Finally Some Good Grief 1.
People, I've been sad
It started again, with quiche.
A key trait that most people know me by for the last ten years or so is that I hate quiche. In fact, my first proper standup routine when I was 18 was about how I hated quiche. What if we made a pizza eggy and sad? I told the audiences, who were all definitely crying with laughter. But then, recently, I went to Sainsburys and they had in the reduced section a ‘Mature Cheddar and Crispy Chilli Oil quiche’. I love both cheddar and crispy chilli oil, but was unsure about the combo I obviously had to try. Spoiler: once heated, it was delicious, gooey and savoury. So firstly I realise I’d like to apologise to quiche everywhere for all the bad things I’ve said. Turns out you just needed a better filling.
Perhaps the more important thing I realised while eating this quiche was that I realised I miss writing this newsletter.
In case you didn’t know, my mum died in May. It’s been horrid and sad, but perhaps one of the most brutal things about all of this is that when I loaded my mum’s tablet up recently, I found in her email inbox that most of these newsletters were unread. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure how to take that. Everyone’s a critic, I guess. After all, I’m not sure who else still reads these either, especially when everyone has a newsletter these days, and our email boxes are fighting for their lives against every subscription you’ve forgotten you’ve signed up to.
But even so, I miss it. I miss telling you all about these good things I’ve eaten. You are my community and writing this newsletter feels like talking to my friends. I care about each and every one of you! And because of you guys, I have kept writing this newsletter for over 4 years now, having written forty of them. Maybe that’s not big for some people, but that’s big for me!
At my mum’s house, I went through the boxes with all my writing so far. I have always felt bad for not writing every day and being ‘consistent’, but seeing thirty years worth of it collated reminded me that you don’t have to show up every day to be showing up. Maybe you write intensely for a week and then not again until two years later. Maybe you write a newsletter every week for a few months, then release one whenever you can. But it still exists, and I am the writer I am because of each one of those pieces of writing and the distance between them.
Grief workshops will tell you how important writing is to process, and I know I need to write about this because it’s been two months and I’m still sad. This is not surprising, but perhaps what is surprising is that I feel like I’m not supposed to talk about it anymore. I feel like everyone else is moving on with their lives and I’m supposed to be too. I should be getting on with things, rather than still bursting into tears if I even try to talk about Mum. But if anything, I miss her even more now. So, I have to write.
I can’t pretend it will be consistent to any plan. As much as the algorithm likes you to have a regular schedule, I simply can’t do it. I can’t neatly proportion and schedule my feelings for ‘the grind’ or to ‘organically build a following’. All I can do is write as much as I want to write, and I will stop when I need to stop.
I want to write about food. But also, for the moment, I want to write about stuff that isn’t food more. So I will write about both, but apologies if if reading about grief is too heavy for you or you are just here to read about supermarket/restaurant/recipe recommendations - I will include as and when, and if you read to the bottom, I’ve got a recipe for anchovy butter pasta I’ve been making. However, if you are looking for company, comfort or perhaps you are just morbidly curious, I’d love for you to stick around.
Also, I will be pausing paid subscriptions as I’m not going to put any of this stuff behind a paywall because that feels super weird! However, financially I can’t say I’m in a place to entirely say no to money, and if you do enjoy any of this work or just feel sorry for me and happen to have some spare cash, feel free to give me a little gift here:
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has already been so generous lately, your kindness has not been forgotten. When I do finally get published, I will put as many of you in the acknowledgements as I can physically allow!!
Now it’s time for my personal highlights and lowlights of late:
I have various phone calls with customer service to cancel every direct debit Mum had. Firstly, why does every customer service line make you go through 15 rounds of options until you reach an actual person? Secondly, the plus side is that having to talk to all these people means saying the words ‘my mum has passed away’ out loud don’t affect me anymore. Some people are good, some are …less good. Her union and car insurance are extremely helpful, the internet company, less so. One guy proceeds to tell me about his family’s history with cancer which would have been fine if he hadn’t emphasised that his mum had ‘luckily’ not died because they “caught it early”. Lucky you! But then the next colleague he passes me onto is a lovely older woman who talks to me about Albert Schloss, and I am endeared.
