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- 20: Celebrating a Milestone
20: Celebrating a Milestone
It's my 20th newsletter. Something I started out as a trial has turned into a regular ritual. I like that.
I like milestones and I hate them too. My life is filled with them, arbitrary as most of them seem. Some of them seem to exist to taunt me, but some of them show me how far I've come. The date I should have been at my graduation. The anniversary of my move to London (complete with ceremonial one-way train ticket). The anniversary of me moving back North. The day I quit my day job. I don't note them down and I don't celebrate them, I just know them. Which is strange for a person who does not know any of her friends and loved one's birthdays.I'm notoriously bad at keeping up routines. Writing these emails every week reminds me of when I learned that I wanted to write, when I would (and could) write on anything about any subject, because the outcome didn't matter, I just wanted to feel the freedom of letting my tangled thoughts connect. I corrected a bad book in its margins. I wrote an album review on catering blue roll. I didn't think about what I was writing or who it was for, just that I was creating something. For a long time I've missed that feeling. Having this newsletter gives me some ownership back, and has made me work harder to make my Job Writing more personal, and less interested in who it's for. So thanks for being a part of that.To celebrate 20 editions, I've donated £20 to First Story. Please follow the link to find out about the amazing work they do.Other Stuff
Marissa A. Ross' Unfiltered column for Bon Appétit has quickly become one of my favourite ever things on the internet, but I hadn't read this, her first piece about it, until this week. And I love it. Her frank and honest enthusiasm, love and joy and total lack of inhibition or pretence is a breath of fresh air in wine writing. She is, and I'm not exaggerating here, a hero.
If you need a moment of calm, please put on Glue by Bicep and think about the sea. This week on Twitter someone asked what song, if any, "kept you alive". This one did for me. (But also the video is great and beautiful and so I want you to rewind once you're done and watch it from the start.)
"The Demolition of Bow Brewery" by Elwin Hawthorne made me feel all kinds of things, especially since Thwaites' is currently in the process of being demolished in the centre of Blackburn. (HT to East London Group and Boak and Bailey for sharing it in the first place).
This piece on Rekjavik's beer scene and violent stormy weather is a real beauty. Look: "This peninsula of water and concrete and black beaches of volcanic sand reaching into the distance like photographic negatives of a Caribbean paradise was its own intoxication." Yeah. See.
Speaking of milestones, Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver talk to Gilly Smith about 25 years of St. John, trotters, moving AA Gil to tears, Marchella Hazan, Anthony Bourdain, Fergus' pioneering surgery, and "cosmic restaurants" in the Delicious podcast. "If you have a whole room full of people eating happily, it's music."
A series of pieces on how maps have shaped people's lives. I love maps. I love personal stories. This is a great and highly emotional series. My faves are (and they are all good but these are my favourite two):Darran Anderson escaping to the 16th Century using the Carta Marina and all its myths and monsters during The Troubles; I mean jesus, look at this for an intro: "My grandfather was a cartographer, though not in an academic sense. For decades, he earned a living on the sea, primarily as a fisherman but also as a smuggler, a minesweeper, and a retriever of the drowned."Suchandrika Chakrabarti found an old tube map in her mother's wardrobe after she died, knowing that she would have used it to navigate London as a new immigrant from Kolkata. "When I was a teenager, she confessed to me that the loneliness of early motherhood had surprised her, and made her question the decision she’d made to move so far away. As I moved my eyes over the map, I recalled that confession."
My Stuff
Not much published recently -- a lot on the submitted and currently-working-on pile though.
I'm heading to Leeds next month to speak at Leeds Trinity University's Journalism Week as an alumni. Writers: What would you tell aspiring journalists and writers about the job?