new year nothings (end of year everythings) xxx
hey hi hello!!! Welcome baaaaack, I’m sorry I’ve been M.I.A. for what feels to me like 79 weeks. My laptop has been missing (in for repair) and if you, like the Apple representatives I’ve been speaking to, were wondering: could I not get my hands on another “device” to use? The answer is no, not until now I couldn’t, no. Plz can I have my laptop back Apple? Plz? Anyway, enough about me. Happy new year!! It’s (finally, fucking finally) New Year’s Day and I’m drinking wine out of one of those goblet size IKEA glasses that are scandalously easy to smash but also only about a pound to buy and make me feel like a literal queen. It’s the leftover white wine from the meal I made for NYD tea, which was lemon-y crab bucatini and it was truly excellent. Last night was New Year’s Eve but also it is currently Tier 4 in London, so me & Tobs just stayed in our lil flat and ate takeaway and watched Jojo Rabbit and I cried a bit and we danced to Heroes when the night turned into 2021. Someone was setting fireworks off in the road outside our flat at midnight, and police kept zooming past with their lights & sirens on amongst the massive bangs and our music was blaring and we were dancing and it felt good, like I’d remember it.
I wanna write, this time, about nostalgia - romance’s number 1 ally, u know. I’ve been watching Stranger Things (for the first time. Yeah, I know) and it’s been getting in my head - not the nostalgia for the 80s that it admittedly so perfectly captures, but the sense of belonging, or of friendship, or of something I’m not really sure I can put my finger on that it feels like all the characters are wistful for. It’s nostalgic in that painful way, the way it feels when you think about a breakup or a faded-out friend, or a conversation you should have had, or a scenario that you loved that doesn’t exist anymore. A moment that you miss but that you wouldn’t want to live out again. I suppose all nostalgia is a little tinged with the bittersweet.
When I first fell in love with London, when I was 18 and interning at a horrible but beautiful fashion studio, I was staying with a friend I went to college with. She lived in London now, and I’d messaged and asked to stay with her until I found a hostel or something else (in)appropriate to sleep for the rest of my month’s internship. There was a spare room at her student house in Archway, and though she was already sharing a room and a bed with her best friend, she said fuck it just come and stay in that the whole time anyway. I still have a bizarre softness for the idea, or the memory, of the High Barnet branch on the northern line. My friend worked at a pub just down the road from the station, and it became my local before I even knew any other local here. I don’t really know how to describe it properly, how to capture that feeling, but the memory of the ramshackle yet done-up beer garden (incidentally exactly how I was trying to style myself at the time. Still am tbh), with the side door by the bins that wasn’t supposed to be used but that we used to enter and exit, with the different levels and the chipped concrete walls next to the decking and the fairy lights, with the deep fried brie with cranberry and the asparagus and cheese (maybe?) dip we used to order for staff-discounted price, with the sun turning into shade over our arms as we squashed next to each other on the small bench and our arms crossing over each other reaching for the food and our pints, the precise moment when summer warmth turns into evening nip - I can remember it all exactly, and the memory of it makes me want to cry. I don’t know why; I remember it with so much affection, and even at the time it was so beautiful. It just feels like another life. I was never that person before those moments and I’ll never be that person again, and nothing life-altering happened and nothing stands out in my memory but the thought of how I know which table was in the blind spot for lock-ins and I remember where the Carling tap was on the bar at a place that none of those people including me go to anymore makes me want to cry. It was nothing, and it was perfect. I live in Camden now still, and I know, of course, exactly where the pub is and I could go back in any time - before/after coronavirus, obv - and I’ve been living in London over 5 years, and I haven’t gone. Why spoil something so perfect with the present?
After a couple of weeks at the Archway house (for me, a student’s lifetime for them), we moved into a ground floor flat in Stepney Green, and I slept on the sofa-that-was-actually-a-bed and lived out of my suitcase, and caught a single decker bus or the overground to the studio I was interning at, and it was before Google Maps or data or whatever was really a thing the way it is now and if I got lost I just walked and walked until I recognised somewhere. If I’d have known I’d still remember the toilet roll my friend used to steal from her job (soz if ur reading, ex-manager of an unnamed pub in North London) or the way we put t-shirts over our eyes when we slept cause there was no curtains, I might have stopped to memorise some of the more important details. (That’s a little joke, of course; these are the important details. These are the details that make us smile when we fail to portray them as good conversation to people who weren’t there, the ones that we keep just for ourselves. These are the ones, you know.)
What I’m trying to say is: I think tiny snippets of tiny things are formative. The shards we build ourselves with are meaningless on their own, or out of context, and helpless without nostalgia. Nothings are everything. I think I feel it more the older that I get, the moments that become memories, the formative nostalgias forming. It’s good that way, cause then you don’t let them slip away as easily or as carelessly. The vignettes we live in being locked in in real time. Trying to never let them go. <3
I’ve been writing poems over the course of December, centred (as far as I can tell) around xmas. Consider these my selection box 4 u to consume - some are sad, some are happy, some are thoughtful and some are vapid. Aren’t we all all of those things tbh xxx
I am soft af at heart, if u hadn’t figured already. One of the most beautiful people I ever met told me that it’s the softness that is beautiful, that we need to hold on to. Like oysters, right? Or cough sweets. Love u all xxxxxxx
P.S. !!! Just if u wanted, an xxxclusive - my 2020 favs now it’s fucking over ! No need to do worsts, or least favs, as we very much know.
FAV ALBUM: Fiona Apple - Fetch The Bolt Cutters. I’m a massive softgirl, fucking obviously this is my fav. It’s also the best, just worth noting (contested a little by Mura Masa’s R.Y.C. which is truly beautiful and a work of genius)
FAV RECIPE: Alison Roman’s Caramelized Shallot Pasta I am a basic bitch and it is so so good sry x
FAV BOOK: Salt Fat Acid Heat the audiobook; I scour the internet daily for more and more of Samin Nosrat talking about anything anywhere because she soothes my soul and is wise and wonderful
FAV PODCAST: omg The Missing Cryptoqueen omg omg
FAV MOVIE: I watched A Star Is Born for the first time this year and it tore my heart out and I loved it wholly and I probably won’t watch it for another 3 years because it is too painful xxx
FAV FOOTBALLER: David Beckham forever IDST
FAV TV SHOW: Gone Fishing is the most wholesome and heartwarming thing I have ever watched and tbh I am dreading when Bob Mortimer is no longer of this mortal earth bc I love him
FAV DRINK: Guinness on tap after 4 months of lockdown <3 <3 <3 <3
FAV DAY: the day we got mussels from La Petite Poissonerie and walked up the canal and saw the warthogs(?) at the zoo from across the way and linked arms in the cold and the sun :)
FAV TWEET: “you took my old tweets out of context, at the Mariner’s Apartment Complex” (from @seanbgoneill, high quality content)
FAV RESTAURANT: Casa Pastor, where I went with Toby and with Ce and with the Hawley girls and with everyone I could and ate tuna tostadas and drank margaritas every time
FAV NEWSLETTER: Griefbacon always and always and always ily (also My Sexy Little Email by Catherine Cohen)
see ya on the flipside!!!! xxxx