Nadin Hadi
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Nadin Hadi

Writer, storyteller, filmmaker.

Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Louise Glück

by NadinHadi 16 October 2020
written by NadinHadi

“At the end of my suffering, there was a door.” – The Wild Iris

Last week, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember reading the news, my hands covered in dust as I packed up my abandoned office, and a warm glow of affection rushed through me. That surge of pride I get when artists I admire are recognised for their work. The home team done good. The Nobel Prize is the latest of well deserved accolades. She’s also won the Pulitzer Prize, and she became the US Poet Laureate in 2003.

Louise Glück is an astonishing poet. She weaves the personal and the mythic in ways that are vivid and revelatory. Reading her sometimes leaves me stunned, a bird flying into a window.

I first came across her a few years back. I was researching underworld stories, descent myths of women journeying, taken into the dark. I was reading Averno, a collection where she explores and retells the myth of Persephone, the Greek story that’s the foundation of the Eleusian Mysteries. It’s a popular subject for art and poetry, a myth that’s been retold and retold. One that I know well, that I keep coming back to again and again. And yet I was floored.

Averno looks at mothers and daughters, consent, complicity, power, winding between perspectives. She makes them real, with lines that are precise, sharp and stunning.

From Persephone The Wanderer

Persephone is having sex in hell.

Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know

what winter is, only that

she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.

What is in her mind?

Is she afraid? Has something

blotted out the idea

of mind?

She does know the earth

is run by mothers, this much

is certain. She also knows

she is not what is called

a girl any longer. Regarding

incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The last line that closes the poem is one of my favourites in poetry. You can read the full text here.

In A Myth Of Devotion, Hades is creating a world for the young woman he has captured, who has captured him, with all the echoes of death and the maiden, dread and desire. What life is there in the underworld? What love is there in the darkness?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,

the other turns—

Glück’s work is often unsettling and uncomfortable, because she turns towards uncertainty. To ambiguity. There’s no neat morality plays here. Her poems gleam with awe and wonder, with struggle and survival. They tend to be longer form. She asks your attention as a reader, and if you’re willing to give it, the images and emotion she paints pour into you and can leave you changed. 

“Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.” ―Louise Glück

The Wild Iris, one of her best known poems comes with a story that’s comforting as a writer. Glück had been suffering from writer’s block. She hadn’t written a line for two years, but the image, “At the end of my suffering, there was a door” had been with her for years. There was an ending to that fallow period. She sat down and wrote the poems that made up the book in five weeks. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize.

I have her full works from 1962 – 2012 sat in front of me. I’ve been leafing through them this week, reminded of how much she is a poet for our times. A well deserving winner. I want to offer Witchgrass to close, which surges to a crescendo of defiance and affirmation. A reminder of claiming your place in the world.

Witchgrass

Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything—

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can’t rest until
you attack the cause, meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion—

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

Friday Beauty is a series of emails I send about one beautiful thing I’ve encountered that week. If you’d like beauty in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

16 October 2020 0 comment
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Writing

Don’t We Touch Each Other Just To Prove We’re Still Here?

by NadinHadi 25 August 2020
written by NadinHadi
Photo by Andrew Neel via Pexels

Somehow, you grow lonelier

than the world that contains you.

That is why you so

want to be touched.

– The World by C.X. Hua

It’s been six months since I’ve been held or touched by another human.

At the start of the year, I moved out of London. Seven years in the city had scraped at my bones. I wanted more community, more quiet, more space. The move meant I could live by myself, closer to nature. I’d chosen Stroud. I knew one person there, but otherwise moving was a blank canvas for a new beginning.

Like all of us, I had hopes for the year. I landed in my new flat in March and found myself in isolation.

The world changed and I was in a new place. I threw myself into volunteering. I’m good in crisis. I’ve had practice. It’s part of how I like to identify — strong, resilient, capable. But the weeks stretched on, and that surge of energy was unsustainable. It crept into burnout.

