The Isis | Savour | MT22

contents

Editor’s Letter 1

Birth of the Reader – Farabee Pushpita 2

Itadakimasu – Siena Muller Yamashita 4

My Father, the Concert Pianist – Sam Wallbank 8

Aphrodisiac Fruits – Louis Rush 12

Immigrant Indulgence – Evie Raja 13

Scenes from the North – Dylan Squires 17

A Story Untold? – Wyatt Radzin 20

In Conversation with Henry Dimbleby – Clemmie Read 24

Lysanias –Paige Crawley 28

Colombia: From Pueblo to the Capital – Karol Janiuk 30

Love Et Cetera – Gabriel Blackwell 32

An Acquired Taste – Nicole Fan 36

Thursday Night – Sonya Ribner 39

Tres Poemas de la Generación del 27 – Iona Blair 44

What’s Left of Murakami’s Tokyo? – Thalia Roychowdhury 46

Swimming Against the Torrent – Lukas Oscar Lacey-Hughes 50

Wisteria – James Turner 54

‘Greedily She Engorg’d Without Restraint’ – Lottie Hassan 55

Last Meal – Zoe Davis 56

editors’ letter

TO BE FRANK, we don’t have a cute story for how we came up with our theme. We were having the first of many discussions about The Isis in Blackwell’s and came up with ‘taste’. Several thesaurus searches later, Savour was born. Perhaps the ease with which we decided the theme for this issue is testament to how pertinent savouring is to our daily lives, that it feels almost natural.

Savour encompasses many ways of experiencing life. In this issue, we present ways of eating (sun-dried persimmons, sweetcorn curry, codroe pasta), ways of encountering (Irish beaches, secret movies, a first date), and ways of feeling (intimate love, coming of age, daddy issues). We visit Tokyo and Paris, spend some time in Colombia and take a moment of reflection by the banks of the Thames.

Savour is the product of six months of love and labour, of little blood but some sweat and a few tears. We give endless thanks to our Deputy

Editors, Oliver, Anneka, Shao, and Mia, who have been nothing but brilliant the whole way through. To our Creative Team and our Creative Leaders, Ben and Elsie, whose ingenuity we can only admire. To our Marketing Team, who have spent many an evening hosting painting and wine, jazz nights, and birthday parties. And to our editorial and investigations teams, who, week in, week out, have worked diligently with our wonderful contributors.

We now invite you to share this moment with us. Savour every page.

Yours, Susie and Dowon.

BY FARABEE PUSHPITA

BIRTH OF THE READER BIRTH OF THE READER

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT PERDITION. / LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOW THOSE BURROWING UNDERNEATH TECTONIC PLATES / SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED WHEN THE UPHEAVAL CAUSES EARTHQUAKES. / LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT WRITERS PRETEND NOT TO KNOW FOR PEACE OF MIND. / WRITING IS DRESSING UP YOUR WOUNDS AND PARADING THEM AROUND TOWN IN FANCY CLOTHES. / SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PRETEND TO BE A STRANGER TO YOUR OWN HURT WHEN YOU SPOT IT IN THE STREETS. / COME ON, LITTLE ONE. / BITE YOUR TONGUE, TURN YOUR HEAD. / THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE. / NOTHING OF YOURS ANYMORE / NOT NOW THAT YOU’VE GIVEN YOURSELF TO THE WORLD. / WHAT CAME FROM WITHIN YOU IS NO LONGER YOURS TO LOSE.

THIS WHOLE WORLD WANTS TO OWN US / BUT THE PINNACLE OF YOUR PRIDEFUL PURSUITS / ARTISTIC ACCOLADES / IS TO PAINT YOUR PAIN IN CORUSCATING COLOURS / SHIMMERY SHINE / GLAMOROUS GRIME / AND PLACE A PRETTY BOW ATOP / HOLD IT OUT TO THE WORLD AND SAY / “LOOK AT ME. / NEVER STOP LOOKING AT ME. / I WAS HERE AND I AM A LOT LIKE YOU. / PLEASE. / PLEASE. / TELL ME YOU SEE IT TOO.” / IF YOU RIP OUT ENOUGH DRAGONFLY WINGS ONTO THE GROUND / YOU CAN PERSUADE THEM IT’S A SHOWER OF IRIDESCENT PETALS. / (DO THEY BELIEVE YOU? / DO YOU BELIEVE THEM NOW? / YOU WANT THEM TO TAKE YOU AT YOUR WORD / BUT WHO DOES THE WORD BELONG TO?).

