I’ve gone mad for walking and will need to update my bio from an obsession with microbes and fungi to one with hiking. I am starting to suspect that my carnivore experiment earlier this year slaughtered a colony of fibre loving microbes which were controlling me and making my every act be one of microbial veneration. Sorry bacteria, but at least the residual colonies are getting nice days out. Anyway, hiking. I love it, but alongside my achilles tendinopathy, I also have Morton’s neuroma which makes walking very painful after a few kilometres. Thankfully my Hoka Tor Ultra hiking boots are helping the achilles element, but they unfortunately do bugger all for the Morton’s neuroma element. The pain I get when the neuroma kicks in starts off with a kind of tingling numbness at the base of the middle three toes, and then very quickly turns into a sensation of burning
I really cannot express the depths of my love of pig fat. I eat enormous quantities of crackling and would eat more if only I could get more of it. If you can sell me some pasture raised pig skin, please do get in touch. Weirdly, I do not like to eat pork itself, aside from some bacon with my liver and caramelised onions. Anyway, lard. Yum. Delicious and (if you buy pasture raised pig fat which I do) nutritious, as it’s also chock full of vitamins D, E, and A, and omega 3 fatty acids. Despite loving crackling (aka pork rinds) more than even lamb fat (*gasp*), it never occurred to me to do anything with it other than eat it. I use the rendered lard from my crackling to fry just about everything bar beef and venison steaks, as I think they taste better with butter. However, this left
I loved Sinéad O’Connor. Somehow, despite multiple moves, I still have her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, on vinyl. It was one of the first albums I bought when my taste matured beyond asinine pop music, and it remains one of my desert island discs. I won’t pretend that I followed her throughout her career, because I didn’t. But that first album of hers still has my heart. There was something about her, and that cover, which genuinely awed me when I was young. The juxtaposition between the fierceness she embodied, how delicate her voice was, the range she was able to cover, and the stories she told with her lyrics. I know every word and melody of every song on that album, and listening can easily transport me back to a self I’d rather not remember being. I did not like being a teenager at all, but that makes
I started the novel I am currently writing, Tools Down, in 2019 when I was bored out of my mind at my job. I would wake up at 6am and write an hour before work; however, I was derailed by a sexual assault which my wanker boss found hilarious. So I downed tools in real life, walked out, and then the pandemic struck. During the pandemic, I wrote a memoir which I finished on New Years Eve, 2022. I then attempted to come back to Tools Down this year, in between the second and third edits of the memoir and the agent submission package creation. Unfortunately, this proved a very unproductive toing and froing of my attention. As such, I have struggled to get into Tools Down at all. This struggle turned into full-blown procrastination after I submitted my memoir to agents. I could tell that the anxiety from that—one rejection
I watched Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale last night. I had no idea what the film was about before watching it: I chose it simply because Samantha Morton is in it and because Aronofsky directed it. Be warned: this review has major spoilers. I should say off the bat that I generally like Aronofsky’s films, even if they are not always quite realised, and even though the endings sometimes seem rushed and weird, as The Whale’s did. That said, I found The Whale to be incredibly moving; it even brought me to tears a couple of times, which is a very rare occurrence. In sum, the film is about a reclusive, obese teacher who is attempting to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. I did some review reading after watching it, and I was surprised to see how many people hated the film and accused it of fat phobia. Whilst I agree that perhaps a genuinely