I watch The Shrouds out of morbid curiosity. Luckily, it is far too daft and horny to actually upset me in any meaningful way.
A mirror that a dear friend is restoring for me turns out to be a valuable antique mirror from the seventies. Of course, Mum had left it in the garden where it had been almost wrecked by nature! Because why wouldn’t you! I can’t be too mad though. I’m not going to sell it, and neither was she. If we treated everything we owned as if we were going to sell it, that would be an awful way to live. Use up the perfume! Wear the clothes until they break! Chuck valuable furniture into nature - for short periods of time, so your friend doesn’t have to dispose of all the dead bugs that accumulate within it. Sorry Josh.
My sibling sends me a picture of a heart shaped like a cloud, which we both take to be a sign beyond the grave. Mum was always a fan of Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s book and series about Cloudspotting. It’s because of this I can still identify cumulonimbus and cirrus, but maybe this heavenly sign is a sign it’s time to finally read the rest of the book so I can learn any other cloud shape.
hi Mum! A friend tells a story about a bride whose mother tried to wear white on her wedding day. I make a joke that at least that’s not going to be a problem. 10/10 bit from me, I like to think, and one of my new favourite things is making jokes around my friends about Mum and seeing the face they make before they allow themselves to laugh. Tee hee! In reality, unfortunately I will probably be the cliche bride who leaves an empty chair for Mum or something like that, unless it’s too expensive. Sorry Mum!
She visits me in my dreams twice. The first in person, the second in the form of a phone call. Both were nice while they were happening, until I remembered in-dream that this should not be possible. The first one afterwards left me upset and weird all day afterwards but the second had the opposite effect weirdly. This time, she was giving me a pep-talk through some sort of magical phone loophole. At the time it applied to a dance audition (??) which I was doing, but what she was saying wasn’t dance specific at all, and felt so incredibly real, more real than any part of a dream I’ve had, that I like to think she was perhaps just talking to real-life Ruby however she could.
Mum when she sees me do the dance solo from the ending of Save The Last Dance
And finally, some good food (content) - I can’t remember much of what I’ve eaten recently, so I don’t have much in the way of singular recommendations bar the quiche at the moment. There is this recipe I’ve been making a lot lately, loosely inspired from a couple I’ve seen online:
Anchovy Butter Pasta - a vague recipe
You will need:
tin of anchovies
butter
garlic
white wine vinegar
chopped parsley
breadcrumbs
pasta of choice
Method:
Prepare breadcrumbs however you like- that could be buying them, or in my partner’s case, making your own using any leftover stale bread, toasting under the grill with olive oil and garlic and putting in the food processor with some leftover anchovy oil. But you do not have to be that extra (they were delicious though!!)
Melt butter in a pan on a low heat. Add crushed garlic for a moment, before adding your tin of anchovies.
While the anchovies break up and melt into the butter, cook your pasta. When you drain, make sure to save some pasta water.
Once the sauce is quite reduced and sufficiently brown from the broken up anchovies, you can add some pasta water, along with a splash of white wine vinegar and some parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then toss in your pasta. One of my best grabs from Mum’s kitchen draws was those tongs that look like little hands - excellent for any noodle-y dish!
Top with your chosen breadcrumbs and/or cheese and serve.
That’s all for now, but I’ll see you when I see you - I’ve bought a different reduced quiche to try so I’ll let you know how that goes. If you relate to anything in this newsletter, I’d love to hear from you, because one of the hardest things about grief is how lonely it is. Also, if you’ve been bereaved by cancer, I really recommend The Loss Foundation, who do free workshops and support groups that have been a bit of a lifesaver at the moment. Otherwise, if you enjoyed this newsletter or found it meaningful/helpful, please feel free to share on social media or pass onto any friends who may need it. As High School Musical once said, we’re all in this together!