There were days in lockdown when I felt like I was dissolving. That I might disappear. There was that Groundhog Day surrealness, waking up to blue April sky, sunlight slatted through bedroom blinds, a sheen of unreality, day after day. Waking up to disorientation and dread, time distorted.

Is this really happening?

There were moments when I couldn’t feel the edges of myself.

I’d wake up some mornings exhausted and break into raw sobbing at the strange enormity of it all.

There were those message in a bottle tendernesses. Calls, emails, I sent to people I loved in different times of my life, different places and received in turn. I hope you’re okay. I hope you’re safe. I hope you and your loved ones are well. A wish, a protection spell we tried to wrap around each other in the face of the unknown. How our strange new world called us to reach out as we stayed in.

When you live by yourself, it’s a kind of solipsism. The New Age crowd like to tell you, you create your own reality. When you live by yourself and work by yourself remotely, it’s doubly true. What you do, what you don’t do shapes your mind, your body, your days. That can be freedom or a millstone.

I found comfort in routine. Yoga. Meditate. Journal. Go outside. Write. Cook. Read. The endless hoovering. Laundry to be done. Dishes to be washed. My world shrank to the domestic, to battles against dust and hairballs, a life in yoga pants and no bra, and getting up still to work every day.

The silence of lockdown became an exhausting digital roar. When I opened social media, it felt like a wasp nest my chest, buzzing with anxiety. I unfollowed everyone on Facebook.

The overwhelm came with a cutting away. I had little energy, little headspace to spare.

Which relationships were feeding me? Who and what did I want to interact with? What’s important to me?

My physical world had become small. No car, no driving licence, plans thwarted by lockdown, the radius of my life stretched as far as I could walk.

My friends were in London, in scattered towns hours away, in different countries, the distance between feeling much the same. There was no-one near to share a bubble with and in a new place, it felt like too much of a vulnerability to ask to strangers, who I did not know, who might not be able to meet me in that.

I’d go out to the woods, my hands trailing through the velvety brush of new leaves, the rough edges of stacked rock walls, moss, trees. I’d trade distance smiling hellos with dog walkers. Sometimes the dogs would break loose, dart to me, tails wagging, jumping up to be petted.

Day after day I’d go. I watched the slow shift of the season, how the wildflowers blossomed in the meadow, the leaves unfurl. I’d take my shoes off, feet in the earth. Breathe in the smell of the trees and rain. You are real, this is real, you are alive. Feel the ground, feel the earth holding you.

In the 1960s, an American primatologist called Harry Harlow tried to measure love. He separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers to investigate a hypothesis — that monkeys needed not just food, but maternal love and physical affection.

He put the babies with a wire mother with a nipple and a bottle for food and a cloth mother, soft, touchable, made for holding that had no food.

When they frightened the monkeys, they ran to the cloth mother. They spent more time with the cloth mother. There are heart wrenching videos of tiny monkeys opening a door just to look at cloth mother through a window.

In the absence of people, I made my own cloth mother. I burrowed into bed, and stacked the pillows around me, one pressing against my back, curled around another against my belly.

I’d sit with a blanket wrapped around me, swaddled, holding myself, right hand on my left ribcage, palm against my heart, left arm over the top, left fingertips cupping the curve of my right shoulder. Feel your heart beat. Breathe.

I took my comfort from screens, went for careful walks with people spaced two metres apart.

Touch is relationship. Touch is connection. It is bridge and boundary. It places us in the world and in relationship to each other.

There is you and me and the space between us and if I touch you, if you touch me, I know myself, and I know you. How do you touch me? How does that change me? How does that show me who I am? Where do I end? Where do you begin?

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”

– On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

In Romania in the 1980s and 1990s, there were thousands of babies in overcrowded orphanages who suffered from neglect. They weren’t held, soothed, touched, given care and attention. The neglect changed the shape of their brains, an imprint that marked the rest of their lives. The children are adults now and most are carrying the legacy of that neglect — social and emotional challenges, long term mental health issues.

Harry Harlow did another experiment in his exploration of connection and love. He put monkeys in steel chambers for three months, six months, twelve months, without any contact from other animals and humans.