THIS DESPAIR NEVER GOES AWAY / SO YOU WRITE IT OUT IN A MILLION DIFFERENT WAYS. / WOOLF IS DEAD SHELLEY IS DEAD KEATS IS DEAD. / YOU WANT TO BE PART OF THE CANON BUT NOT OF COLONIALISM. / YOU WANT TO BE PART OF THE HISTORY BOOKS BUT WON’T BE CAUGHT DEAD BEGGING. / THE EMPEROR HAS NEW CLOTHES. / YOUR LITTLE EMPIRE COLLAPSES BECAUSE IT’S MADE FROM YOUR OWN BONES. / EVERYONE WANTS TO BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE. / AND WHAT YOU THOUGHT WAS THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL COMES BACK TO NIP AT YOUR SHINS / AND REMIND YOU / WHITE PEOPLE WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND YOUR WORDS SO THEY WILL TRY TO MAKE THEM THEIR OWN. / AND THAT IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WRITER. / YOU BECOME A TANTALUS TO YOUR OWN SELF / SERVE UP YOUR ENTRAILS ON A GLISTENING PLATTER / (DON’T FORGET THE GARNISH, ADD SOME MORE SEASONING SO IT’S PALATABLE) / AND SAY, “I GIVE THIS TO YOU TO MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL / BECAUSE THAT IS THE POWER OF POETRY.” / AND YOU MEAN IT, YOU REALLY DO / BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT DOESN’T HURT YOU. BUT IT’S TOO LATE NOW. / YOU’RE A BIG GIRL NOW. / SO YOU’LL TIP YOUR HAT AT THE DOOR / SHAKE HANDS WITH YOUR GHOSTS / PECK YOUR PAST ON THE CHEEK / AND SAY, “HELLO, IT WAS NICE TO MEET YOU / BUT

REMIND ME AGAIN / WHO ARE YOU?” / WHO ARE YOU NOW THAT YOU’VE MADE YOURSELF COME UNDONE AND BEQUEATHED IT TO THEM ALL? / AND THERE IS NO ONE TO ANSWER YOU / BUT YOU’VE KNOWN THAT ALL ALONG. / SO YOU CARRY ON / PRAY YOU DON’T CATCH ANYONE’S EYES IN THE STREETS / STAB THE SAME WOUND IN YOUR SIDE / POUR OUT THE SAME PAIN / AND FIND PLEASURE. / JESUS CHRIST, WHAT WOULD YOUR MOTHER SAY? / SECRETS BECOME CONFESSIONALS IN SCRIPT. / THE PEN PERCHES LIKE A GAVEL AND PINS DOWN ALL YOUR LOVED ONES ON THE PAGE. / IT’S A VICIOUS CYCLE, THIS INABILITY TO ESCAPE EACH OTHER’S GAZE. YOU PEDDLE YOUR SOUL IN THIS PROFESSION / AND IT’S ALL YOU’VE EVER DESIRED / IT’S ALL YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT / BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT EASIER. / YOU CLUTCHED AT CONTROL TIGHTLY AND MADE IT YOUR GOD-GIVEN MISSION TO LET GO SPECTACULARLY / SPRAY YOUR INNARDS FOR THEM ALL TO SEE / TO TASTE / TO RELISH / TO TAKE / EVEN THE ONES WHO WISH YOU WERE DEAD / FOR WHOM YOU EXIST AS A SUBHUMAN IN THE BACK-CHAMBERS OF THEIR HEADS / AND YOU WOULD DO IT AGAIN. / SO MUCH TIME WASTED WORRYING ABOUT WORDS AND WHO THEY BELONG TO / AS IF EMILY DICKINSON WASN’T BINDING UP HER FASCICLES IN DRAWERS / AS IF THE ACT OF GIVING ALWAYS IMPLIES SOMETHING HAS TO BE TAKEN / NOT RECEIVED / AS IF LONELY LITTLE GIRLS WHO OPEN A BLANK PAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME CARE / AS IF PURGATORY EVER MADE A DIFFERENCE TO HOW / HAPPINESS IS A GOLDEN NOOSE. / IF IT FEELS NATURAL, IF IT FEELS GOOD / WHY RUN? / THERE IS NOT A WAR TO BE WON / NOTHING MORE TO BE DONE / SO LET YOURSELF BE EXTINGUISHED BY THE SETTING SUN / SCRABBLING

