savourites #95
losing things | miso rosewater cookies | astonishing non-fiction
At the end of last year my laptop died. Lovely trusty laptop, beast of several books and much burden. It just stopped switching on, after several weeks - possibly months - of warning me about a nearly full start-up disc. I took it to a slightly suspect computer shop on the Wandsworth Road where, after several days of silence, they called to tell me it was now working, but they had wiped the entire hard drive in the process and I owed them £250.
I was sure I had saved the important stuff; I have been writing in the cloud for a decade now. The honeymoon photos were safe. The wedding photos. The first-week-of-baby photos, saved in untold different places. The chunks of manuscripts yet to be published.
But a couple of weeks ago I went rummaging for photos taken on my film camera - holiday snaps, engagement party shots - and realised that they were not in the cloud. They might be on a hard drive, they may be on some CDs, but in terms of immediate access, they were lost.
It’s a funny kind of grief. I know they are lost because I know they existed, because I can remember some of them. Because some of them I had the good sense to print out and frame, and they sit looking back at me as I type this on my sofa. I thought about the irony of using a physical format to make the ephemeral permanent, only to have that rendered into a digital file that will be deleted in seven days should you not preserve it correctly. I thought about the warning cry that comes on the slip you get when you take your film to be processed: “print it or lose it!”
I’d recently watched a video of a woman interviewed in the midst of the Los Angeles fires, rattling off the possessions she didn’t rescue. Her wedding dress. Her wedding album. Her photo albums. I thought of my mother, who has always said that she would grab the photo albums first, were there to be a fire. I thought of the box file, tucked in a cupboard in her studio, which has the word NOSTALGIA scribbled on the spine and is filled with all the photographs that weren’t considered good enough to go in the albums. I bet she wouldn’t grab that.
I would like to see those photos again, of course I would. But the whole exercise made me think about why I take them in the first place. Film is cumbersome, unreliable and expensive, increasingly so. You get 36 prints, perhaps four or five will be keepers. I am less good at printing them than I would like; less good at storing them, too. I came to the conclusion that it’s an act of distillation. I think of those lost photos and I remember the scenes I was trying to capture, the smell of the salt in the air in Olhao or the light falling through the slats of a window blind in a Vietnamese temple.
January is a time of essence, I think. The brave and the foolish try to whittle things down, the rest of us simply try to keep on keeping on in these dark cold days. It’s tough because a lot of things are at their bare minimum, their most essential. And here I am, sitting with the very essence of my memories, realising that is the truest way they can exist.
Other good things this month:
tasty morsels
tie dye
Right at the start of the year, on one of those magical crispy days after the storm, C and I boarded a train to Oxford to help a beloved school friend’s son tie dye his T-shirts. I had, in all honesty, professed greater knowledge of tie-dyeing practice than I realistically had, but the kids got to poke their clothes in buckets of water with a stick and then, while they slept, my friend and I used a deceptively helpful website to do all manner of elaborate folding. The squeal as we saw the washing machine churn with blue froth! The deep satisfaction when a neat little grid emerged from the string! I can see why people end up wearing it head-to-toe.
stair reading
The toddler is blessed with a bookcase in his room, generously stuffed with books he has been handed down. He enjoys these, but he prefers to remove the ones from the case of adult books instead, and then walk up the stairs with them, depositing them on various steps as he goes. I have taken to sitting on the stairs as he does this, reading. It is a surprisingly peaceful twenty minutes.
being a tourist
When you live in a city that people like to visit on holiday, it’s easy to be snobby about the stuff those people come to see. But this month I went on both the Thames Clipper (now officially called something awful by Uber) and an open top bus and I had my perspective shifted from both of them.
gong
There were many things to enjoy on our inaugural writing + drawing retreat, not least the proliferation of blood oranges (the opulence of snarfing down one of those in the middle of a writing workshop!) but the most delicious source of childlike glee was an enormous, sonorous gong located in the corridor that flanked the dining / workshop room. We banged it before meals, we banged it before workshops, we banged it again for good measure.
to eat
tahini loaf, slightly undercooked
I made this for pudding for our New Year’s Eve dinner. It emerged as a stalwart during lockdown, when everyone was making banana bread, but while it does contain bananas and the word “loaf”, it’s very much a chocolate cake in disguise. It also had about seven minutes less than it probably needed and was far better for it.
