A question often asked is how one pronounces neither or neither, either or either. But for most of us it’s often … either. This is true of many words for me. Down south, the long ‘a’ rules in bath or laugh or glass. The north has flat, short vowel sounds. I never really know which type of ‘a’ is going to come out of my mouth.
I like the Liverpudlian accent’s melodic cadence, which lends itself to the humour the city is famed for. But I wouldn’t say it was my favourite. I feel a solidarity with brummies, because the accent is disparaged as much as the scouse one.
I do like received pronunciation, although apparently it is spoken by only 2 per cent of the population – and 99.9 per cent of BBC presenters. The Queen’s speech, I’m so sorry, has come to sound absurd, with a touch of the Bond villain. I wouldn’t want the upper classes to dilute their accents, however; I don’t think anybody should be coerced in such a way.
I really was not a fan of cockney – but then along came Adele. Glaswegian is great.
But my favourite accent is to be found in Belfast; a Northern Irish accent immediately adds three points to a person’s attractiveness. It has the friendliness of scouse but is much softer and more charming.
I used to have an ex-girlfriend who, I’m ashamed to say, I frequently asked to say ‘power shower’. She was not, she told me many times, ‘a performing monkey’. But whenever she relented, I soaked in that ‘power shower’ just as I would a deeply pleasurable, relaxing bath. And how, then, did you pronounce that final word?
SETTING THE OUT-OF-OFFICE
When one thinks of the glorious anticipation of a holiday, packing comes to mind. However, being a perennially disorganised person who would probably have made the journey to Mordor with the ring and nothing else – in fact, possibly not even the ring – this is never a key part of the prep for me. I’ll make sure I have swimming gear, or thermals; whichever is required. Mostly, I will be faff-free.
There are things that set the vacation pulse racing: letting the passport off its desk-drawer leash, for instance. But there is only one virtual equivalent of kicking off the brogues and slipping on the flip-flops: setting the out-of-office.
There are many different styles of out-of-office (to those in marketing, it is always the OOO). I’m sure there exists a magazine quiz: What Does Your OOO Say About You?
If you are someone with a proper job, your message probably includes contact details of other people to bother in your absence. These people will not be thrilled. Some out-of-offices are very blunt: ‘I am away and back on x date. I will be deleting all messages sent in the interim’, being a particular favourite I’ve encountered. Others are circumspect, in the ‘I can’t get to the phone right now’ landline-voicemail vibe of yore. In case someone tried to … hot desk? Steal your charger?
My own used to read politely that I was not around and gave the date I’d be back looking at emails. But … people still email. People will never not email. Just checking in again!!! Just circling back!!!
Now, my out-of-office is simply: me <------ distance------> the office. My auto-reply might as well be a photograph of me in a hammock. Which is actually quite a good idea.
It is entering those dates, that sliver of calendar year, that marks the true coming of the holiday spirit. Bury the inbox in the sands of the Sahara. Drown it in Lake Garda. Chuck it off the Cornish coast. Nobody can ‘reach out’ now. You are safe.
GOOD COFFEE
Reading an Anna Wintour interview, I am afraid I was disappointed by a certain reveal (and I use the word ‘reveal’ loosely, as I was widely mocked by friends who said this was a well-known fact): Wintour drinks Starbucks coffee. Anna Wintour, the world’s chicest. Drinks Starbucks. Not the worst ever coffee, but a close second, behind Costa (it should be criminalised). In the same interview, Wintour talked about playing tennis with her good friend Roger Federer. Starbucks. You can see the discrepancy here.
Anyway, those friends responded with ‘duh’ and an eye-roll when I mentioned this. Had I never seen The Devil Wears Prada? Or The September Issue? I’ve seen both, but maybe I blocked the Starbucks cups from my mind.
I, too, used to drink copious amounts of Starbucks, but that was when I drank lattes, or, as my friend calls them, ‘giant cups of milk’. I am now a flat-white girl and take my coffee more seriously.