He reported that “the effects of six months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that twelve months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

We are and we are not monkeys. Most of us are not completely alone, although it might feel that way on some days. Most of us are not in steel boxes, but if this time has confirmed anything for me, it’s that prison and isolation is inhumane.

We are wired for connection.

We need each other.

In May, my friend sent me a photo of a book she was reading.

Highlighted in blue was “After a disaster, everyone fucks.”

I get that. I get the people who just met someone and decided to do lockdown together. Who got back together with an ex. I get the reaching out for closeness and comfort. I read about secret raves in London. My friend tells me about covid parties in Berlin. I get the desire to spit death in the eye. I understand the defiance and the rebellion even though it’s not my choice.

For me, it’s more about intimacy.

There’s a line from an Ilya Kaminsky poem:

“Soaping together — that

is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.

You can fuck

anyone — but with whom can you sit in water?”

I rattle around my flat to a flickering carousel of memory. Things I’ve not thought of in years surface in the silence. When I was 24, I volunteered in southern Tanzania, with all my white saviour wanna save the world naivety.

I spent six months in a village as part of a health education programme. There was no running water, no electricity, no phone network. We’d wash with buckets from the river or have cold showers in the town hostels.

When the programme ended, my boyfriend, a Peace Corp volunteer turned up at my village on a motorbike to take me away. I swung on the back with my bag, hair streaming in the wind, and we tore down the road to a lodge a few kilometres away that felt like a different world.

We’d rented a cabin, with a log fire, a bed with soft white sheets and an immense bath tub, the first I’d seen since I’d arrived in the country. He lit the fire, carried me to the bath and we sank into water, the heat seeping into us and held each other.

In the morning, we walked through gardens, pine and eucalyptus heavy in the air. Under the gold morning sun, the lake was a green mirror, covered in water lilies, pink and white. He wrapped his arms around my waist and I leaned into him, held by him and that warmth and beauty.

I remember evenings curled up with lovers, reading to each other in candlelit rooms, my head on their shoulder, legs tangled, feeling the vibration of the words rumble in their chest, eyes closed, soft, loved, safe. Friends over for dinner, sitting on the countertop talking as we cook, leaning in for a hug.

Lacing my arm with a friend’s as we walk down the street. The friend who holds you and holds you through tears and crisis, their body wrapped around yours whispering to yours, reminding you to breathe. I love you, you’re okay, I’m not going anywhere.

Dancing with someone, being joyfully swung into a lift, a spin, the sense making mystery of moving together. The gentle sweetness when a semi stranger tucks a label back into your shirt, when someone brushes a strand of hair from your face, or an eyelash from your cheek and holds it out for you to blow.

What does intimacy mean now? What is safety? What is closeness when our intimacy could make each other sick? Who do you let close to you? Who do you trust? Who do you let into your world?

My skin hunger eats me. I want to hold my friends. I want to be held by people I love, and yet the idea of that tenderness feels scalding.

After too many months alone, I have become brittle and strange and touch might shatter me. I will fall apart. It’s not that I want to hold anyone. I want to be held by someone I love who can hold me through that with softness.

Back in the spring, I remember conversations with friends. “When this is over…When things get back to normal…”

I kept holding onto milestones. Bargaining. When we get an antibody test, when we get a vaccine. Or maybe I get it and then I’m fine. Immunity and done.

Trying to make sense out of uncertainty, grasping to the idea we can control this, slam the lid on Pandora’s box, tame the beast, slay the monster.

Back to normal.

None of these have come to pass. The antibody tests aren’t consistent and reliable enough to know. A vaccine is a long way off and long-term immunity remains a question mark. We live with unknowns and uncertainty. I know things are going to be hard for a long time.

I watch birthdays flicker by on Facebook. Plans cancelled. Events, festivals, and holidays evaporate. We all have our griefs to carry through this, some small, some large.

