Getting a jump start on the resolutions...
Started pottering, got sincere, recommended some reads. Will do better, promise.
Well, for once I’m early. It is New Year’s Eve and shut in by the rain, I’m getting a jump start on an age-old resolution - to write more.
My word count for 2024 has been rather piss poor so the only way is up for the new year and much as I’ve wanted to get back to these particular pages I’ve wondered what to do with them, what the purpose should be. That overthinking has kept me from just putting words down - something I’ve been firmly told to just get on with by those who hold me accountable - so in the spirit of good intentions I’ve thrown all that caution to this morning’s hammering winds.
I am seeing out the year in a very different place from where I began but while the surroundings have changed the scene is much the same as it has always been. I am sitting at the table, feet propped up on the opposite chair, bedecked in slippers, a second jumper and soft, woollen wrist warmers (a new addition from my mother possibly for fear of the Raynaud’s she’s also passed on). On the table before me are a trio of twisted candlesticks, throwing a warm glow on a midnight blue vase of white tulips, a steaming brown teapot, a small bowl of Smarties, and a stack of books I’ve begun to pick through and which are responsible for bringing me here, I suppose.
Wrapped up on the sofa this morning I picked through the January chapters of Monty Don’s ‘Almanac’ and Nigel Slater’s ‘The Kitchen Diaries’, jotting down tasks and recipes for the new month ahead - a mission to live by the rhythms and cycles of the seasons. Nigel’s Kitchen Diaries are usually what I turn to on New Year’s Day - I’m early here too - and as well as inspiring the making of soup and baking of bread, his writing always makes me want to pick up a pen. It is exactly his kind of cosy, everyday narratives that I want to read, so why not try to write them? If I will insist on tying myself in knots about writing meaningful, timely things on which to inform myself before forming opinions, it would do much better to unravel the small, simplicities of the everyday. So this year, on these pages at least, I intend to write as I live - snug as fuck, pottering among plant pots and saucepans, buried in books, and tramping about this corner of the city and beyond.
From here the city looks grey. It has been entrenched in cloud all day. Big, globulous droplets are gathered along the lip of the balcony roof and on the railing, plopping down to the grateful row of potted plants that line the deck in the hope of a drizzle. The sheltered nature of the balconies give the feel of an American porch where, usually, you could sit and look out at the rain while remaining relatively dry yourself. Not today. The early morning storm has drenched the balcony’s boards to the inner edge and sprinkled the glass with rare raindrops. Despite this, I have managed a little pottering - pruning and deadheading, peering in on emerging green shoots and enjoying the bursts of purple and deep pink which have found bloom over the mild winter months so far. Tidied up for the end of year, my secateurs are now cleaned down and drying on the rack. That will prove as far as I will venture today.
Yesterday, I repotted a houseplant which was showing up neglect with signs of disease. It is a hardy plant, the first I bought when I moved into my first house in Dublin five years ago, and it has perhaps tripled in size since then. I hope it proves hardy enough to survive the pruning of roots and a complete repotting in the depths of winter. Elsewhere, the indoor greenery is in fine fettle - the Christmas tree has not so much as dropped a needle since the day it was propped up and adorned with lights and novelties. My sister’s slender orchid is still in a full bloom of soft, white petals. On the sideboard, a small spattering of pink and purple heather has survived since autumn. It will likely prove an expensive resolution to expand the current collection of houseplants, as well as the continued wilding of the balconies but I’ll continue to plague the charity shops for any vessels which could serve as planters and planter plates.
There’s been a bit of tidying indoors too. After a fit of enterprise last night, the kitchen has been cleaned down and the drying rack stacked with various pots and pans. After almost a week away at home gorging on cheese and roasted meat and vegetables, I got back to the city and immediately sought out greens, sharp gingery and citrus flavours, fish. A grocery delivery brought razors of green celery, earthy pillows of portobello mushrooms, fresh leafy greens and tubs of Greek yogurt and hummus.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a good deal less virtuous stores about the place too - cheese and mince pies and shortbread biscuits, After Eights and Quality Street, mostly brought south in a post-Christmas care package from my mother - the care being that I was reducing the amount of crap she’d have about the house. She also sent with me, her own sparse recipe for celery soup - celery (about six stalks), garlic, white onion (both quantities at the chef’s discretion), chicken stock (enough to cook the veg in, says she helpfully), then blitz it all and add a basic roux before heating through to serve. A basic roux, says she, as if that culinary classic hasn’t been my arch nemesis for some twenty years. How many clumped, burnt or grainy disasters have I binned over that time?
So, with just enough light left in the year for a final challenge, I faced up to equal parts butter and flour, and a jug of oat milk, and this time - came out victorious. After several months of struggling to conquer new, practical skills, this triumph over the most basic of foundational sauces is one of the greatest achievements of the year.