The problem with good coffee is that once it grasps the taste buds with the vigour of a newborn grasping a lock of hair, it is difficult to go back to any old sludge. I have managed to cut my intake down to two a day: I carry them around in a luminous reusable cup and sup at my anti-fatigue elixir once in the morning and again after lunch. Of course, I know that giving up caffeine is supposed to make one more energised – but it’s no longer just about the hit.
If I am not working in the office, I go to one of my favourite cafés and drink a (Fairtrade) Colombian blend, and revel in the fact I am consuming something that, while bringing me much pleasure, is not as bad for me as so many other things I might be ingesting.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not so obsessed that I have spent a lot of money I cannot afford on a home espresso machine. But I am at the stage where, if I don’t think the coffee will be up to scratch, I order tea. I have grown out of bad coffee. It doesn’t have to be from a fancy place; there is a kiosk close to my nearest station that sells great coffee. An Italian man owns it, naturally. (PS: Try ordering a ‘latte’ in Italy, where it just means ‘milk’.) I am not sure it is true that brewing coffee before showing a potential buyer around your home increases the likelihood of a purchase, as is claimed, but reader: I can 100 per cent believe it.
NIGHT BUSES
I apologise for introducing the doom of depression into meditations on the joys of small things, but it was in the middle of a quagmire of ennui, nocturnal sleeping patterns and the cold winds of increasing isolation – familiar to many who experience mental health problems – that this particular delight was discovered. It’s a slim one, but critical. A delight that, when I am most well, I do not experience. It is riding buses at night.
Night buses are synonymous with drunken, rowdy revellers; takeaway food in polystyrene containers; the stink of skunk; amusing group banter overheard. But night buses midweek, when the sky is the colour of plums and the only other road users are maintenance workers – those night buses are a different prospect altogether.
When I am deeply depressed, I sleep a lot. The opposite of the usual. I can sleep for twenty hours a day when at my most despairing. I’ll wake up at midnight or so, when all over the country novels are slipping from the grasp of married couples propped up by pillows, glasses are removed, bedside lights snapped off. I wake up hungry and alone and pathetic.
In London, in the heart of Soho, there is a café that’s open twenty-four hours a day. I pull on jeans and a jumper, close my flat door behind me – a slow, quiet click. Catching the bus at circa 2 a.m., you can almost hear the wheels turn on the road. The driver will nod and perhaps wonder at your story. Mostly, the buses are empty. Many times, an entire journey has, start to finish, accommodated me as the only passenger. Occasionally, on the back seat, the hidden homeless sleep, or medics alight, bleary-eyed.
I head, always, to the front seats. Either I read (I read the entirety of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends on the 24 bus) or, more often, track the deserted streets while listening to music. Bowie; Cat Power; James Blake; Johnny Cash. Wondering what it would be like to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Thinking about the turns that life takes. Turning the corner at the hospital where you yourself almost died, but didn’t; appreciating the buildings that have survived all that technology has thrown at them. The bus waits at red lights for ghosts.
I have done some of my best thinking on night buses. The feeling of going from A to B, of having some kind of destination, when all else has ground to a halt. At the café, the waiters greet me warmly, as a regular who has the cover story that she works nights, but who is almost certainly lying. I eat pancakes in a moat of syrup and si
p at tea. I chat to them when I haven’t seen friends in weeks. And afterwards, the drivers of the night buses see I get back home safe.
MINT
Mint is the most versatile thing in the world. You might say, ‘But what about a little black dress, which can go with anything?’, or you might suggest footballers who can play in multiple positions, sometimes all at once. No, sorry: it’s definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, mint.
I am not alone in this opinion. The journalist Eleanor Margolis recently said something similar on Twitter, and 250,000 people hit the like button. That’s a lot of mint fans. 250,000 is almost as many as there are uses for mint.
‘Refreshing’ is the word most associated with this masterful herb, as it is truly a life force. Use a mint shower gel and you feel reborn, ready to take on anything. Have it in a mojito, nestled next to crushed ice, and it’s a perfect pick-me-up. Have it in a hot cup of water for a soothing tea. I don’t understand how something that can make you feel fully ready for the coming day, burstingly alive, can also prepare you for sleep; but that is the magic of mint.