ART BY MATTHEW KURNIA

itadakimasu

BY SIENA MULLER YAMASHITA

Dewa, yukkuri ajiwaimasho, or “Well then, let’s enjoy this slowly”, I recall my grandmother saying to me over tea before watching her daily dose of travel shows. While I was living with her, the two of us would sit down every afternoon on the zabuton mats by her coffee table with freshly brewed cups of her favourite tea. She would ask me to make it with two heaped teaspoons of sugar and a fresh slice of lemon, picked from the tree she has been proudly tending for years in her small backyard. My grandmother always uses her lemons sparingly, and I know she’s filled with joy when she spots a few of those yellow fruits timidly

ripening on her tree in the winter.

Ajiwau in Japanese means ‘to taste’ or ‘to relish’ something slowly: a homecooked meal, the bitter sweetness of wagashi (Japanese confectionery), or the steaming warmth of tea. The word is reflective of the Japanese tradition of experiencing sensations mindfully. As my grandmother says, it’s about the added value of an appreciative kimochi (feeling) rather than just the taste. We use ajiwau in a less tangible way too – for a quiet walk along the coast or among rows of sakura trees, as their short-lived beauty tinges concrete cityscapes with sprinkles of the palest pink. Yet these glimpses of slower living don’t contradict the reality of a country dominated by constant busyness. Tokyo’s metro overflows with rush-hour commuters and working days are infamously long. Japan’s connection to bullet trains, anime, and capsule hotels may further contribute to the stereotype of a country that is somewhat hostile to tradition. However, the seemingly incompatible habits of modernity and tradition appear to be reconciled with people’s daily lives. My country’s fondness for practices of mindful enjoyment is something I’ve encountered on my yearly visits to my grandmother’s house in Fujisawa, Kanagawa – a place where, in my memory, lively children and busy grown-ups always gather, somewhat chaotically, to share her delicious meals.

In Japan, every meal starts by saying itadakimasu. Hungry children pronounce this with enthusiasm at a dinner table, initiating a silence only interrupted by the sound of chopsticks scraping rice from the bottom of a bowl. It’s used by co-workers on their rushed lunchbreaks and by guests sat at a traditional tea ceremony. As a language student, I’m always fascinated by the cultural resonance of words and I find myself dwelling over the translation of common Japanese sayings. I like to

think that it’s because the language is exceptionally suggestive, since Japanese is heavily context-based. It carries the literal meaning embedded in the visual kanji but also more implicit information, which on occasion consists of references to the seasons or of ranging degrees of formality. My uncle once received an admissions letter from a university saying – somewhat ambiguously – that “the flying plum of the Dazaifu Shrine is blooming” (太 宰府の飛梅咲く). Resorting to seasonal symbolism, the news came across as a very subtle and indirect congratulation. Similarly, itadakimasu expresses something different from the more easily translatable bon appetit, as the verb itadaku (頂く) means ‘to receive’ or ‘to accept’ a gift. The phrase traces back to Buddhist beliefs centred around the respect for all sacrificed forms of life, and it’s the acknowledgement of a kind offering, placing us in a position of humility.

Every meal also ends with an appreciative gochisousama. It roughly translates to “you’ve treated us so well”, in recognition of someone’s efforts in preparing a meal – it’s another example of how everyday phrases are imbued with an evocative meaning. Although I’d hear and use it all the time, only recently did I learn that the kanji of gochisousama are the symbols of ‘horse’ and ‘run’ (馳走 or chisou), creating an image of the host galloping around to take care of the guests and provide the food. With go and sama being common indicators of courtesy, gochisousama may sound unnecessarily formal. Yet it’s still used in most restaurants and households, including my own, where a conversation in English instantly switches to Japanese when thanking my mother for her cooking. Itadakimasu and gochisousama are so ingrained in our daily exchanges that failing to say them results in a nudge from a family member. Such expectations of politeness

ART BY ELSIE GRAY

also serve to foster a widespread custom of giving and receiving (omiyage and okaeshi) that I’ve seen being perpetually reciprocated through food between my grandmother and her in-laws.

