54: The Pubs Are Opening 🚨
This weekend the pubs are opening. I know this, not because I read it in a paper or because I saw it on a sign pinned to the door of my local, but because it is the current constant ambient city street noise on Twitter. It's a distant siren getting closer and closer. Soon the noise will get too loud to talk over and then it'll just stop: the pubs will be open.
For sanity's sake throughout this horrible few months of boring home imprisonment I've tried not to think about having a pint of Pride of Pendle with my friends and pubmates in the front room of the New Inn. But now I'm thinking about it, and I'm really looking forward to it. I really am. But it so happens that a friend and I booked a camping trip for this weekend, so I'm actually not going to be able to pop in for a ceremonial first-post-lockdown pint at my local. How fucking typical is that?
I haven't enjoyed drinking in the house. It's not the same to chat over Zoom with a tinny. I've really missed being able to talk about things over a table of pints and a packet of quavers. Video calls feel forced, and I don't ever want to say how I really feel. We're keeping in touch and keeping each other's heads above water. These conversations are not the place to set the world to rights. You can't have a good-natured argument over the phone. Not easily anyway, and not while there are several horsemen of the apocalypse cantering overhead. So I will, despite being afraid to go outside and extremely nervous about catching a deadly virus, be going to the pub when I can and when I can be shown how safe it is. And I'm letting myself get a bit excited about that.
Other Stuff
The microcosm garden in Geneva is where parts of CERN's equipment now live in their retirement.
Joe Strummer made a radio show for the BBC in 1998 and you can listen to it here. I highly recommend it, especially if you love reggae, punk, world music, Latin jazz and maybe even some Berlin techno.
Get your Pellicle shirt here. Be cool.
"But plant roots can crack and buckle even concrete slabs." Ruby Tandoh's wonderful story of Esiah Levy's life's purpose as a gardener, and of seeds and migration and preservation.
I have no tie to Chicago. I do seem to read about it fairly often though. This report on Blackbird restaurant closing forever due to the coronavirus was sad, all reports like it are, but one question in it stuck with me: “Are we even Chicago without Blackbird?” What would have to close near me to make me ask a similar question?
Transform Harm is a really useful resource hub full of articles and information about important topics worth educating ourselves about and interrogating like abolition, transformative justice, carceral feminisms and community accountability.
I have never been to the USA, but I do watch a lot of TV shows and listen to a lot of music. I've always wondered what a 40 was, so I gave in this week and Googled it, and found not one but two great articles about them.
Something I've been coming to terms with recently is that my view of food has been unrealistically comfortable and rose-tinted. Articles like this one by Bettina Makalintal describe how narratives in food programming are overwhelmingly white, and that food does not, and cannot, and should not be allowed to be seen to transcend the political and social issues bound up within its production, preparation and distribution.
How can food media work to improve and ultimately stamp out its racism? Cathy Erway for Grub Street has some solid ideas.
Sandra Oh on bringing her characters' ethnicities forward in the work she does (most recently Killing Eve) because nobody else is stepping up.
"How To Know You're Not Insane" is a difficult but essential read on how Nicholas Carter was gaslit and fired from his writing role at Cards Against Humanity, sectioned despite being healthy, and ultimately fired because he tried to speak up against racism within the company.
A review of Underworld's 1999 Glastonbury appearance, dictated over the phone while the writer was off his tits.
I want to play this game very much. Hurry up and be released.
My Stuff
I've spent this whole week trying to finish the first draft of my book (which I thought was finished but absolutely was not).
I also entered two short story competitions this week. As always, thank you very much if you tipped me via ko-fi -- this is how I paid for the (frankly, extortionate this time) entry fees.
From the archives: Bread For All, And Cider Too -- my interview with Dick and Cath, the Manchester real cider activists.
Joe Strummer running the London Marathon -- Steve Rapport