Cheese, Change, Tomato, Time
On new beginnings and new incarnations
Oh, my god, the light this week. The light!
It is falling on the pale walls and the carpet and the cat. It is lending this lunchtime pasta bake a glamour it definitely does not possess: golden, bronzed, spattery and decadent and burnt. It is full of cheese. I cannot eat cheese, but nonetheless, here we are. That is where I am, spiritually.
January was hard. Wasn’t it hard? Did it crush you too? I could not believe how grey it was and how cold it was, and how glad I am it’s February. This soft sky! The shadows on the wall behind me are mysterious and sharply defined. The windows of the houses across the street are glowing. Do you know that story about the children who long to visit the golden palace they see across the valley, and then they do, and it’s just an abandoned cottage with a tree growing through the roof? And then they look back across the valley they see their own house, and the windows of their own house are shining gold? It was the sun all along! It was their perception all along! Anyway I think about that story a lot, every time I see a house with windows glowing gold, and every time I come down the hill and see my own house glowing gold, and think: mine. I love my house. I am leaving my house. Things are changing.
Waiting for change was part of why January was such a struggle, for me, although I suppose I am glad that we managed to synchronise our personal lives with the season. January is a waiting month. Under the snow and under the ice, things are coming. Every snowdrop and every early daff I see is like a little salute: we were waiting too.
I am looking forward to this change; I am not good with change; we are taking steps in directions I feel I have been waiting all my life to get to go.
For obvious reasons, my twenties were sort of discombobulating. It was like someone had kicked me off a train in the middle of nowhere. But I have a ticket for X, I said. At least let me go back to Y if you won’t let me go where I was going. In the end it turned out I didn’t actually mind not going to X. There was nothing for me left at Y either. But that took a while to figure out; and finding the next train onwards took a long time too. I think I have found it now. I think this train is a good one. And yet it’s scary to go somewhere new. I would like to bring you with me.
I would like this newsletter to be a bigger part of my life. I would like to document the new parts of my life— new home, new books, new ideas, new everything— in new ways and ways that are maybe helpful to you, too. How to cook. How to eat. How to sleep. How to rest, how to try, how to work, how to fight, how to stop. How to make things nice — when so many things aren’t. So this is sort of a launch announcement, or a relaunch.
I would like to have the time to make this place something special. Actually it is, I think, already something special. I love emails from people. I love getting to talk to people. I love writing it: direct, personal, real. There’s nothing mediating it. It’s just what I say, and what you read. It’s like the internet used to be before it got bad. It’s mine, basically, and also yours.
The thing is that it is starting to get tricky, financially, to make time for writing things like this for free. Actually, in a story that I guess is familiar to a lot of people, it is starting to get tricky financially full stop. This is because of things like tax bills, and my patchy mental health last year, and also the London rental market is insane. Did you know that? It is insane. It is so insane I don’t even know how to speak about it.
So, here’s what I think: I think if you love my books, or my poetry recommendations, or maybe you get something out of my Instagram captions (which I get a weird amount of messages about, and makes me very puzzled but happy)...or if you just love this newsletter, or maybe just love me, or have tried to give me money before (you exist! thank you! you have made it possible for me to ask for this!) ... there’s going to be a paid-subscriber category. It’s going to be £5 a month, or £50 a year (two free months!), because that is…the default setting on the Substack thing and messing with that scares me*.
Also, I think it’s a good price! It’s basically the cost of half a coffee a week, and it will mean I can both afford to keep writing this nice thing regularly, and make other cool art and books that are good. I would love you to subscribe. I would love to share more here, direct to email, and not online publicly at all. I am so excited by this.
Click on this green button above, and I think you can change to a paid subscription there if you would like to support my work. I would love you to support my work! I am so grateful to everyone who has suggested that I set this up, and so nervous about asking for help in this way. Asking for help sucks, but also, it is necessary and I need it. We all need it! Help is being human!
So partly, that £5 will go into meaning this can still exist. Also, it will go into meaning I can still exist in a nice way where I am not insanely stressed about money every day of my life. But what it will also do is buy you more, better and different stuff. It will buy you fun quick pieces, it will buy you poetry recommendations, it will buy you gossip, it will buy you links to things I am reading and really want to talk about, it will buy you the extremely personal long-form stuff I don’t want to just put out there on the internet forever. It will buy you the inside scoop on writing a cookbook, advice on writing, advice on cooking, advice on editing. I would love it to buy you an advice column, if I can figure out some way to make that work. And it will buy you recipes. It will buy me time to make recipes that are the best version of themselves: the easiest, and the most delicious, and the thing you really want to cook right now. The thing you need. The best version of this newsletter! The nicest, most fun, most useful version!