Every winter, my sister and I look forward to our aunt’s special delivery of hoshigaki – sweet sundried persimmons that she makes – from the south of Japan. To us, they’re the ultimate winter delicacy, and we always fight over who gets to eat more. Food, and the appreciation of it, are closely linked to 四季 (shiki or the four seasons), which are artfully featured all across Japanese culture. They are the central source of contemplation in haiku, the short and impressionistic poems composed as the poet-wanderer’s melancholic response to the changing seasons. Seasonal imagery typically forms the landscape of Edo-period (16031848) screen paintings, kimono fabrics, and decorative lacquerware. The seasons are also delightfully contained inside a warm bowl of gleaming shinmai (newly harvested rice), in the starchy core of satsumaimo (baked sweet potatoes), and in my grandmother’s cup of lemon tea.

Japanese cuisine always celebrates 旬 (shun or ‘peak seasonality’) in the ingredients used, making the enjoyment of food a way of being in touch with the current season through its harvest. Commercially, the seasons appear creatively packaged in limited-edition chestnut or plum-flavoured Kit-Kats, which I’ve so far only found in Japan. More traditionally, seasonal ingredients can be discovered in the multi-course kaiseki-ryori. It’s a rather fancy meal that comprises a series of small and colourful dishes representing different methods of cooking and textures. The kaiseki-ryori is meant to enable the slow enjoyment of both balance and variety. The word kaiseki (懐石) is written as ‘bosom stone’, referring to the stone that Zen monks placed on their stomachs to keep their hunger at bay before a tea ceremony,

in show of moderation. This sense of measure is still vital in Japanese cooking: the portions tend to serve just enough because, according to an old Japanese saying, in order to really enjoy a meal it’s best to be “eight-tenths full” (腹八分).

Taste is a visual experience too. Beauty and food are closely correlated ideas, so much so that the kanji of the adjective oishii (tasty), is spelt by combining the terms ‘beautiful’ (美) and ‘flavour’ (味). Careful composition and presentation also extend to everyday cooking at home. A homemade meal usually includes the tasteful mix of white rice, miso soup, fish, and a few okazu (small side dishes) – traditionally even served for breakfast. Back home, I remember my grandmother religiously laying out the dishes herself. She would frown at us if we served ourselves rice messily, and if she noticed that the colour green was missing on the plate, she would promptly top it with some form of garnish to make the dish more beautiful. In a way, she recreates her own version of a kaisekiryori on our dining table. Whenever I visit, I’m amazed by her ability to put together a diverse and nourishing meal just by using what she finds in her fridge, as well as her patience in decorating it, even if it’s just for us appetite-driven grandchildren.

Through these subtle yet expressive modes of appreciation and hospitality, Japanese culture suggests some ways in which we can savour life today, in its array of seasons and flavours. The disruptive demands of modern society often force residents in larger cities of Japan to eat alone or resort to more practical convenience store food. The pace of life and dining habits have changed, and not everyone now has the time of day to enjoy food slowly. Yet many commuters can still be spotted traveling with a beautifully packed bento box to indulge in for lunch. Eating seems to reflect the search for a more

immersive comfort within the everchanging landscape of the seasons – the same one that haiku poets crystalized into seventeen exquisite syllables. It’s a way of allowing ourselves the luxury of small, measured joys amidst a flood of appointments.

Despite Japan’s predominant sense of modernity, our daily habits, utterances, and gestures, as well as our chosen ingredients, are a gentle nod to tradition. Phrases such as osakini or ‘excuse me for going before you’, conventionally used during a tea ceremony by the guest who starts drinking, crop up in everyday interactions with colleagues and friends. Having spent a long time living abroad, I’ve grown to admire the Japanese language’s distinctive nuances and respectful intentions, imparted even to the more mundane activity of eating. With food, as with haiku poetry, words can translate the immediacy of the sensory and the temporality of the seasonal into a kimochi that lingers like the aftertaste of sweet sake. They are, I think, the unwritten recipe for a truly flavoursome meal that fulfills our feelings as much as our tastebuds. It all starts with the simple yet ever so thoughtful itadakimasu.

