A round up of essays

Dec 22, 2024

I have a tendency to get distracted. This often can look like procrastination, like deciding to deep clean my oven instead of write a strategy. Lately I’ve been distracted but in a slightly more efficient way, using up every inch of time between launching a new project, sitting in on meetings with architects, project managing photoshoots and penning essays about the culture of hospitality for people other than myself.

Until today, I didn’t even realise I hadn’t been making time for Since No One Asked, perhaps because the Leftovers and Recipes-not-recipes were still holding strong. In truth, my brain has not been in the right space to write an essay. Sometimes the words get redirected to something or someone else. My mind whirs and fizzes in a different obsessive way; waking up at 3am to note down a task I forgot to do, or scrolling through social media saving posts that I think could work for our strategy. In the case of Kettle, it also looked like packing up products until 2am and running them around London, as well as spending 4 hours on a reel and tripping up on countless voice over takes.

Of course everyone is busy this time of year, and I’ve probably just been prioritising socialising every night of the week and enjoying time in an office over sitting with my thoughts. Cooking has taken a passenger seat, still present through repeated recipes like the hot honeyed roasted squash and broth beans with aioli that’s fed me (and some friends) over the past two weeks. Or the trusty tortilla that’s become muscle memory at this point. And of course a roast chicken or two with silky, ricotta-laced mashed potato and a slightly lumpy (but still delicious) chicken stock gravy eaten on the sofa watching my favourite Christmas film.

Anyway, this isn’t an essay. I think I need a few days of doing nothing to deliver something more solid. So instead here’s a quick round up of some favourite essays from 2024.