The Ottolenghi ragu made a cameo in my recent paean to ikea biscuits but M made a jumbo batch at the start of the month, filled the freshly defrosted freezer (how smug we felt!) with it and it’s kept us going during the hard, short, long little days of January. Yes, the ingredients are expensive, but it really does make a truckload.
cookie dough for breakfast
Occupying the Venn diagram between tasty morsel and to eat, these miso rosewater cookies from
(via former savourites takeover host ’s excellent newsletter, ) survived their creation as “an activity” with a toddler, being fridged as a mixture, rather than in balls, overnight, mostly baked and, for the six balls I chucked in the freezer afterwards, baked from frozen on another grim-weathered solo parenting weekend afternoon. C ate some of the dough for breakfast, in his pyjamas and a single yellow welly, and you know what? Good for him.toklas radicchio salad
I think Toklas might be my favourite restaurant in London? I’ve laughed until I cried over dinner there, received big edits on manuscripts over lunch there, had all-anticipation meals with girlfriends at the very start of my pregnancy there and cheerio blow-outs before I went on mat leave. It’s always delicious and unshowy and you can add a loaf of sourdough to your bill to take home. Anyway, we had a birthday meal with friends older than the staff who were serving us and I ordered the radicchio salad because it’s always good and little brightens dark days like pink leaves.
to read
My routine while I lived there was exquisite. I would wake up at 6 am and drive to Hollywood for an hour and a half of hyperventilation yoga, then drive home high as a kite with a green smoothie, black coffee and an American spirit. I’d sit at my window and read until midday, every day, then go for a hike in Griffith Park, running like an animal until I made it to The Observatory, then on to Dantes Peak, then a hot, sweaty amble back down. Then coffee and correspondence at the same cafe every day, then home to write and smoke by the window, then maybe a walk to the book shop or market, then dinner, one glass of red wine, two squares of dark chocolate, then bed. Every day, the same - sometimes interrupted in the evenings by outsiders.
Over the weekend I bit off chunks of Laura Marling’s latest newsletter, whose songwriting has always seemed to mirror my womanhood, and whose non-song writing is, enviously, as pleasing. I’ve spent a lot of recent weeks thinking about routine and those of other creative people, and how really I’d like to live a life where four hours of good work a day is enough. Her post is about more than this but this nugget felt relevant.
It feels a small century ago that I read this but I guess that’s just… January? Anyway, Lili Anolik’s fun, gossipy, not remotely objective analysis of the twisty friendship and rivalry between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, and the Los Angeles of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies that they circled one another in. I gulped it down and longed for Hollywood sunshine.
I wrote about this extraordinary memoir-cum-meditation on the Dutch masters in Wednesday’s letter, but I’m still thinking about the courage and deftness with which Cumming deploys the revelation in the final paragraph. It made me gasp as I read it, and I’ve not stopped thinking about it since - both the gravity of it, and the way Cumming leads us up to it, gentle to the point of invisibility, throughout the entire book. I adored it.
Not a January post, but one that
-creator shared again recently which I saved and saved. The past few weeks have been ones of easily missed transition, and there’s reassurance in knowing that’s one of the few reliable things in life, I guess:utsuroi is like an ambivalent, never-ending recital that constantly reminds us: nothing is reliable, and that's perfectly okay. In fact, it doesn’t need to be! Utsuroi is wrapped in a delicate ambiguity that embraces the transient beauty of things fading, shifting, and vanishing.
to listen to
I adore this podcast, and finally it is on Substack.
is a warm and incisive interviewer (in fact, I’m delighted that she’ll be chairing my first Hark event, at the almighty Rough Trade East later this year) and her determination to tell the stories of women who have lived extraordinary lives (trepanning! gruesome punk! avant garde mothering!) has seen her travel across the world.
There's so much to savour here. Thank you. I'm sorry about your photos. My aunt has been digitizing old home movies recently, and I’ve found myself caught up in this same dilemma—what's safer, physical or digital? Nothing is inviolate. Still, we try. Where you’ve landed with it feels wise. x
The Thames clipper feels so fancy!