from their favourite restaurant and this on Taka's tuna from Yoko's in Portland by Andrea Damewood is just pure happiness.
Something different and delicious: Craft dairy in Athens.
In a season with no sports, sports radio hosts in America have become the unexpected trusted voices of the pandemic. This is a super interesting piece looking at how broadcasters are holding up an increasingly vital line of communication, and how it no longer makes sense to carry on as normal in the name of escapism. If people want to talk about what's happening, why wouldn't they want to talk about it with the people they let into their ears and hearts on a daily basis? (I came across this piece because I was hoping to find something along similar lines about radio presenters. Radio 6 has been a lifeline for me this week, and I might have to write about that at some point.)
It's April and the weather is cheering up and we need some escapism. May I recommend reading (or re-reading) The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim? Here's a review of it. It's perfect.
I miss going to the pub. That's not strange. I specifically miss going to The Old Fountain after reading Johnny Garrett's piece on the Old Street institution. That's very strange -- I've never actually been there.
Allan McCollum's Ongoing Collection Of Reassurance is everything for me at the moment. I even find how he created the collection -- by watching endless episodes of TV shows on a laptop and screenshotting the iamges as he saw them -- highly relevant and somewhat bleak, but only in a relateable way.
My Stuff
Some news: this week I found out I was shortlisted in a short story competition run by The Writer's Retreat. My story, The Barometer, will be published in their anthology later this year.
Tom took over the kombucha this week -- and started making kimchi, sauerkraut, sourdough and a number of other things in bubbling jars and sealed bags. My story about making kombucha has an ending, finally. I gave up, and Tom is now the mama.
OK457 by Allan McCollum, taken from
An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs With Reassuring Subtitles