I have been feeling a little weird lately, on and off. It is possibly to do with it being dark all the time, but not yet cold enough to really commit to the bundle; but also to do with it being not yet cold enough when it really ought to be; and also, relatedly, to do with the world being on a tipping point into extinction. So it was all of that, but also, it was that in my general malaise at the state of the universe– big and small– I had been eating only carbs and sugar for several straight days. Also, the tap was dripping on and on and on, an irregular ostinato beat that was driving me up the wall with wasted water and pointless sound.
So I put on my new jumper, as discussed in posts passim, and went for a big walk in the dwindling light, and came back via the world’s most expensive corner shop [Shepherd’s in Blackheath, just where do you people get off?] and came home both with the things for dinner, and a new resolve to commit again to the things that can be done rather than an endless futile scroll through the growing list of things that can’t.
Walk more. Eat properly. Eat more plants. Support better farmers. See more trees. See more birds. Cycling. Start volunteering at the library again; put leftovers on Olio; put on a jumper; put on some socks. SAD lamp every morning. Hot water bottles, house plants, at-home gentle yoga. Write to your MP. Write to everyone. Ban bleach. Ban bleached cotton. Ban fast fashion and wear everything to death. Wash up, especially in someone else’s house. Make dinner. Make leftovers. Make enough to share, and hope someone shares with you.
This recipe sort of dropped out of the last cookbook by degrees, and I now have no idea why. I thought it must be in there, and maybe it is and I’ve lost it, but anyway: it’s broccoli, basically, broccoli and olive oil and gnocchi. Broccoli Gnoccholi. Stupid name that makes me laugh. You cook the broccoli twice, once by boiling, and then sauteeing in garlic and anchovy and chilli flakes and olive oil. You can also put courgettes and Parmesan. Then you put the gnocchi in and some broccoli water, and more olive oil, and cook it until it’s a sauce and everything is soft and salty and rippling with gold. It’s really really good; and it makes me feel good in the cooking and in the eating and in the day after, when I feel all plump and happy with good gold fat and glossy with vitamins.
You start by taking, like, half a head of broccoli and pulling it into small florets and dropping it into boiling salted water. Stem also. Chop it up. I think this serves two? But also you could eat it all, I did, and I felt strongly better for it.
In the future– if we get one– there is going to be a revolution in diets. I heard this from my flatmate Tash, who heard it in the New Scientist. Basically, they are on the verge of figuring out that there is no such thing as something that is universally good for everyone to eat: that what makes me tick on a basic happy-body level may not be what makes you tick. They can do these blood tests on you to find out what foods you, personally, need to eat to be healthy; and those foods will be different for everybody. I find this incredibly neat, but also, when they call me up I will tell them I don’t need a test because I already know mine: heaps of green vegetables, no dairy, no booze, and genuinely staggering quantities of olive oil. Eating these things, plus kimchi [?], is on my list of Things That Can Be Done. Cooking is on that list, also. Cooking things that I am pleased to have bought and are meditative to chop.
Chop garlic very finely, and fry it very VERY gently in a huge quantity of olive oil, like more than a tablespoon, I don’t know, like a glug. I think I put four big cloves in. You can put some anchovies in here too and I strongly advise it.
Chopping garlic is a task I didn’t do for ages and now have come back to purely for the meditative quality of bringing a knife down over and over again on something small and solid: reducing it down to a fine heap. The change is very good for me, I think? Practical change. Also then you can take half a courgette, and cut it into chunks. I think chunks are better here than discs or half discs or ribbons.
The thing about the no dairy and no booze and lots of green vegetables thing is not that I do it; it’s that if I do do it, I do want to kill myself less. Like walking to see a tree or body of water every day; like cycling on my stupid little flimsy exercise bike; like seeing my therapist and talking on the phone and cooking and keeping things basically tidy all the time. The practical effects of them are very tangible and obvious to me; and I like having this kind of list of ways I can become more sane, and more human. Especially in the dark. Especially in the twilight of the year and maybe also the world.
Probably by now the broccoli is tender, so you can take it out, reserving a little water and any broccoli rubble suspended within it; and put it in the frying pan with the golden garlic and disintegrating anchovies. You can put the courgette chunks in too, plus some chilli flakes. Stir it around for a while. It will all start to fall apart. Things fall apart; the courgette cannot hold.
