I started writing a book about learning how to be alone through time spent in the kitchen. Something that began in my little shed and solidified over years spent moving and then landing in London. I’m back in Cornwall but further west than I’d been before. The weeks leading up to my arrival I had been seeing four people a day and didn’t have a night to myself for almost a month. That is the normal pace of life in London and sometimes it’s overwhelming and sometimes you’re numb to it, until you are surrounded by space to think and dream and write and swim, and then you wonder whether you miss it or are just feeling the withdrawal symptoms of something that wasn’t very good for you.
Instead of pints at the pub twice a day, I’ve been driving way out west, to edge of the land, lying in white sand and on craggy rocks and climbing down to quiet coves. I want so badly to step into nostalgia but there’s newness around the corner and that scares me a little because nostalgia is comforting, even if it’s tainted with bad feelings from years past. The familiar that looks like the silken river and the roads that wind beside it and the him who tries to forget me.
I’m thinking about going back to that book but in a different way because perhaps before I was foolish enough to think I’d solved the mystery of loneliness. As if it can be finished. As if it cannot touch me again. And so I cook and dream and write and eat and push forward onto new roads that I think might lead me back to myself.
Cooking
Truthfully a lot of girl dinner (more assembling than cooking): corn cakes, butter, edam cheese, cucumbers. Brothy beans eaten at the hob. Creamy coconut daal on a particularly Cornish mizzle day. Salmon coated in ssamjang made and jarred by my mother and transported 300 miles south in the Yeti. Kimchi straight out of the jar stood in front of the fridge. Banana dipped in peanut butter. Tortilla (obviously). Cherries in salads. Lots of eggs on rye toast. One night, half a bottle of red wine and a bowl of honeyed yoghurt!
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