It will probably go out 2-3x a month, whether that’s fewer long form pieces or more fun short bits. I think this is a fun way to spend five quid!
Sometimes, things will be free to everyone. I don’t know what yet, but there will still be some essays and blogs anyone can read. They will probably happen even less often, but they will still happen. They will happen as often as I can afford to give up a day of work to make them happen! But they will still happen. If you would like to get the full newsletter, but absolutely cannot afford £5 a month, then please email me and I will put you on the list and not ask any questions.
And so that is my news, or at least the first part of my news: the part I can share right now. More change and more new directions are coming. This is a year of work, for me. Of work and new things and making things. I would love to bring you with me.
I would also love to be about to share a recipe with you, but we are moving house. I live on toast. I live on Deliveroo. I live on this mad easy mad delicious pasta bake, which is sort of like the marital harmony sausage pasta from my first book: red onions, sausages, tomatoes, cream.
This time I was clearing the cupboards, so I caramelised three red onions in a lot of olive oil, for maybe thirty minutes or so while I was doing other stuff; and then six very cheap sausages chopped up into bits and mostly crumbled and fried until brownish. Usually I would use two tins of tomatoes, but we had none and I didn’t want to buy anything, so I added this jar of plain tomato pasta sauce I don’t remember buying, and three peeled chopped big tomatoes I got at the corner shop, and filled the sauce jar with red wine and put the lid back on and shook it and shook it and tipped it all into the frying pan too.
Then I just turned the heat right down and forgot about it for about an hour. I have no idea what I did with that hour. Yesterday I was on the Tube and I was at Green Park and I blinked and suddenly I was at Canning Town, quite a long way from where I had wanted to get off, and no idea how I got there. I think I fell asleep. I had to ring a man who was coming to disassemble a wardrobe and tell him that there had been an emergency and I was running late, but the only emergency was that I am so tired and frazzled lately that I had somehow lost about seven stops on the Jubilee line.
Anyway, after an hour, I boiled some very salty water in which I cooked a whole bunch of penne and other penne-sized pasta shapes I found in the cupboard. While it was cooking I grated some Parmesan into the dinner, the end of two fridgey bits, and turned the heat off; and added a couple of tablespoons of cream. The measurements for this are in Midnight Chicken if you hate to wing it. I stirred it all up, and drained the pasta and stirred that in too; and then on the first night we ate it as is, with more cheese and black pepper on top. It was better the second day, as all tomato-based sauces are really; but it was best in its third incarnation as this pasta bake: spooned cold into a little blue-and-white enamel dish, a whole ball of mozzarella (torn, not sliced!!) and lots more black pepper over the top; 200C for 20 minutes or until it’s properly bronzed and crispy on top. What was so good about it was that the inside was not at all dry, as so many pasta bakes are: it was completely saucy and silky still, underneath this crisp bronzy-golden crust of cheese and friable little fragments of pepper-speckled pasta.
Why is it that pasta is always better the second or third day? Why is it always worth waiting for? Why are so many things worth waiting for when I am not blessed with any patience whatsoever?
The pasta bake is, obviously, a metaphor– and one that is way better than the business about snowdrops and ice up at the top– but it’s also very delicious.
Please do consider subscribing, if you like my work. I would love to be able to make more of it.
This is an offer I think I have just made: sign up in the next couple weeks, BEFORE I move house, and you get TWENTY PER CENT off. Don’t make me do the maths on that. Please subscribe! Subscribe to my letter!
*If you, for whatever reason, feel like giving me an extremely large sum of money, there is also a Founding Members option at £250 a year. I do not expect anyone to sign up for this, but if you do want to make an outrageous difference to what I’m able to do with this newsletter (and how I feel in my life), please email me! Substack offers this option! To be clear, the newsletter will be the same for everybody on the paid list, but also you will be first in line for free tickets, guest list passes, treats, trinkets, merch when I have it (tea towels! Aprons! Tote bags!), signed books; and also I will think gratefully and fondly of you as my patron like we are in 16th century Florence. As I say, though, this is an outrageous option and one I would never have thought of if Substack hadn’t put it right there for me.