My grandmother recently phoned to tell me that she started baking satsumaimo on her old outdoor stove again and that she’s looking forward to my visit in December when she’ll finally be able to make them for me as well. Her words felt like a much-needed hug on a gloomy week of term, bringing back the familiarity of my childhood and the joy of anticipation that I so strongly associate with her and my native country.

Edo-period poet Matsuo Basho wrote this haiku on a chilly autumn day during one of his solitary voyages across a mountainous and windy Japan. He evokes the homely space of a tatami room:

Smell of autumn –Heart longs for The four-mat room. （秋近き心の寄るや四畳半） aki chikaki kokoro no yoru ya yojohan

As the colder months return my thoughts travel to similar places of comfort. They recover the warm flavours of my memory and repeat the words I was taught to use as a child. And now as I resume my hectic life as a student, I find myself craving a taste of life outside of the library. I long for home and the afternoons spent sipping tea with my grandmother.

では、いただきます。 Dewa, itadakimasu. ⬛

my father, the concert pianist

THE NEXT TIME I spoke to my father, I was living in London. Months went by fast and slow. Days rustled alongside and fell to the ground. Sometimes I thought about what had happened with him. I didn’t regret what I said, didn’t wish for any form of reconciliation.

One afternoon, though, he told me he was coming down south. I suppose my memories must have faded over time because I don’t remember much,

except that he had things he wanted to say and the conversation was best done in person. This appeared strange back then – I wasn’t used to him being so direct – but I didn’t think too much of it. We agreed to meet on a bench along the Thames. There was one long line of buildings on the opposite bank, but the hurriedness that I had come to associate with the city was far away. For the most part, we would be left alone.

I arrived a few minutes later than planned. In the grey light, leaves cast faint, moving shadows over the pavement. My father was already there. He must have heard my approach because, when I got closer, he stood up and embraced me.

“How have you been?” I asked. He frowned slightly.

“The same old. Nothing really of interest to you, I imagine.”

I sat down on the bench next to him. Then, after a few seconds, when neither of us had said anything, I glanced in his direction. His eyes were focused on the view. I sensed that he expected something from me but I didn’t quite know what. I looked out at the river for a few moments.

“Dad,” I said, “I’m sorry about –” “Oh,” he replied. He waved his hand airily: “that – I think I know what you’re going to say – you can consider it forgotten. Besides, I think we’d both had rather too much to drink.”

The conversation moved on, and this brief reference was the only mention of those few months we had spent out of touch. It all became easier after that. We flowed into pleasantries, talked about things that had happened a long time ago.

The small talk must have carried on in this way for at least an hour until, quite suddenly, he stopped, becoming serious. He began to speak more quietly. It wasn’t a big change, but to one who knew him well, it was obvious.

He looked expectantly towards me. “Do you remember that piece I used to play for you?”

That’s not what I had expected him to

say. His face had become harder, like that of a man under interrogation. I looked down at my hands.

“Which one?” I said.

“You know the one.” He hummed a tune for me. I vaguely recognised it and nodded.

“I can’t play it very well anymore. I tried to the other day and, well –” He lifted up his hands, as if examining them. “I’ve lost my nerve. I keep making mistakes.”

“That piece in particular?”

“Not just that one. Others too.”

He wanted to say something else, but he was stalling. I looked down at the bench. Some of the paint was peeling, exposing rust underneath. I picked at it mindlessly.

“I liked that piece though.” He paused. “That’s why I mentioned it.”

“I know.”

“I always thought you hated it.”

“I liked hearing you play it. I didn’t like playing it myself.”

I leaned back slightly.

“We spent hours on it. Some of those bridges.” He stopped, as if imagining a piano. “There was just one part.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, I can’t remember now. But it frustrated me. You just used to give up on it.”

“No, well,” I said. “They weren’t always my favourite times.”

