Hello! This week, we have Rosie Coleman writing for us. Talking on intimacy and food as a medium to build intimacy, linking special memories to the very present. Hope you are excited as much as we are.
Bio: Rosie (she/her) is a curator, researcher and editor from Newcastle upon Tyne currently based in Glasgow where she is doing an MLitt Curatorial Practice at GSA. Her work looks to facilitate contexts for exchange and collectivity, and is situated within practical and theoretical approaches towards care, labour, support, relations and intimacy.
Find a preamble from Rosie and her first dispatch below.
Thanks! Kate + Sinae
eliza, day 1
Breakfast this morning is something that I wake up needing, which is rare for me – a ritual I always perform but could easily go without. Between unloading the dishwasher, balancing mugs on top of mugs and finding room for pans, I make a coffee: an indulgent Vanilla Nespresso pod out of a machine that Eve gave me as a hand-me-down if coffee machines can be such a thing. 1 shot topped up with some boiling water and a dash of oat milk, the coffee is hot on the tongue, ever so slightly sweet but also perfectly strong. I make porridge, again with oat milk and top this with raspberries and chia seeds (need to get more chia seeds as I’m running out) as well as a small dash of honey.
As I put together breakfast my phone screen lights up with a series of messages coming through from you, saying good morning and asking what my day is like today, these messages becoming as much part of my morning ritual as my coffee. With you in London and me in Glasgow, our relationship unfolds through iMessage; voicenotes recorded as we walk down different streets, me negotiating the rain and a wet phone and you, the noise of sirens that you always apologise for, daily morning texts and occasionally drunken ‘hi’s that affirm something that evening isn’t going quite right. We communicate constantly in this way, with a shared understanding that we never need to have a phone call. One day we discussed moving to WhatsApp, but quickly decided against this, agreeing it would be too weird to text on a different platform when we have been used to the blue speech bubbles for the past ten years.
I get to the studio at around 9:45 and make another coffee, and when the mid-morning hits I have one of these raw fruit and nut bars that is ‘cacao orange’ flavoured. I can’t remember when or why I brought these, most likely in a frenzy where I decided I need to cut back on sugar. We don’t have teaching until the 30th January and so I’m in this limbo period waiting for real sense of structure to begin, but I feel better starting the week with work and a self-enforced sense of routine. You said this would be the case to me last week when I was in a funk, telling me it would pass – you were right. For lunch I eat something I put together last night out of what was left in the fridge: fusilli pasta with fresh pesto, roasted kale and broccoli. Very green but the pasta was way too starchy, and the portion way too big and so I threw half of it in the bin, and I feel guilty for that. I reply to your text messages from this morning.
In the afternoon me and Peter go on one of our frequent trips ‘to Tesco’, which is always a code for buying (sometimes accidently not scanning on self-service) something sweet. Peter is like you in that he’ll always want to eat something sweet at precisely the same time as me, so we both actively encourage this habit in each other; when we were on Bute this weekend, we shared two sticky toffee puddings in two days. I think that’s something we’d probably do together too. I get a Boost Bar because the combination of cold weather and using my brain as I read makes me want and think I deserve chocolate (more guilt) and I get a banana, to balance.
You text me saying you’re hungry. I reply to this text via a voicenote as I’m walking to the gym, thinking of the ways our day-to-day is so consistently entwined across palpable distance, considering the ways in which we are dependent on each other in the most comfortable sense of the word. Back from the gym I take a bath, nibbling on a strange variety of snacks like grapes and oat cakes laced with honey as it runs. The bath is something we share; when we were teenagers we’d take baths together after school, sitting in our bikinis and chatting about everything that happened that day. More recently, at one of our regular mid-week sleepovers just before I moved to Glasgow, we shared a bath, naked except for our knickers, topping up the hot water when it got lukewarm. I wonder if our flatmates at the time thought it was strange we would stay at each other’s houses every week when we had our own flats to go back to.
My body now warm, I make an Anna Jones’s ginger turmeric noodle broth recipe, something I only allow myself in emergency situations like when I’ve had a heavy weekend or I can feel myself getting ill. My weekend was in no way heavy and I don’t think I’m getting ill, but it is a Monday in January so I give myself this meal. I’ve told you about this broth before but I’m not sure you have ever made it, so the recipe is here for you to try. The noodles and broth are soothing, and I add too many chilli flakes and too much chilli oil, thinking of the time we were at a festival and we ate an amazing bowl of mac and cheese that came just at the right point in the evening, but I ruined mine by adding chilli flakes and jalapenos and chilli sauce and you didn’t ever tell me to stop, letting me make that mistake for myself. Before I got to bed you text me saying ‘Honestly can January just be over’ and told me you made an omelette for tea.
Loved this!