I know I’m luckier than many. I’ve not been sick, lost a parent or a loved one. I’m not shielding. I’ve not lost my job. I’m not a single parent waking up each day to look after my kids in this vast unknown with shut schools. I’m not the social care worker hands red raw from washing, lips cracked from wearing masks, going back on shift after her father’s funeral. I’m not caring for a partner with cancer, shuttling back and forth to the hospice, the fear wrapped around my heart.

And yet our grief doesn’t get lightened by comparison, by “Other people have it harder.” They may do, but your loss doesn’t get any smaller by your diminishment of it.

I think these times ask of us a sensitivity, empathy and kindness when we talk to others of how their world might be, a recognition of what their losses, their challenges may be. We all have our different experiences with this.

Some people seem to be doing just fine. Others of us are finding it hard. There are days when I’m in tears. You might be lucky enough to be more resilient, or more resourced than somebody else, that these strange days haven’t impacted you as hard as others yet.

That might come up in different ways. If you’re fortunate enough to have something, you probably don’t realise what it’s like to be without it. How it could be a foundation stone for your life you take for granted.

If you’ve been healthy all your life, it’s hard to imagine the heart-breaking exhaustion of being chronically ill. If you’ve been financially secure, it can be difficult to really understand the grinding despair of being poor.

It might be in your relationships, if you’ve got a close family, a partner, a strong network of friends, people close to you, weekly family calls, siblings to pop around and visit, emotional and practical support you can lean on. Not everybody has this.

It could be your physical space. If you have a house, with a garden and dog, that’s a different experience to living in a flat share in London with near strangers, to being homeless.

It might be your ability to access mental health support. I got a therapist back in April when this all kicked off, who I’m grateful and lucky to have. I know too well that’s not available for all.

There are many more.

This is wealth we perhaps don’t recognise. I’m not judging anyone for what they have. I mean to say, poverty of any kind is crushing and that gets crystallised in crisis.

We’re living in a time of what psychologist Pauline Boss calls ambiguous loss. She came up with it in the 1970s to describe a kind of unresolved grief.

It’s for a loss that isn’t clean, doesn’t have a finality. I feel like it’s woven into the loss of a future we imagined, the normal we won’t get back and the uncertainty that stretches out in front of us.

How do we live now?

We all have our own risk calculation based our understanding, our own situation, where we live. It’s been easy to see that become charged. For us to blame each other, judge each other for our choices. In the UK, the lack of clarity from the government has not helped.

Here’s what I understand. 80% of cases are mild, but 20% are not. It’s not binary, it’s not, you could be hospitalised and die or, you could not notice you have it and be fine.

There are the covid chronically ill, the long termers who have been through weeks of exhaustion stretching into months of strange symptoms, honeycombed from the virus, brain fog, heart, liver, kidney problems. It’s happened to the young and healthy as well as the older and more characterised at risk.

Which is to say, I know this is serious. I do not take it lightly.

I wear a mask. I’ve spent most of the past six months inside. I’m in my 30s, I’m healthy, no pre-existing conditions. I live somewhere with a lower transmission rate than the rest of the country. I live by myself. I work at home by myself. My circle of respiratory contacts, the people I share the same air with is very small. I’m aware of my privilege that my work and life allows me that.

On paper I’m low risk, but I tend towards caution. Much of that has not been for myself. It’s been the care I felt I owed to others, who might have to carry the consequences of my choices.

As lockdown eased, not much in my life changed. It might have been different if I was somewhere else where I’d been there longer and was more settled.

I see friends going on holiday and travelling. Going to the gym. Instagram shots of groups, couples out camping. People date. I cycle along the canal past the brewery where people are chatting, laughing, drinking at their assigned tables. On Saturdays the market bustles, some masked, some not, some better at social distancing than others.

I’m on a call with a work friend in LA, who describes how the world seems to have split into “the house people” and “the outside people”. They’re saving the economy, we’re saving healthcare, he jokes.

There’s been the stutter stop of this year. All of my new beginnings frozen. The liminal in between ness of moving stretching out. I feel caught between lives and I’m moving beyond being a house person now. Moving back into relationship with the world.