Anyway I said this, about the reasons not to kill myself, a while ago on Instagram, and got almost immediately bonked over the head by the Facebook Police for it. We Hear You Need Some Help, they said. Could You Confirm You Are Still Alive? Or words to that effect anyway. I don’t know if someone had reported me, or if their algorithm had seized on my inability to use an asterisk in the word “suicide”. I hate using asterisks. I also hate acronyms– “kms”, for “kill myself”– and most of all I hate the deeply weird novo-verb “unalive”. Dark things flourish in darkness. When we make a word taboo, how far can we be from making the subject taboo? How can we talk about this without the words?
In my case I am perhaps uniquely well placed to be annoyed by this: I live with suicidal ideation not as a present threat, but as an ever-present idea, a dull thrumming tap-dripping ostinato somewhere under my conscious thought. The work of not killing myself is a daily project, but not a terribly onerous one. It’s like a person with an allergy carrying an epipen; like a person with hayfever taking an antihistamine. My life is a kind of ongoing project against death, which I suppose is true of all of us, but for me manifests as a sort of endless quest to shut up the Clippy-the-paperclip suicide note for thirty fucking minutes. There are no asterisks in there.
And what I would like to convey in this newsletter, which I did not convey in my Instagram post, was that that is fine. I am not ashamed of this. I am not embarrassed to tell you about it. I’m not embarrassed that I’m not better. I am writing this newsletter under my nice SAD lamp drinking my nice zero-caffeine coffee wearing my nice big socks and my nice soft jumper. I am writing this newsletter full of last night’s gnocchi, surrounded by all my workarounds that mean that I can live happily alongside my suicidal ideation even as I cannot and have never ever been able to make it leave.
It is as if, having opened the door to the idea of suicide once too often and a lot too early, it just won’t go completely closed again. It no longer fits the frame it was made to fit; it hangs badly; the hinges are just slightly misaligned. There is, shall we say, a bit of a draught. It feels like stretching the metaphor too far to say, then, that I am by now pretty great at draught excluders. The door is the door, permanently just a little ajar; and over it here is a big fucking tapestry curtain, and at the base of it is this single cut-off tight-leg stuffed full of dried beans and tied at the top, and here is a hot water bottle and a lot of blankets and some kind of wholesome warming nourishing soup to keep out the cold. I’m really good at keeping out the cold, practically and metaphorically. Hence the cooking, which is both.
So to your soft courgette and your disintegrating broccoli, add a handful of gnocchi- I used a very expensive kind with porcini mushroom and I don’t think it made a difference. Cook for three minutes; add a handful of grated Parmesan. I knew as I added the Parmesan I would regret it but I didn’t care, it tasted too nice.
I am not a perfect person. I am not a perfect patient, either, in that I eat things that are bad for me, don’t do the things I know I should, and also in that by now I sort of resent any diagnosis anyone tries to give me. It is just the way things are; and also I don’t know whether “mentally ill” is a useful word for a lot of people who are diagnosed with being so. The world is going to hell in a handcart and there is very little I, personally, can do. I do all the obvious things. It is not enough. I could spiral right now thinking of all the things I could do more. Surely I must be able to do more. Surely I could. What else? How else? I am failing/ I don’t know where to start/ I am wasting time/ I am wasting space/ I–
And yet, wasn’t that where we started? Commit again to the things that can be done rather than an endless futile scroll through the growing list of things that can’t.
Sign up to work at the community library every week that’s on the rota. In the absence of a plumber, put a mug under the dripping tap, and tip the mug into the dry base of the house plants. Set an alarm for the morning for a Yoga With Adriene and a session under the SAD lamp. Write to Janet Daby and hope she writes back. Write a newsletter in case someone else needs to hear it: do only what you can, and do it the best way you know how. Make dinner. Make enough to share, but don’t forget to feed yourself.
Add the reserved pasta water, and stir to form a sauce. Add more olive oil. Black pepper. More chilli maybe. Spoon into a bowl. Sit. Don’t read the news, but instead ring your grandmother, getting her in from the garden where she’s been gathering leaves or some other wholesome task; and get her to tell you about the trees she’s been felling for the RSPB, even though you ideally would like her at her age perhaps to be slowing down on the charitable manual labour, but she never will; and how this, the felling, will open up her small bit of the world for wildlife in a startling new way that is also old; and she will say to you, as if it’s not the thing you’ve been thinking about all day, as if it’s not all you ever think about: one has to do what one can, darling, don’t you think?