There have been others of course, though that’s not quite the purpose of the particular meandering. It has been a year of change and progress and doing hard yards. And that’s not to speak of Leeds finishing the year top of the table. But all of that feels a little trivial and embarrassing in comparison. It has been an unforgivable year of violence and inhumanity, the global car crash from which none of us should have the privilege of looking away while it continues. It is, as a result of the boycotts, the longest I have ever gone without a McDonalds. A small personal sacrifice in the face of genocide perhaps but these are the things you do when you feel powerless - you protest and donate and amplify the few voices that still have breath to share the horrors from inside. You vote for those who promise greater pressure. You sign petitions and swear aloud on the street as the morning’s headlines deliver another wave of unimaginable terror into your ears as you walk to work in the comfort of a big coat and watertight shoes and the weight of breakfast in your belly, the greatest threat to your nervous system the steady ping of emails rather than constant drone of bombs and bullets.
At home too, the unrelenting tirade of attacks - some sexual, all violent, of bodies discovered in what was once the comfort of that somebody’s home, the weight of male insecurity and entitlement, the deepening cut of more violence against women and girls all of whom could be you or yours but for the grace of the men in your life. And here I thought I wouldn’t find words for the bigger, harder things beyond the everyday. Though not without upsetting myself. Even as I write the headlines on the radio bring news of another woman’s body found. The hardest thing I have learned this year is that there is always just enough time to squeeze in another thump to the heart.
Elsewhere. It has been a year well read, if not well written. A few honourable mentions:
‘Crudo’ by Olivia Laing. Published in 2018 and recounting the summer of 2017, this is sharp and punchy and touchingly sweet.
‘The Descent of Man’ by Grayson Perry. Published in 2016, a friend lent me this perhaps two years ago and I carried it around in my backpack for six months before finally rattling through the bulk of the narrow volume in a few days. It is always the way with ‘bag books’. Despite being written well before the current flood of the misogynist sewer, this book pins down the psychologies and societal failings which answer for it.
‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney. Her best yet. I loved it all. I cannot wait for the inevitable adaptation.
‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott, published in 1994 and on my list to read for some four or five years. Just marvellous. An essential for anyone who writes or wants to or who keeps their creative spark alive. As it happens, today’s Ted Talk is a good taster of what to expect.
‘Evenings and Weekends’ by Oisín McKenna. Practically perfect. Big, bold, colourful characters. Fully dimensional spaces and cityscapes. The kind of narrative that fools you into believing plot is simple. God, I hope he’s bringing us something new soon.
‘Recovering’ by Richie Sadlier, published 2019. My crush on Sadlier aside, this is a very well written book, a very well read audio, and a great insight into the physical and mental pressures and injuries that can come with a professional career in football. For anyone affected by addiction, reading about recovery can be bittersweet but this is well worth the reading.
‘Nigel: My Family and Other Dogs’ by Monty Don. Just wonderful.
‘Wild Horses’ by Colin Barrett, published this year. All the bluster about this book is legit. Gave me shades of Kevin Barry and Lisa McInerney.
‘This is Happiness’ by Niall Williams, published 2019. My mother raved about this until I borrowed it from her. She was right. The writing is stunning. It sickened me.
‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ by E.M. Delafield, published 1930. I’d never read this before but the voice was so bell-ringly familiar of a dear friend for whom I suspect this was a formative text, and who I long to talk to about books and baking and all the little nothings of our lives. It was like she visited for a short spell. I’ll read more in the hope of summoning up the same magic.
‘Exile’ by Aimee Walsh. Aimee and I met in Liverpool and the snapshot she captures of the city of our student years is gut-punchingly good. There’s a wave of honest, post-GFA voices rising from the North over the last few years which is much more about the fegs than the flegs and it’s delightfully refreshing.
‘The Long Game’ by Aoife Moore. Probably can’t take full credit for bursting Sinn Fein’s ‘next Government’ bubble but can definitely take a bow.
‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray. We all know by now how brilliant this is, how brilliant Murray is.
‘Out of the Wreckage’ by George Monbiot, published 2017. So much has happened in politics since this was published but it is still as nail-on-the-head and a welcome stirring of hope that change is possible.
‘Hagstone’ by Sinéad Gleeson. I couldn’t believe this was Gleeson’s first novel and now I find it hard to believe this was actually this year. This got under my skin.
‘White City’ by Kevin Power, published 2021. What a romp. Chef’s kiss.
‘Transcript’ by Kate Atkinson, published 2018. Adored this. The first of her books that I’d read and I’ve since finished another and picked up a third.
‘Kala’ by Colin Walsh, published 2023. If Netflix or RTÉ are paying attention, this is the adaptation you’re looking for. Bet into it. Couldn’t put it down.
That about catches me up with the early year’s good intentions so for January to March reading recommendations, please see more here.
Well, that’s a good deal more than I thought I’d put down on paper. Hopefully I can keep up the pace when the shine of the new year has worn off.
A very happy new year to you, if you’re made it through the ramblings. I promise/threaten to write more regularly so please do subscribe if you see fit. Hold me accountable. Admonish me with a big stick. Like all good lapsed Catholics, I am more motivated by shame than anything else so obligate me, go on.
I hope you have a pottering kind of New Year’s Day ahead of you. I’m off to cook steak and to lip sync all parts in When Harry Met Sally. Oíche mhaith!