We’re on the edge of the end of summer. I miss the world we had, even though I know we will not get it back. The winter is coming and I need something to hold me through. I need to find my way in this different world, find myself in this new place.

Life goes on.

Last week, a friend of a friend I’d reached out to nearby called me up. Hey, do you want to go for lunch? She picked me up and we ate at a café, the first time either of us had eaten out since March. We talk and laugh and hatch plans for the autumn for art and beauty.

A friend in London encourages me to come down and I may brave the train, mask on and go. I get an invite for a grief ritual to share our losses. An email lands in my inbox, new driving tests to reopen. Compromise and risk. My world may get a little bigger again soon.

I write. I make art.

One way or another, I keep reaching out my hands.

Title from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

25 August 2020 0 comment
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Dishoom's Gunpowder potatos
Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Tastes Like Home

by NadinHadi 14 August 2020
written by NadinHadi

“PUT POTATO IN FRIDAY BEAUTY”

“JUST ONE WORD”

“POTATO”

My friend Emma and I spent two days rapturously screaming at each other on WhatsApp about potatoes. It started as an offhand comment about being CARBS AND WAILING days away from your period.

“I’m planning on making the gunpowder potatoes from my Dishoom book for dinner. Just that. A mountain.”

Given I was CARBS AND WAILING days away from my period too (being in separate cities is no barrier to the witch coven synchronisation of cycles), this filled me with ravenous hunger and a wash of memory.

I looked up the recipe, opened my fridge and started to cook.

At the risk of sounding like the (former) London dwelling working in media hipster I resist being, Dishoom is a chain of Indian restaurants that started in London. From Bombay with love, writes their website. They’re a tribute to the old Irani cafes in Bombay that were run by Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran.

The one in Shoreditch was one of my favourite places to eat in the city.

I always ordered the gunpowder potatoes.

1. Boil a large pan of salted water. Add the potatoes and cook until just tender — 12–15 minutes.

Last summer, my friend David was over from the States for a few weeks and I got to show him my London, the places I loved. I took him to Dishoom for lunch and he grinned at the décor as much as the food, the carved dark fret wood panels, the courtyard area with plants, the tiled bathroom with brass taps. His visit was the start of these Friday Beauties after two weeks of me sharing parts of my world with him, he nudged me — wouldn’t it be cool if you did this?

I met my friend Damien there for brunch, and we sat and talked for hours, parked at our table outside, re-ordering for lunch, and the waitress smiled at us. Naan bacon rolls, flakey crisp vegetable samosas, black daal, creamy rich and sinfully good, bowls of greens — grilled broccoli, snow peas, kale, crunchy, citrus sharp and spring fresh. I ate with people I loved there and I laughed a lot.

2. Meanwhile, toast all the seeds in a hot dry frying pan for 2 minutes until fragrant.

My tiny Irish mother hails from a small town in Galway. She learned to cook Indian food for my Pakistani dad from Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks, yellow paged and pencil marked in the kitchen cupboards.

She’d buy whole spices from the Indian corner shops, and toast them in a pan, the smell scenting the house. We’d have tandoori chicken marinated in yoghurt with garlic, ginger, lemon and spice overnight for Christmas and birthdays, dashed with red splodges of food colouring because you ain’t gonna get tandoori ovens in the suburbs outside Loughborough to give you the authentic look.

I learned from her. She set me to chopping, stirring and peeling. When we’d been fighting, what was sharp between us got soothed by the silence of cooking together, hands busy, anger melting away. She grew up on a farm, where she’d pulled carrots and potatoes from the dark earth, kept chickens for eggs, and spent spring lambing out in the fields. She smuggles back legs of lamb from Ireland in her suitcase when she visits, kept in pride of place in the freezer.

She held her suspicion of processed food like a family grudge. No McDonalds for us as kids. Cooking should be done from scratch with real food. On Sundays, we’d bake mini sponge cakes for school packed lunches. 8 ounces of self-raising flour, 8 ounces of caster sugar, 8 ounces butter, 4 eggs, a dash of vanilla essence, spooned into patterned cake cases. They’d sit in my lunch box, next to a tangerine, which she’d already started to peel.

