Broccoli Fingers

Every other day, as my lazy fingers strain to reach the TV remote, a reel of depressing - sometimes slightly provocative - news stories steam on, while I slurp on my Shredded Wheat. And, more often than not, someone in some country has done something to offend them. (As we’ve proved with most of history, we don’t learn from the past…) And, more often than not, we all form one of three innate opinions: “they’re really stupid what the heck did they think would happen?”; “they had every right to, free speech human rights” etc, etc; or “Mum where’s the remote? Has it fallen down the sofa cushion again?”

However, I have been thinking (batten down any loose objects!) and surely, surely you would research the customs of a place before you visit? Maybe? I mean, you wouldn’t burst into a holy place of worship, with bikini shorts half way past your rear end, hooting a vuvuzela (and aren’t we all glad they were all buried, along with the hopes of becoming the next top Olympic gymnast). Well I hope not: it would be hideously embarrassing for everyone there, and yourself, as well as completely offensive.

And, trust me, it is embarrassing when you get the rules wrong:

When I was about seven, I was gleefully around my best friend’s house (a maze of animals and theatre tickets I could only aspire to own), chomping on the tea her mum had cooked for us. I wasn’t a particularly fussy child at that point – and, goodness, I had been previously – yet I did have some odd habits. I was, in truth, still grappling the concept of using cutlery and there were some foods I just didn’t use them for: it had just never occurred to me – I wasn’t trying to be a generally disrespectful and downright bratty youngster, I promise.

Anyway, so we were all around my friend’s varnished dining room table – myself, her, her mum and dad, and two older sisters – enjoying a chat as awkward and slightly forced as you can probably imagine. Due to this, I wasn’t exactly examining my eating habits, as I picked up the broccoli. With my fingers. In fact, it only registered when my friend leaned across to her mum and asked – in a louder voice than I appreciated – “mum, can I eat my broccoli with my fingers too?”

Now, I blush like someone has smashed blackberries into the apples of my cheeks, so you can imagine what happened to my face right at that moment. I delicately placed the quarter-eaten broccoli back on the plate, as my friend’s mum agreed she too could munch on the broccoli with her little fingers. Even then, I could understand she was only doing this to protect the little dignity a year three actually possesses. It was mortifying and I have since never eaten broccoli like I feel it was intended ever again.

So, if you ever discover yourself to be in a peculiar land – a foreign country, a religious conference, or your friend’s deceptively-relaxed family home – please try to observe the customs; you don’t want to trudge into the trap of broccoli fingers.

La Gioia e Guai (Joy and Woe)

A poem I wrote for creative writing coursework last year, about the struggle between the emotions 'joy' and 'woe' in someone's brain. It was heavily inspired by John Milton's 'Il Penseroso'

 

Hence my torn, wretched brain

An immortal battle, destined and done

Hath my sanity gone?

Drowning in feeling, after a birth maim

Which sliced my mind in two

Inhabiting a juxtaposing twin

Duelling from within

Sole decisions perplex for hours

Far beyond my powers

One Woe, one Joy, replenishing their coup

Hail Joy, embodied like a Goddess

Shrouded in a golden dress

Euphoric under gleeful beam

For she is one of our dreams

Adopting what may bring me bliss

Appraisal like a well-won kiss

Felicity bestowed for delight

Woe in hostility from this fright

Mere mention of an exuberance

Spirals into sorrowful trance

Persuades a route of melancholy

Endorses what is right and holy

For desolation tails our sin

Which one should purge from within

Homage Misery, the subsequent

Grounding me with an anchor’s dent

Let it be known, to be modest

Clutches at the hands of sadness

For Woe is wrapped in a vortex

Unhappiness – black – she ejects

Shadows monosyllabic choices

Fought by Pleasure’s tongues and voices

Muffled by lamb’s wool, by new-born’s fuzz

Ecstasy flows with electric buzz

“Select what will bring elation

Not whom escorts vile dejection”

Allergic to her sister’s despair

Happiness amends to disrepair

These parasites, whom I play host

Forced to hear the winner’s boast

While the other slinks deviously

Pounce prepared meticulously

On a coming alternative

I unknowingly grant and give

To Exhilaration and Gloom

O my poor head hath no room!

(Woe smirks at relentless anguish)

O to most this seems outlandish

Mind carved into quarrelling divide

Joy and Woe on either side

Pilot to each option I conduct

Pair of twins, with me, are stuck

In the Defence of Blue Cheese

Every summer, our family would pack our car boot – until there was a bulging sensation in the metal – and take the Euro Star across to France. Although an ambling journey (probably far worse for my parents, desperate to keep their young daughter and her baby brother continually amused), the holidays we experienced in St Tropez and Nice were simple wonderful. Among their toasty weather, plethora of activities and explorations, the French are the best at food. One of our favourite ways to endorse in this was to have a ‘market lunch’, consisting of fresh baguettes (far lighter than the limp sponges that have embedded into English supermarkets), pâtés, cheese and fruits which all could have featured on an M&S advert. As I gorged on foreign crisps and strawberries – though not together – my parents would laden their sliced baguette with something so alien, I believed it inedible: blue cheese. How were they not disgusted by the boisterous mould, tinting the whole slab a palette of blues and greens? They produced the audible sounds of pleasure when the bread was clamped into their mouths, but this was an equation I simply could not configure.