I’d spoken without thinking, but he

BY SAM WALLBANK

ART BY POPPY WILLIAMS

grimaced. It was only then that I realised the direction in which our conversation, arrow-like, was headed. There was, I thought, a point of irresolution before us. I took a deep breath.

“Why can’t you play it?”

For a moment, I thought that he hadn’t heard me.

He winced slightly. “It’s my age, I think.” He sighed, then stopped. “I just can’t play like I used to. The movements feel so cramped. I don’t see the value in it anymore.”

We looked at each other for a moment. I turned away from him.

“Do you remember much from those mornings?” he asked.

“Hm?”

“When we used to play the piano.”

“Some of them.”

He nodded.

“I suppose it was a long time ago. Still, I remember them quite well. I used to put you on my lap and you would look down at the keys – focused – and press them singly, very heavily, one at a time. Your mother used to hate it.”

I glanced at him.

“That’s good,” he continued. He seemed to be talking to himself now. “Even if you only remember one morning, I think that’s enough. I hope you don’t think that too vain. But it does make a world of difference. I know it shouldn’t.” He paused, looked down. “Sorry. I know you don’t care about all this.”

“I do. It’s just been so long. I don’t remember much of it now.”

“No, no, I don’t want to bore you.”

He sighed, and I found myself entirely without response. I hadn’t thought about those moments in a long time. All I could recall was the faint sense of an environment: floating notes of music, half-heard from a distance. They were vague, without any sense of definition. I suppose I must have appeared quite taken aback.

He looked across at me, holding my gaze for a moment. I thought, just then, that there was something weighing on his mind, something he wanted to say. But he seemed to relax again, as though nothing had happened and just shook his head. Sometimes, in idle moments, I find myself wondering what that could have meant. For a while longer, he didn’t speak. I looked back out at the river. ⬛

BY ELSIE GRAY

ART BY LOUIS RUSH

aphrodisiac fruits

Traditionally, aphrodisiac fruits bewitch the senses. Their sensuality stems from curious textures and curves, and their colours blush with provocative fertility.

immigrant indulgence

Ugandan-Asian Food and Identity 50 years on

To remember a recipe and to produce in one’s kitchen the dish to which it refers – indeed to recall in a new time or place a taste one once savoured in another time and place – is to demonstrate a cultural memory and to ‘write’ oneself into history. (Dan Ojwang in ‘‘Eat pig and become a beast’: Food, Drink and Diaspora in East African Indian Writing’)

Crush several handfuls of unsalted peanuts using a pestle and mortar until mosaic shards slowly begin to form.

AS A CHILD, my gums would welcome the sharp edges of my fingernails as I fished out corn fibres and peanut fragments, relics of Ba’s dinner, still lodged in my museum mouth several hours after we had settled down at the dinner table. Like with every meal, she proclaimed sweetcorn curry to be my favourite. Except this time, she was correct.

The earliest memories I have of my Indian grandmother, my Ba, are closely connected with the food she religiously prepared for us. My family often reminisce about me and my sister running away from the screaming pressure cooker, our hands pressed hard against our ears. Or the smell of fresh chapattis and melting ghee that wafted from the kitchen window as we arrived home from school. It is unsurprising,

then, that the strongest connection I have to my Indian – but more importantly my Ugandan-Asian heritage – is through the food we prepared, consumed, and shared. After all, Ba’s beloved sweetcorn curry is not strictly Indian, but rather a fusion of both Indian and East African flavours. Its roots most likely trace back to the initial encounters between Indians and Ugandan Africans, having been brought over to the Uganda Protectorate by the British administration in the late 19th century. These immigrant workers functioned as intermediaries between Europeans and Africans, particularly in commerce and administration. Having worked for the British government since the days of the East India Company, Indians were entrusted with the task. Many were also labourers who helped to build the Uganda Railway connecting Mombasa in Kenya to Kampala in Uganda.

Add a pinch of mustard seeds to a pan of hot sunflower oil, letting them sizzle long enough for their sharp sour aroma to make home in every fibre of your clothing.