We say I love you in a thousand ways.

Whatever was happening, the kitchen was a place we’d actually talk to each other and listen.

When I think of it now, I realise how many quiet acts of love were in it. She learned to make food for my father, from another place, another culture she had not been to, that she did not know. A taste from home. The daily ordinary devotion and sometimes domestic drudgery keeping her family fed. Food cooked, on the table, meal after meal, day after day, the dishes done, the kitchen cleaned and out to the shops to do it again.

Inheritance is many things. Food and cooking are something she gave me.

3. Crush them in a pestle and mortar, then set aside.

My cupboards are filled with spices. There’s already fennel there, cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, chilli powder, mustard seed, bags of whole spices from the corner shop.

Everything is biography, says Lucien Freud.

In between house-shares in London, I stayed with my friends Bronya and Chris, crashing in their spare room as I went through the weeks long ordeal of housemate interviews and house viewings. When I opened their kitchen cupboards, there were spices, but more herbs, and zaatar and sumac. Bronya’s Jewish, and that, the Middle East and Israel comes through their food. They keep a kosher kitchen, plates for meat and milk and host Friday night dinners, rich with friends, light candles for Shabbat and celebrate the week and the rest.

We cooked together, danced in the kitchen and sat around the table that looked out onto their downstairs neighbours’ garden, with visiting fox, and ate. Bronya’s a hugger and sometimes she’d reach out and wrap her arms around me. Chris, who is Welsh, made us shakshuka for brunch, eggs baked in a spiced tomato sauce, something he’s learned from Bronya, from her friends, her community.

She told me how when they first started dating, he made her porridge for breakfast. She took a bite and grimaced. It was inedible. Bronya was gently forthright. I’m sorry, but I can’t eat this.

A week or two later, the dates were going well enough she was staying over again, he made her porridge again. It was the best she’d tasted. He’d bought an Anna Jones cookbook and learned. One of the many reasons he was a keeper.

Before lockdown, I sat in their kitchen with a cup of tea, watching them in the ballet of chores and tasks, juggling a toddler and a newborn, cooking together, the routine of family life, meal after meal.

For breakfast, Chris handed me a bowl of porridge, infused with ginger and pushed over a jar of fresh berry compote. It’s some of the best I’ve ever had.

4. Drain the potatoes and steam dry in the colander for a minute.

Emma’s making gunpowder potatoes, in her flat, in her kitchen and we text in shared glee.

Someone should do a delivery service that is just potatoes.

Triple fried chips, roast potatoes in goose fat, garlic mash with sea salt and black pepper.

Rosemary baked new potatoes. Hasslebacks.

Hash browns.

WHY IS NO ONE DOING THIS?!

When I lived in London, when life got hard for either of us, I’d invite her over for dinner. I’d ask for use of the living room with my flatmates and I’d cook, and sometimes send her home with Tupperware boxes of leftovers.

Sweet potato gratin with lime, chilli, peanut butter and coconut milk. Daal. Sage butternut squash soup. Carrot and roasted chickpea salad with pistachio nuts, parsley and a tahini, olive oil and lemon dressing.

The food I’ve learnt to make for my no dairy, no gluten, no meat, friends tends oddly towards orange, but hey, it’s a choice for that to be a feature ,not a bug. The last time I cooked for her was in her flat, a mushroom risotto I’d overdone on the booze, with toasted pine nuts and parmesan.

If I love you, I’ve fed you. If I’ve fed you, I love you. Food and the sharing of it is a love language of its own. Here’s my home, here’s my hearth, my heart. Come over, I’ll cook. Weekend brunches, story dinners, pot lucks. Food is all kinds of nourishment.

It’s one of the many small aching ironies of lockdown that for the first time in years I have my own flat, my own kitchen, a dining table that stretches out I bought with guests in mind and I can’t have people over for dinner, for lunch, for breakfast, to sit together, to drink tea and talk.

