Something for the Weekend: 07.04.2024
Accumulated life ephemera, domestic life on the edge, and some weekend recommendations
I’m grappling with stuff at the moment. The big life questions are a constant - life, death, environment - but then there is actual stuff. Possessions, and the accumulated life ephemera you find yourself with after 45 years on earth.
In my case much of this stuff was shipped from one side of the globe to the other. There’s a cost attached to that, and in keeping it. Of all places it was a market gardening book which brought that home recently - that there’s a cost in keeping things you don’t need. A cost in having somewhere to store it all, and a time cost in endlessly moving and sorting things that may never be used again.
I wouldn’t say I’m a hoarder but I do have a tendency to collect and to save. Our trusty gooseneck kettle which has been part of my pour-over morning routine for ten years succumbed recently to a leaky base (not a great thing in an electrical appliance and something I initially ignored - I like to live domestic life on the edge), and then more fatally the (corroded) neck detached from the body. Strange as it sounds I took a moment to thank the kettle for a good innings, and then chucked it in the bin. But not before stashing the lid and the detached spout behind the house because, well, they may come in useful for something. Sorry, did I say I wasn’t a hoarder?
There is, spouts aside, a gradual thinning of things. Bank statements and receipts, some over a decade old, finding their way to the compost bin or first the shredder. There’s something cathartic in that. Old greetings cards with a generic one liner to the bin too; those written with more feeling are filed. There’s lots of menus. They will one day be digitized I tell myself, but really who am I kidding. Where in the next 10 years is there going to be a moment when I say to myself, it’s the day to digitize those menus. Besides, my favourites are those with a good weight to the paper and printed on stock that just makes you want to touch.
Amongst boxes I’m currently sorting I find that ephemera which means little to anyone else but for me conjures more than a good gig or a specific place. A Brockwell Lido card reminds me of swiping through the gate each morning during the swimming season, the swimmer who would sing opera in the showers, and that moment when I’d duck under the cold water. A full body, life-affirming rush of cold which in the later months of the season - around October - would be accompanied by a low and long exclamation: fuuuuuuuccccck. It reminds me that I’ve been saying that I should bring that morning plunge back into my life but to date have not.
There’s a sample of fabric stapled to the card of an East London tailor, who whilst pinning and chalking up a suit would call his brother over and they’d stand behind me critiquing my frame. I’d watch them in the mirror. Does he ‘av one leg shorter than the other, or is it the way he stands? Tracing a finger across my shoulders one would ponder to the other whether I lifted weights, and the other would scoff at the idea. When they finally asked, and I said, well I swim most days, there was an ahhhh, and an answer for my strange build.
Beyond the cutting environment of the tailors there’s a memory of a proper pie and mash shop in East Ham post body shaming. Possibly Robins Pie & Mash, which I don’t think is there anymore. Even then you could feel that these were experiences to file away. Pie and mash appreciation seemed to correlate with attendance at the Church of England; on the wane.
In amongst the tickets there’s Low at Shepherds Bush Empire, a gig that I remember little beyond it was pretty good. I do remember the Greek run workers cafe around the corner that my part Greek best mate guide us to. They served a nightly special and while Egg and chips or a Full English may have ruled by day, that night their kleftiko burrowed its way into my subconscious, to emerge now 17 years later. As with pie and mash I wonder how many of these places - bastions of working class food for working class people - will and have survived the headwinds of time and taste, of developers and landlords.
An invite to the House of Commons for a reception in the Members’ Dining Room reminds me of wandering the halls of power, and the feeling of disappointment at the canapes.
A bundle of currency, brings a feeling that I haven’t had in a while: being in a place that’s foreign to you, trying to work out what the physical currency is worth and often the seller just picking the money from your hands in assistance.
There’s travel stubs from journeys I took in 1999 - a train from Berlin to Amsterdam, and randomly a flight I booked from Athens to Budapest - and with it a rush of memories of travelling alone for the first time: another cold water plunge at the Gellert Baths, meeting Chris Rea in a bar and getting him to sign a Hungarian condom ad, of finding a love of dining alone, and setting up my first non-university email account to stay in contact with an Australian girl who ghosted me decades before ghosting was a term we used.
I wonder whether having conjured up these memories and written them down I can now let these pieces go? Or whether if I keep them in a box there’ll be different memories brought forward next time I try to thin out life’s accumulated flotsam and jetsam. I think we all know the answer to that.
And finally…
Copyright photography © Kristoffer Paulsen 2024, from On Sundays: Long lunches through the seasons by Dave Verheul, published by Hardie Grant Books.
You might have missed the midweek drop of this recipe from On Sundays, which I’ll confess I’m not cooking this week but is high on the coming soon list. For more Sunday related vibes I’d point you to James Ramsden’s new Substack, Sunday Sauce, as well as Ed Smith’s rekindling of Rocket & Squash, and the return of his Supplemental column. Two writers I’ve been reading for, I don’t know, fifteen years maybe, whether that be via social media, in print, or listening to James’ former podcast, the Kitchen is on Fire. Petra Barran’s podcast Lowlines, is something I’ve been eeking out over weeks. Petra is someone who truly changed London’s food landscape, being at the forefront of pushing street food when it was something that you needed to explain to some people. This is very much not about that, and her on the road. She describes it as a “sonic scrapbook,” and it’s nothing short of wonderful.
I live and write on Wadandi Boodja, home to the Wadandi people, Traditional Owners of this corner of south west Australia. Saltwater people, their connection to land and sea is deep, and continuous. I acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.