Got home at around midnight last night; the train was delayed to pretty much the same extent it would’ve been had we jumped on in the morning. Muggy and faintly stinky, a little bogged down by the plethora of gorgeously conflicting carbs we brought with us (I’m harried by the sensation of having eaten a wedge of fibreglass insulation), and dinnerless again, I collapse into bed.
Rising late and with the steely reminder that I’ll be working until eleven tonight, I think this last day at the Gazette might best serve as a sieve with which to catch all the things I’ve missed, or the impressions that – re-reading this week in full before I start writing – I am struck with now.
***
1). The haircut-cordial.
There’s always a tinge of loss or self-chastisement that comes from being offered a beer or something else and choosing something else. Especially if it’s free. Alcohol is a kind of currency. If you are someone who drinks, free drinks are like a free lunch: difficult, and (despite my best efforts to feel the contrary), a little self-defeating to turn down. But how often is anything ever free? The currency I’m imagining is more like an experiential one; a passage or token toward a specific experience, different to the one you’re currently having, and so a free drink becomes a sort of small victory; a circumvention of an established norm; the discovery of a short-cut from A to B; an unexpired voucher you find in the street; successfully hopping the barrier on the tube. You’ve won. You’ve actually won something. You squirmed your way through the infinite walls of the daily maze and this is your reward, you beautiful worm! You got one over on the bastards. (I wonder, again, whether this is also a class thing. Always a little on-alert, it’d be inconceivable to say no to something you didn’t have to pay for. But then again, the people most inclined to take up something-for-nothing, those who actively seek out a free lunch – and, in a way, are the stingiest of all – often seem to be the most minted. So who’s to say? Not that there’s any kind of contradiction here.)
***
You know what actually, I’ve tried to pick out the intricacies of the moments I missed, or the half-glimpsed things I skipped unnecessarily; the photos I forgot to take, but I’m absolutely knackered and start work in half an hour, and I think I’m getting ill. With all that in mind, I think I’m going to bring my time at the Gazette to an end. My time in Glasgow was too short, sadly cut short, and so I guess it’s only fitting that this slot would feel already too short, too.
I’ve loved reading everyone’s residencies at Fortified over the last year or so. It feels like a really special forum to share writing through and with, towards and against, food, and other people; not only because in its regular immediacy you cannot help but shave off hand-wringing preciousness, but also because Sinae and Kate are so hands-off; tacitly extending an unflinching warmth and trust in your writing and its particulars.
Whether you’ve read even a snippet of my posts this week or somehow endured the whole thing, thank you so much. Food has not been an easy thing for me in my life. For the longest time I have had a very fraught relationship with it. Those old patterns raise their head pretty regularly and it is an ongoing effort to keep them at bay; to not let them be appeased. That is a fact of my life. Perhaps eventually it no longer will be. But what Fortified offers is the opportunity to pause, the space to puncture the blistering heedlessness which is my norm, my coping mechanism, and thereby weather the experience of properly attending to food; my habits and tastes, the small daily miracle of it, what I actually think and feel, and be held in the process. It renders food no longer numb. Before I started, I was a little anxious about attempting to write what is at its core a food diary, even if only for a few days. But taking stock at the end of this week, I realise that paying this kind of intimate attention to what I eat has actually been incredibly rich. This is the real power of food: it can isolate moments in time. Meals and snacks and drinks and smells and everything in between – shared or alone – tangibly anchor your memories by forcing you to recall the sensorial and social poetics of a moment, a place, a group of friends, the way you held yourself; beyond the general limitations of the visual and auditory, beyond the limitations and expectations attemptedly placed on you by the world and its own fucked up and punitive ordering of bodies and the innumerable permutations of violence implicitly done to them. Fortified has reminded me of that power, in the same way that it probably reminds everyone who reads it when they get that notification pop up in their inbox. In this way it has been very healing. I ate a slice of chicken on Sunday night for the first time in ten years. So, a massive thank you to Kate and Sinae for having me, and again to anyone who’s spent any amount of time with the smallest part of these dispatches. Food matters; you need it; it is a right.
Wes Knowler is a writer living in London. @otter_cobra
That’s Wes’ last dispatch on the Gazette! Thanks so much for all your writing this week, it’s been a real pleasure to think and eat with you every day. Thanks, too, for your description of what this space can hold and do.
Note: Given that food is the primary subject of all the writing we share here, we hope that readers are aware that disordered eating might sometimes be touched upon, and that more generally some aspects of food writing can be difficult for some of us. We’ll try and use our judgement sensitively to give content warnings/disclaimers when we feel it’s necessary. (In this instance, ourselves and Wes didn’t think it was needed.)
As ever, this is an open space, so if any readers would like to have a week writing for the Fortified Gazette in the new year, just let us know.
Best,
Sinae + Kate