Far more than simply nutrition and necessity, Kasoli nu Saak (or sweetcorn curry) has its own unique biography or life history. The dish tells a complex story of just one aspect of British colonialism, that which eventually facilitated a group of ambitious Indians, many originating from Gujarat, having freely emigrated to Uganda in the early 20th century, to

BY EVIE RAJA

nor Swahili for sweetcorn curry, but rather a fusion. Kasoli being sweetcorn in Swahili and saak curry in Gujarati. And so, with each mouthful of this dish, both the flavours and languages dissolve on the tongue. An often-relished meal which defined my childhood also serves a deeper purpose. It illuminates a complex relationship between three countries spread across three continents. My father would often attempt to explain this to me whilst I sat disappointed that ‘my dish’ had failed to appear on the restaurant menu.

History, like a restaurant menu, is selective. We have a curated perception of the past through a snapshot of details or dishes – The East India Company, Partition, Idi Amin or chicken tikka masala, samosas, and dhal. The mundane is often forgotten beneath the sensationalised; recipes rich with history replaced by rumours of a dictator’s cannibalism. (It was rumoured Idi Amin kept human heads in his refrigerator and apparently revealed in 1976 that he had ‘eaten human meat’, admitting ‘it is very salty, even more salty than leopard meat’.) Indeed, even on a personal level,

the nuances of my own family history are lost when I refer to my grandmother as merely Indian. The core of her identity, and mine, is distinctly both Gujarati and

Shake powders of chilli, turmeric, cumin, coriander and garam masala into the pan as if you are in the middle of a busy street

The memorised recipes my pregnant grandmother carried to the UK alongside her seven children never made the archives. Favoured instead were incomprehensible statistics, like the 27,000 Indians who sought refuge in the UK, or the descriptions of resettlement camps – such as Doniford or Tonfanau. These facts and figures cannot authentically capture the lives of those uprooted and given a mere 90 days to leave. A three-times-a-day ritual has the power to reveal far more about the lives of the 76,000 individuals expelled from Uganda 50 years ago. Their recipes can be recreated, reconsumed and relived. History can be experienced as rich tomato sauce packed with garam masala invades the back of your throat, a full sensory understanding of what was forced to immigrate across a continent.

Yet sadly, this history and these dishes remain in obscurity. When, however, you know for what to search, recipes and tales from individuals working to preserve these peripheral cultures emerge. A prime example is the food writer Meera Sodha, whose parents were also political refugees from Uganda. As a regular columnist for The Guardian, I am grateful she has a platform from which to share recipes that are often rooted in Ugandan Indian cuisine to individuals across the country. As if in protest of being largely ignored by historical records, the biography of sweetcorn curry continues. Now prepared and enjoyed in a suburban town in Manchester, it reveals a uniquely complicated diasporic

community. These recipes form a mostly underground archive, potently capturing the ‘everyday’ dismissed by the media and written records.

Gently unwrap the fresh corn cobs and slice into cylinders that can be easily enjoyed by children and grandparents alike.

Aside from sweetcorn curry, I have only recently begun to recognise many of my childhood recipes as characteristically Ugandan-Asian, thanks to AlibhaiBrown’s The Settler’s Cookbook. I was surprised to see her write of the “slices of sour, unripe mangoes dipped into a concoction of chilli powder, salt [and] sugar” that I would often greedily try, but rarely enjoy. It conjured a memory of my grandmother placing this delicacy on the kitchen table in a little glass bowl, mostly ignored in favour of her steaming rice and pea and potato saak. I am grateful to Alibhai-Brown for preserving even what feels like the most insignificant of snacks. Such flavours can transport me fifty years back, to a Uganda now lost to time. These dishes invite me into my father and grandmother’s experience of Uganda, which is at the core of my family history.

Tip in a can of tomatoes to introduce some sour-sweet competition to the army of spices.

“Fruit from two trees nourish me” is how Avan Jogia expresses the biracial experience in Mixed Feelings. At least in my case, that meant it was difficult to commit to learning my father’s tongue for threat of excluding my mother from our jokes and conversations. Religion was treated in a similar way. Unable to side with either Christianity or Hinduism, my parents chose a combination of good morals and a celebration of both Diwali and Christmas. Yet, when we sit down and share a meal, I feel whole, consuming a culture I am often disconnected to. Nina

Minya Powles expresses this in ‘Hungry Girls’. Even after nourishing her identity through Mandarin lessons for three years, there are days when the language fails her, days when “food feels like the only thing I have to tie me to this home my family brought to me from far away”. Food is an accessible inlet to a culture, but also a sense of security and familiarity.