These days, too often food is something I do in front of a laptop screen. But sometimes it’s cooking together in different cities, sometimes it’s the phone on speaker, talking as you cook and photos of the shared food you make.

5. Heat the grill to high. Put the potatoes on a baking tray. Brush with oil and grill until crispy and browned — 5–7 minutes. Turn the potatoes over and repeat to crisp and colour the other side.

I’m munching on dried mango as I cook. It’s been tropics hot and heat heavy, an Indian summer heatwave in a country fundamentally not built for heat, and when it gets like this, it’s a Pavlonian craving. Eat mango.

When I slump on a chair and close my eyes, it could be a decade ago. I could be in my flat in Gizenga Street in Zanzibar, above the book shop, opposite the big mosque.

Except that flat had fans, air that moved, and a wooden balcony that opened onto the streets, with cool tiles under your feet, where the street vendors would push barrows, with fresh mango, with a twist of salt and chilli. The salt crunched on your tongue, the chilli tingled and burned against the ripe bursting sweetness of the mango.

Zanzibar had Zoroastrians too. They claim Freddie Mercury as a favoured son, for tourist merch at least, for the few years his Iranian family lived here when he was a kid. Tucked away in the winding streets is a Zoroastrian temple where the fires once used to burn.

The islands are a melting pot, nestled off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. You see it in the architecture, the old Arab fort on the seafront, the mosques. Stone Town’s streets with the arched grand carved dark wooden Zanzibar doors that are a blend of Indian and Arabic influences, ornate with floral patterns in startling geometric symmetry. The brass spikes studding them meant to deter elephants, an Indian heritage.

Zanzibar was known for spices. Under Omani Arab rule, the islands sold coconuts, slaves and spices. There are spice farms there, where I learned nutmeg grows inside a fruit like a peach. Slice it open and the nutmeg is the glossy brown stone buried inside the white flesh, wrapped in the red lace of mace. Wander through the streets and you can buy curls of cinnamon bark, sticky dark vanilla pods, and cloves. If you get the boat over to Pemba, the scent of cloves rolls off the island and the bees make smoky sweet amber dark clove honey.

I learned how to bake cinnamon rolls from the Pioneer Woman in Texas, grinding fragrant curls of bark harvested from trees on the island. I scraped fresh vanilla into pancakes, made pilau rice with chilli, cardamom and cloves.

Sometimes I’d wander the five minutes down to the street food market in the evenings to eat. Zanzibar pizza, more a savoury omelette meets crepes, filled with minced meat, chilli and coriander, mishkaki meat skewers cooked over an open flame, samosas — called sambusas here, sugarcane, lime and ginger juice, tooth rottingly sweet and cool.

I worked for a small publishing company and edited a cookbook out there. Walking to work, I’d often buy breakfast, mandazi, fried dough balls not unlike a doughnut, flavoured with cardamom, sambusa, cassava crisps again with chilli and salt. For all the fresh fish and seafood on the island, lobster, prawns, swordfish, red snapper and more, my sea creature food aversion felt like a waste.

Life there was much about food. I met my fairy godmother there and we’d have four-hour long teas in the Archipelago café which looked out over the ocean, where we’d drink passion fruit juice, chai, share cakes and talk. When it was full moon, my friend Peter and I’d go for sunset moonrise drinks on the spired rooftop tower of one of the quieter hotels, watch the sun slip into the ocean in orange red glory and the moon, a pale golden coin, rise from the other side of the island.

There was a family restaurant hidden away that served a hibiscus and tamarind juice I had once that was sweet, tart, cool and so so good I’ve never forgotten it. My friend Leigh Ann and I spent a day in my kitchen making pineapple hooch called Tapu Tapu from a recipe one of her co-workers gave her. I found the dated photos on my phone memory, cheersing with champagne glasses.

Food can be travel, memory and home all at the same time.

6. Put the crushed spices in a large bowl with the melted butter, spring onions, coriander and chillies. Remove the potatoes from the grill and divide each one in half, using a metal spoon so you create rough edges. Put the potatoes straight into the spice bowl and toss until well combined.

