Really playing catch up with my writing by this point in the week. Still thinking about yesterday's entry cos it only exists in note form on my phone at the moment plus trying to be present today so don't miss anything, scouring through the ACFM podcast I'm listening to on my way to work just in case they mention something good about food but they're mainly just talking about the failure of Corbynism. I'm foraging really, to include a relevant metaphor, and that's what writing encourages, the desire to look for what might be 'the writing' or what might be 'that which is worth writing about', the gold, the value, the meat, the nugget, in amongst all the other stuff, 'whack-a-mole' as Nadia Idle just said, not sure the context cos I'm just typing and walking now and not really listening.
Further east now I catch the smell of hops * fresh sweet soft bread smell * coming from the Strathclyde grain distillery, which I later learn is owned by the Pernod Ricard group of pastis fame who until 2020 were major financers of bullfighting in France. When I was little we would go to Edinburgh in the summer and I used to think that that hoppy smell you get there too was from the Edinburgh Dungeons cos it smells kind of meaty and dank, which is a pretty disgusting thing to have dreamt up really.
Breakfast
Two glorious toasted crumpets thickly buttered.
Snack
Several handfuls of salty little cashew nuts, a particularly saline day today maybe I'm getting my tastes back. Tomorrow I wake up with a thick head and realise that maybe it's a salt hangover.
Lunch
Dearest tin of cream of tomato soup with a third crumpet. I like to bite the soft bit off the top of the crumpet first and chew just the bouncy sponge dribbling butter.
Snack
A slice of toasted banana bread with gloopy organic peanut butter and tea at J's house.
Dinner
I post chakri (savoury rice sticks, Sainsbury's) into M's mouth whilst he peels chunky grey prawns from a slimy little plastic bag. Looking back at my phone notes for today on Saturday as I write this up, I've written the words 'prawns tag', the day of prawns. Maybe more buttertag or crumpettag.
Watching Boiling Point later that night I decide that in order for me to actually like a film it needs to really make me feel something very viscerally. Boiling Point was an hour and a half of pure stress. I cried and peeked through my hands and cringed hard at all the stereotypes: the sexist influencer bros, the black pot wash who picks up for the cokey head chef, the boiled ham racist dad, the naïve flirting waitress, the young French commis chef who doesn't catch a nut allergy because she's so overwhelmed and can't understand Stephen Graham's thick scouse accent. In a review on TimeOut written by several actual chefs in London, a kitchen porter said they found it so stressful that they had to watch Paddington afterwards to calm themselves down. Thinking about it now, maybe more than the actual story, what I liked was the high drama and the onslaught of emotion and hating all the horrible characterisations, all the ugly stuff.
Caitlin is a programmer and writer based in Glasgow. (@caitlinmerrettking)