Literally the biggest slabs of cheese we've ever witnessed. Our purchase from a French market this year was well worth it

Years later, I was at my Grandma’s house, eagerly bouncing on my chair, waiting for our typically homemade, traditional delights to unfurl into today’s bowl. (You can tell my life has gravitated around my life source of food.) She slid us all a bowl of soup and I graciously sipped the smooth food-liquid hybrid off my spoon.

Half way through, she announced what enchanting flavour it was: broccoli and stilton. Blue cheese. I was ingesting mouldy cheese, and I loved it!

So, why does this savoury mound make us quiver with distaste? For one, the most obvious allows me to use the ‘never judge a book by its cover’ cliché: it’s marbled with mould. However, unlike the fuzz that spins a jacket over your grapes overnight, mould on blue cheese is not harmful to us at all. This breed of mould is non-toxic and – better still – may even be beneficial for our bodies: penicillium roqueforti (guess which cheese this mould may inhabit) has antibacterial properties, which even prevent some harmful pathogens from attacking our body.

Even after 9,000 years of spreading and nibbling upon this cheese (and leaving the table still perfectly healthy from doing so), some neophobes are still unconvinced. In which case, I always like to refer to our disgust of fat: chewy, bulbous strings of white, encasing otherwise pleasant meats. On its own, fat makes people uncomfortable, even a little queasy. However, how do you think the gravy drizzled over your roast dinner tastes so moreish? Or how bacon sizzles and crisps under the grill? Much like fat, mould is only acceptable in the right circumstances, the right contexts.

And, cheese is the best of them all.

If you’re still stubborn on testing a bit of solitary blue cheese, there are an abundance of recipes, which would be simply undesirable without it. The classics include: soups (my first experience with broccoli and stilton, but also with celery, cauliflower, or crumbled over your mundane garden-vegetable for some more flare), as well as sprinkled on salads and stirred into Italian pastas. Steak and stilton. Gorgonzola-glazed chicken. Delicious.

If stilton and roquefort sound too bold for sheltered taste-buds, gorgonzola and Danish blues are creamy enough to glide onto bread, melting in your mouth like it would on a steaming dinner.

Finally, I feel one must just be brave.

So, take yourself to the cheese aisle (or a French market, if you want to experience the literal ‘crème-de-la-crème’) an place in your basket something which will one day be incorporated into your weekly shop.

Timely Letter

This piece was a response to Colum McCann's outstanding short story 'What Time Is It, Where You Are?' In my own piece, the narrator flickers between his own thought processes and a letter he is trying to compose...

11:17

Dear B

I was just writing to say

Dear B

I

How does one begin a letter like this? It all sounds too formal, too business-like, which is hardly me and she’d never believe it anyway, so maybe I’ll try something else:

Dear B

I don’t think we can be together anymore.

Bluntness and honesty are always mistaken, so it doesn’t hurt to sweeten it a little, does it? Can you imagine when she trudges through the door, expecting to greet you and instead your body has transformed into scrawny text on a page? What happens if she collapses, has a heart attack-ok, stop, stop, let’s scrap it and try it again:

Dear B

For the past few months, I don’t feel like we’ve been compatible

Compatible? We’re not formats on a computer, we’ve been together for the past two years and it’s not even that, it’s just-Let’s take a break and start again later.

14:26

Dear B,

As you know, we’ve both been really trying to keep our relationship together. However, with my work and your health …

I’ve always known her health, so why does that matter? Is this really all inflated from what she can’t control? God knows what her fiancée told-screamed into her swollen, sunken skin, about how useless she’s become. I’ve seen the disappointed look on her mum’s face as I flounce out of the car, while she’s still drowning in her pullover and draped blanket-I can’t be like them. Maybe I should think about this.

15:02

Dear B

I love you but

Is there a but? Does there always have to be a negative tailed onto the end? I remember when she’d been crying for two days and on that deceptively sunny afternoon, we scooted around to the corner shop and bought ice cream and how happy was she then? There were no ‘ifs’ of ‘if this is the only happy time for the next week’ or ‘but this won’t last’ or ‘when we get home, she’ll be nostalgic and sad and then really fucking sad’.

15:40

Dear B

This has been a really difficult decision for me but

God I’m selfish. So bloody selfish to see this as a difficult route for me, I mean I have selected this card myself; it hasn’t been forced upon my cheek.

Dear B

I have been struggling to put this into words, so I’ve put it on paper instead. What I wanted to say is that I love you, but I don’t feel like that’s enough to keep us together anymore. For the past few months, with work and arrangements, I feel – and you probably do too – that we’re just not right for each other anymore …

I remember when we first met and it was that party, was it Rick’s or Richard’s? And everyone was swanning around his drinks dispenser and she glided over to slosh more wine into her plastic cup and her cream dress, covered in intricate lace like a bohemian wedding costume, was already splattered at the sternum which looked like the patter of a crushed berry. And she smiled and pointed out I had broccoli in my tooth – no one had said anything until then, so either it was too dark and she was really scrutinizing my face or she was the only friend I’d take away from there. More then friend.

17:58

Dear B

I can’t put into words how much I love you, but I’m also desperately trying to find words to tell you that

Is that the front door?