Skip to main content

Another year ends...

I was planning to end this writing project after a year, therefore November 2015. Why? Because I like a project, I like a beginning and middle, and an end. I like to evaluate and consider. I like to round up, round off and pontificate my learning. I recently had an interview, and my interviewer said that I was clearly very goal focused - and I agree, I am happy to muck in to do whatever needs to doing to achieve what was set out to be achieved - and this was a project for me to listen, watch, learn and write about it.

But as I was pondering what to round off with about this year in food, wine and London, I realised that I was still thinking, I was still oscillating between different ideas and had come to no conclusions. Therefore I have decided to go against my nature to sum things up, and instead - continue writing. I'll continue writing on a monthly basis, about how food, wine and the location of London intersects in my life.



I'm going to keep going, just keep going, with no real goal, no end date, just a theme... and this freaks me out - which is why I think it is a good idea.

I have not written for November because I was over analysing what to write, and how to conclude. I have things to write about, for example about my October trip to Copenhagen, and the amazing food there - and the fact that I also ate the worst dish ever; I also have to write about my November decision to re-think what I want to with my career, and the choice London has to offer, and then my trip Belfast at the beginning of December.

But one thing I have been thinking a lot of recently is social media. I love it, I love technology, I love the friends and work I've got from it.. but instgram is the modern day 'keeping up with the Jones' but on a global scale, and with 'Jones' you don't even know. The podcast The Kitchen is on Fire had an episode where they said/asked 'is instagram just bragging' - and of course it is, which is ok, it's ok to be privileged and spoilt. But, I feel overwhelmed by it all and it makes me anxious and even though I know it's a farce, and I don't have to play into it, I do. And with food there are so many more elements - having to know the latest restaurants, the best wines, being able to take the best photo... being 'in the know' is exhausting.

And so, I'm going to try and take a break. Or at least slow down.

Twitter and intagram are wonderful and powerful things, but I need to take some perspective. It's just fucking food, after all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Body Eats

When I first saw Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) I remember feeling a deep hunger. My belly rumbled, my torso tightened and the muscles sucked into my belly button as my body concaved in on itself. I could feel my arms wanting to desperately reach out and seek things to fill me up, to bring close to me, to suck up and consume. I wanted to devour the world. I watched it the first year of my Performing Arts undergraduate, where I thought I would major in dance and movement. In the end I didn’t, switching in the final semester to acting, after struggling to feel fully comfortable with my body moving through space for people to watch. I decided I preferred to hide behind words. Dance has always been a space of thirst, for cravings, for desire – a way to seek out and pursue, a way to rampage through ideas. Moving to be sated. Finishing dance exams growing up I would always be hungry, never being able to eat when nervous. Navigating how to feel in leotards, in front of mirrors, o

A restaurant review: of Instagram Stories

With the importance of ‘brand’, of storytelling and the prolific use of social media to attract customers, it seems appropriate to me that restaurants can be judged through the prism of Instagram and the fleeting tool of Stories. It is after all, a curated space for the business to tell their story. This is a piece of writing that was difficult to write because it hit emotional points that are sometimes hard to articulate, so this is a string of thoughts.  Food is the focal point of a restaurant, to be examined and appraised. It is often thought. In communities which have a robust food culture the dissection of dishes is an act of bonding, of creating memory and building connection to space and time and place. “We eat to remember place” anthropologist David Sutton writes, in his work reflecting the Greek island of Kalymnos.  Restaurants have a history and an anchor in the idea of being spaces of restorative-ness, of gathering and of being with people, of nourishment.  In the capitalist

The undoing and redoing of me

I am often thinking about the line between public and private, the way it wavers, blurs, disappears. In a world of social media it is a question for everyone, and not just for the stars, royalty, politicians. For me the question broadens into the realm of work. Where do I begin, and where do ‘I’ end. The ‘I’ must interrogate my place within power structures, within cultural narratives, within relatability.  My academic research was about a community I am part of, through my father. It was an ‘objective’ approach to examine storytelling, but because it was not a culture I participated in on a daily basis I was constantly negotiating my position in the work, my lens in the re-telling, my biases, my outside-ness and my inside-ness. The story of me became integral to the condition of the research. And, as my professional career has progressed, my approximation to this culture, one that is less known in the wider world, means I have become a tool to crack into these spheres - I have the con