You can have it with eggs. You can clean your teeth with it. You can make a sauce that sings on roast potatoes. You can rub it on your chest to help you breathe easier, or chew it to make your breath better. It’s delicious in chocolate. Delicious in ice-cream. Some even like it in cigarettes (absolutely not, but each to their own).
In certain parts of the UK, ‘that’s mint’ means something is good. In Poland, ‘to feel mint’ can mean to be in love. Which makes sense, given the quasi-high both induce. I feel fresher and cleaner even writing this.
It tastes like heaven, it smells like heaven, it feels like heaven. Mint is very much heaven. It is notorious for muscling out every other plant in a garden – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
THE FINAL DAB OF PAINT
If you really want to experience the glory of paint, the thick swell it can cause in the heart, I’d recommend seeing a Frank Auerbach in the flesh. Failing that, acquiring one of his books. I consume art as some sweep the shelves of pharmacies for multivitamins. Throw it down my throat like a shot. While I can appreciate the intricacies of a charcoal sketch and the calming sensations of a watercolour, it is the slathered fat waves of oil and acrylic that are my drugs of choice.
I doodled constantly as a child and a teenager, almost compulsively. Every breath I took, out popped a ballpoint portrait of a guy with floppy hair, a woman with architectural cheekbones or an imagined plant with invented shapes for leaves. I no longer doodle because my hands have been commandeered by keyboards and trackpads.
But I do paint. That is when my hands remind me of their dexterity. The lure of paint has yet to dry. Time is suspended when smearing canvas. If one is fully focused, one is untouchable and could be living through almost any period of history. The world has evolved so much that this can be said of fewer and fewer activities. John Keats was not bombing couplets into his Notes app before he forgot them.
Reading, strolling, painting, kissing, crying, napping for entire afternoons: these are all heritage pursuits. What a thrill to know that I have wiped the paint from bristles with turps in the same manner, or almost, as Vermeer or Van Gogh. Suffered the same multicoloured nail beds for days. Thrown a cloth down in despair. Accidentally wiped navy blue across my forehead. Mixed a colour to match my mood. Nailed a shadow or an earlobe on the fifth attempt.
But the greatest joy of painting is the finish, similar to a marathon or that other popular climax. Transitioning from achieving to achievement. Standing back and thinking: The End. And being content. A dollop of equanimity; a stroke of satisfaction. The tap of wood on wood as the paintbrush returns to the easel. In the beautiful French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Héloïse asks of her painter lover, ‘When do we know it’s finished?’
‘At one point,’ Marianne replies, ‘we stop.’ It’s in the instinctive knowing when to stop that gratification lies.
A SUNDAY ROAST
I once had a friend – and I use the past tense conspicuously – who, when I suggested a walk and a pub Sunday roast, told me she didn’t like Sunday roasts. Did not like Sunday roasts. I don’t know the specific medical terminology for this pathology, but I hope she is getting the help she needs. I imagine so, because the waiting list must be very short.
I’m never happier than when diving into a moat of gravy. If it were possible, I would shrink myself and jump merrily into the middle of a giant, squishy Yorkshire pudding, like a kid on a bouncy castle.
Originally the roast was an after-church meal (hence the Sunday). I think often about how frustrating it is that such a a delight is limited to just one day of the week, and where this ranks on the world scale of injustice (high).
Brits are such big fans of the roast that, in one survey about what we are most proud of, the roast came in at No. 16. Yorkshire puds alone came in at No. 9. To put this into context, that’s ahead of Stonehenge, the Royal family and Shakespeare.
As a vegetarian, I am sometimes accused of not taking full advantage of all the roast has to offer, whether that’s beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey or other meats. But this ignores the fact that the increasing quality of available nut roasts and butternut squash wellingtons tempts even carnivores. It is not uncommon for me to find, these days, that the veggie roasts have run out. (I am sure you can imagine my reaction.) There are also cookbooks and columns full of home options: Nigella’s roast stuffed pumpkin or Nigel Slater’s parsnip loaf.