Life has gotten very simple in lockdown. I’ve been thinking about food from the start. Small gratitudes. I have cupboards full of food, I can pay my bills for the electricity to cook. On my harder days, sometimes food is comfort — a tray of roast potatoes, a bowl of spaghetti carbonara.

Sometimes it’s a chore, especially when past me has failed on bulk cooking and frozen portions. Then I eat oatcakes with peanut butter for dinner, whack on smoothies for the vitamins, and binge on bad snacks — bags of Chilli Heatwave flavoured Doritos, bacon fries crisps, and a Vienetta from the Co-op because that was the only damn ice cream they had. I’ve ordered pizza three times and I miss London’s take out game often, but mostly I cook.

I go to the market in the morning each week, and pick up my vegetables, buy fresh local eggs, get bread from the local bakery, sometimes with a croissant, a pain au chocolate, and in one memorable moment of curiosity driven sickly regret, a cronut. Sometimes the stall folk are only other actual humans I speak to in a week.

When I was community volunteering, I worried about food. I still do. I worry about food poverty. I talk to Damien who started a food bank this year feeding families in North London and has got land to start community gardens. I donate to the food bank and projects here.

I worry about harvests, biblical swarms of locust devastating East Africa, the Arabian Gulf, and with India and Pakistan on alert. Our food is global — the coffee you drink with sugar, the rice, our chocolate comes from cocoa beans grown mostly from West Africa and other equatorial regions, our fruit and vegetables are largely flown in from Europe, our farms depend on Eastern Europeans to pick and pack our food.

We only produce 52% of our own food in the UK. We’ve got a dark harvest growing this winter that will reap bitterness, when Covid meets Brexit agriculture import price rises, falling food standards as EU regulations evaporate and the US hammers us to take chlorinated chicken in a trade deal.

Rising food prices, recession driven falling incomes and a government that does not seem to care enough and certainly not about all. Millions of households in the UK are already going hungry. It’s hard for us to look clear eyed at the immensity what’s coming. We get frozen not knowing what to do and turn away.

When I feel like that, I’ve learned to ask myself, what can I do around me? What’s something small that would help?

Stroud is big on local food and organic produce. There’s a farmer’s market, community farms and local food co-operatives. On my alpaca and llama questing walks, the public footpath takes me through fields and local farms where there’s chard and kale reaching up through the earth, sheltered under polytunnels. One of my co-volunteers offers me a squash plant from his allotment, there are seed sharing groups, a woman selling tomato seedlings to buy. Swing by and drop some money in the honesty box.

I live in a flat with no garden, no space for window boxes and I think about hydroponic food growing. About turning my back wall into a living garden space. I read about the Sikh community kitchens feeding thousands. I see the local free food fridges cropping up in Stroud. Take what you need. People ask to see if they can drop off the vegetables from their gardens — we’ve got extra to spare and want to share. There are soup kitchens that have been feeding the local community for free, neighbours dropping off meals for people on their street they didn’t know six months ago.

What I know, what I’ve seen in these times, is we want to help each other. We want to be kind.

I grow herbs on my windowsill. I make shakshuka topped with the coriander that grows in gold tin can and eat the rest of my gunpowder potatoes. I prep carrot and chickpea salad for a picnic with a friend who’s driving up to see me with blackcurrants and strawberries from his garden.

I think about what hospitality used to mean. When a stranger knocks on your door, you open your home and you feed them. What happens when you sit down with people, break bread together and eat.

How in feeding others, you feed yourself.

7. Add the sea salt, lime juice and kebab masala, adjusting them to taste, then serve.

Dishoom’s gunpowder potatoes recipe in full is here. They are godly.

Damien’s food bank is here and if you can spare a little, donations would help people hugely.

The Trussell Trust can direct you to your local food bank in the UK if you want to donate, volunteer or need support.

Friday Beauty is a series of emails I send about one beautiful thing I’ve encountered that week. You can subscribe here.

14 August 2020 0 comment
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