Smoky Crispy Red Thai Tofu Burgers

...plus carrot slaw and jazzed-up cornershop buns

I don’t really know where to begin with me and August, except that it’s complicated.

It was always complicated with me and August.

…I wish this was the beginning of my wistful YA novel (oh, but should I? could I?) but it is in fact the beginning of my most wistful month. I have mixed feelings towards the whole of August, a kind of low-key dread that starts about now and lifts like magic on 1st September. I’m a September girl! It’s my birthday month! Sharp pencils! Everything starts new! Everyone is back from holiday!

Actually I think that is the key to my low-key August malaise: everyone is away, especially in publishing, and everything kind of hums along in suspended animation. Also, I feel like I should be having a more thrilling summer. I have always felt like this about August, no matter what I was actually doing. I just got back from a canal boat! In France! Where I spoke French! I spoke French and tied half-hitches and stood on the roof to heave the boat into port! I wore only this white dress for an entire week, which was…look, let’s just say that now home I might as well have taken out shares in Vanish. But I looked great. I also bought a very large straw hat, so you can tell it was a great and glam holiday, and now I am home I have the post-holiday incipient-August blues. Why aren’t I more thrilling? Why isn’t life more thrilling here? It didn’t help that I both sprained my ankle leaping off the boat, and had a serious, blister-heavy allergic reaction to a series of mosquito bites¹, so by the time I got home I was mostly swathed in bandages like a lazy attempt at a cameo in 1999’s The Mummy (and not as my beloved Evie).

Anyway, I lay around in my lack of thrills for a few days, soaking in Vanish and Germolene and sulks, and then it became clear it was time to make some goddamn thrills. It was time, in fact, to get to grips with August before it got to grips with me— as it does every! single! year! This year, no. I live by the seaside now. I am on a permanent holiday, albeit one where I still have to go to work and pay my July tax installment (freelancers, do you owe this? I did! This is your reminder! Do it before August!).

This year, I am on a permanent holiday, the smell of the sea and smoke is in the air, and August is mine.

Which takes us back to the YA novel, no? August will be mine.

Opening scene: bonfire on the beach. August, the new boy with a dark past, sits looking out to sea. Everyone loves him, but maybe he’s not telling everything he knows. Why did he leave his old school? Where even was his old school? Why does he look so tortured? He’s playing the guitar, etc. He’s wistful, capricious, mysterious. Who is he? Who are you? I hope we find out over the next 300 pages of you and August nearly but not quite kissing. Smoke on the sunset air. Starving hungry like you always are when you’re 14. Burger van pulled up on the promenade. What could be more August teen than burgers?

Big burgers, juicy and sticky, extra pickles, rich Japanese mayo, sriracha to the top. Slaw. Fries. Soft slabs of cheap white buns, jazzed up with a quick sesame glaze and shoved under the grill. Double patties, sweet and spicy and charred at the edges in the cast-iron skillet (or, for people with a barbecue, on a barbecue). Big burgers.

Big burgers, big feelings. Big flavours. Also, vegan, incidentally, which sort of goes with the teen theme, no? (Maybe August and our heroine bond over their desire never to eat animal products. He’s sensitive, you guys! Not like the others!)