Of course, as with the best meals, the joy of a Sunday roast isn’t merely about what is on one’s plate. It is the act of gathering, and the company one shares. Whether it is a friend hosting and pulling a disparate collection of chairs together to accommodate pals around a too-small table, or meeting up one-on-one with an old mate one hasn’t seen for ages, tucking into potatoes and life events. For me, the best roasts are enjoyed after an appetite has been built up on a muddy stroll. The afternoon is spent reading at home, top trouser button undone. Utterly sated.
Or perhaps not quite sated, given how handy the surplus can be to fold into bubble and squeak, or sandwiches. Truly, the gift that keeps on giving. And a deserving matter of national pride.
FIXING THINGS
Mending is back in fashion. As more of us wake up to the 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon produced by the global fashion industry annually, the impact of our wardrobes on the environment is getting harder to ignore. Harder than hiding, on the back hangers, that ugly but expensive top you wore a single time.
I messed about during home economics and textiles lessons at school. I messed about in most lessons, in fairness, but particularly when it came to learning to use a sewing machine. Put one in front of me and it might as well be the Enigma machine.
Now, sewing and knitting are increasingly common pursuits. I am in awe of friends who conjure The Vampire’s Wife-style dresses from their own fingers, and patch up hole-ridden sweaters, eschewing new purchases; swapping patterns online and carrying needles around in their bags like paperbacks.
I remain awful at all the above, yet have come to truly appreciate the satisfaction in making and mending. Especially: fixing. I have always loved solving problems. When I moved into my flat, I refused to be beaten by a narrow doorframe when it came to a Chesterfield sofa. A trial-and-error process of angles followed. For hours. This perseverance extends to fixing things.
My solutions aren’t exactly kosher, but I don’t care a jot, as long as they have the desired effect. Sorting a loose connection in a remote by shoving the foil from a chewing-gum wrapper in there; good as new. Noticing that two loose floorboards in my kitchen are cold on the feet, and stuffing newspaper in the gaps. Similarly, folded napkins under a wobbly restaurant table.
This isn’t fixing things in the traditional way, i.e., properly. I’m not saying that taping an extension cord to the back of a desk is the stuff of restoration experts putting together smashed Ming dynasty vases, but I’ll still stand back, hands on hips and admire m
y work, smacking palms together after a job well done. Actually, not well done. But done.
People more skilled than I am (read: almost everyone) will no doubt take gratification from repairing punctured tyres or reupholstering a chair, saving it from the indignity of the skip. All I know is, I am a champ when it comes to my innovative ways of repairing. In my head, I build cities from ruins and there is a vast relish in that.
LOCAL GRAFFITI
There is the kind of graffiti or street art that breaks out and goes on to bigger and better things. The Banksy works that are removed from their place of birth and sold for hundreds of thousands, for instance, or the murals on the West Bank wall.
What I’m infatuated with is the more discreet, local graffiti; spontaneous doodles found in unexpected places. The messages that can make visits to the loo a reading experience almost as pleasurable as sitting in a library scouring quirky book annotations: a scrawled observation that the design of a coat hook resembles a drunk octopus; the hidden confession of unrequited love; the country’s legislature taken to task via marker pen.
Even better are the dialogues. I have seen, on more than one occasion, questions posed about relationships that have been answered in separate handwriting: ‘Dump him!’, ‘Girl, you deserve better’. I love inspiring quotes, too – the sort that if posted to Instagram might cause me to eye-roll, but somehow, etched against the grain of a stall, speak to me.
On one summer day, the temperature hitting 29°C, I saw a sign that had been changed from: ‘This road will be closed for temporary roadworks’ to ‘for a temporary beach’. The idea made me smile. A road round the corner had been pedestrianised a couple of years back, while a bridge was being repaired, and it had naturally morphed from a rat-run into a space for neighbourly parties and kids’ play. The metal street sign peeling off a wall daubed with ‘fix me‘ also has a community spirit.
The Joy of Small Things Page 10