This past week has really been a salad bowl of sorts, so you’ll have to forgive the disorganisation of this post.
In an attempt to shed all the lockdown-/Covid-/laziness-related bacon I’ve accumulated on my thighs and belly these past two years as well as to let off some steam, I’ve decided to go back to the gym, and it was surprisingly not as horrible as I expected it to be. It does help that not too many people frequent my gym these days (lots of my fellow countrymen are on holiday in Spain or in Italy at this time of the year) and that the air conditioning is on.
Speaking of which, I don’t know how it is for you at home, but here we are bracing ourselves for the heatwave that is going to hit us this week. It is already 32°C (89.6°F), which might not seem much to you if you live in a warmer region of the world, but you have to understand that northern Europe, where I live, wasn’t built to sustain prolonged periods of heat. Our houses are made to retain heat, not to evacuate it. That means that the temperatures do not go down at night at all, and if we want a real chance of catching a couple of Zs, some of us resort to sleeping in their backyards (but that’s where the mosquitoes are, and I’m terribly allergic) or in their cellars (but that’s where the spiders are, and I’m a wimp). There isn’t air conditioning anywhere except at the gym, as I just mentioned, or in the shops. We are generally terribly ill-equipped to face those extreme temperatures.
At least Jon and I are lucky because we made the decision a long time ago to keep as many trees as we could in our backyard, which resulted in having our own tiny wooded area where the temperatures are a little more bearable, but still, it is eminently impractical to work there so it’s only a temporary relief when we really can no longer stand sitting in the house. Fuck global warming.
On Friday, Jon took me to Suzanne Vega’s concert at the Hôpital Notre-Dame-à-la-Rose in Lessines (Belgium), a medieval convent/hospital that has been converted into a museum. The concert took place on a small stage that had been set in the yard of the former farm of the convent, which was perfect seeing that I’m not ready yet to go back to indoor venues as the Covid figures remain less than encouraging.
It was quite emotional for me to see Suzanne Vega (translation: I cried like four times), as she’s one of the singers I’ve consistently been listening to on repeat for the past twenty years but somehow never thought I’d see on stage. It was just her and her brilliant guitarist Gerry Leonard, and it was absolutely perfect. She started the set with Marlene on the Wall, my favourite song of hers (and one of my top 10 songs of all time). She interacted with the audience a lot and spoke of her first love, of Liverpool, of New York, of course, and of Lou Reed. She even sang Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. It was an enchanting evening and one I’ll remember for a long time with the same fondness as I remember Leonard Cohen’s concert.
In other news, I’ve been on a food and cooking kick lately. I’ve always loved cooking and reading about food, but Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential has rekindled my interest in those things. I made a long list of books that I plan to read in order to eat my way through food knowledge, I joined r/Cooking on Reddit, which probably is the most entertaining subreddit of all, and I started a new personal cookbook (gotta put all those unused notebooks I cannot seem to stop buying to good use!) and asked some of my friends to contribute their favourite recipes to it.
Now if I’m being honest, I think that if I’d known what life had in store for me, I’d probably have studied creative writing and I’d be a failed food writer by now, instead of studying translation and being a failed researcher. I know it is never too late, but some days it feels like it is—which doesn’t mean that food cannot be my hobby. If I had to make a list of the things that truly make me happy (and maybe I should, after all), food and all things related to it are very much up there, with kittens, writing, and finding myself completely lost in a Welsh forest in the middle of the summer.
That’s it from me for today. Catch you soon!
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Bonus
If you are interested in the book list, it is available on the blog. I’ve divided it into three bookshelves: Food, culture, etc., which is about food history, the anthropology of food, and food in culture, Cookbooks, which is … well, cookbooks (though there’s a bit of an overlap with the previous category seeing that some histories of food have recipes in them and vice versa, and Food writing, which is made of books that more or less focus on the craft of writing about food.