“I take a bite and my worries melt away. I’m home and also far away from home, in one bite.” (Nina Minya Powles in ‘Pan Fried Dumplings’)

It seems ridiculous, therefore, that I failed to consider the role that food played during my father and his family’s time living at a refugee camp in Doniford, not nutritionally but as a “powerful index of a sense of security and belonging” as described by Ojwang in ‘Eat pig and become a beast’. A period of immense adjustment made more challenging by the unforgiving climatic and dietary differences. Of course, there is the obvious point that both British cuisine and the produce available in 1970s Somerset was far from that which they enjoyed in Uganda. However, when thinking more laterally

ART BY LOTTIE HASSAN

of cooking can, as Jordanna Bailkin argues in Unsettled, Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, serve as a “crucial reminder of what they had lost in expulsion.” More than this, food, and the accompanied cooking practices, have the potential to uphold the social life and kinship networks uprooted through migration. This was particularly challenging as many of the UgandanAsian resettlement camps insisted on refugees eating the food that was prepared for them by volunteers in large dining halls, imposing a cooking ban throughout the site. The stories Bailkin shares of illicit cooking and the example of two enterprising brothers who opened a shop to sell “authentic” Indian spices reveals a community reaching for small moments of independence and normalcy. In fact, at the Tonfanau camp, such happenings prompted each family to be given £5 to buy an electric plate. Whilst an amusing tale, these electric plates were particularly important in allowing women to “express cultural preferences and keep up household rules” through the act of preparing food. Bailkin quotes one woman who

Tear up a small handful of coriander leaves and scatter on top of the steaming golden saak, moments before it is ready for presentation.

Today, Doniford refugee camp is just a memory for my Ba. Preparing these dishes now is a form of archiving and storytelling for her, or what Ojwang describes as a way to “animate the past in the present” through the “material agency of food and the acts that go into its preparation and enjoyment.” Recipes and meals enjoyed are often imprinted on our minds, having stimulated all of the senses as they are prepared and eaten. According to psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne, this is because “food memories involve very basic, nonverbal areas of the brain that can bypass your conscious awareness.” She uses this to explain why “you can have strong emotional reactions when you eat a food that arouses those deep unconscious memories.” Even those memories stored within our consciousness are strengthened as we recall not just an image of the meal but its flavour, the sound of its preparation and the conversation we had whilst eating it. This connection between food and memory struck Powels’ when her grandmother, her Popo, who suffered from dementia and “could never remember whether she’d turned the light off in the upstairs room,” immediately recalled the recipe of her chicken and aubergine curry. “It was years since she last cooked but still

I will never fully understand what it was like to live in Uganda, or to store the painful memories of leaving to begin a new life in England. But Ba’s rich peanut sauce, unripe mangos, and mogo chips doused in chilli powder and fresh lime allow me to taste their home in Jinja and share in my father’s childhood and those tender moments of joy. ⬛

SCENES FROM THE NORTH

BY DYLAN SQUIRES

I We wrestle wind of Irish Sea Atop red raw sandstone, And gusts that wail like ghostly gales, A far, far cry from home.

Grass purls, The fading coastline hurls Past tales, Crashing from mouths of caves. All of it now a memory, Washed out and veiled by waves.

II In valleys hollowed by glaciers

We walk where ages passed. Two faint silhouettes slip and lurch On the fells that outlast.

Giants Turn men to marching ants, Who search For tarn ‘tween crag and rigg, A sanctum in Mother Nature’s Embrace, sweet as a fig.

III

Scampering swift over loose stone, Falling fast from above, With feet that weave over water, Twisting towards the Dove. Alive, A sweet and sticky hive. Shorter Steps, the path leads up high, As summer sun gives one last groan, Waking a moonlit sky.

IV

The fells, in Kronos’s shadow, Down by the reservoir, Where the rocky trail tries to hold Onto what still is our Warm heart, Beating for lakes we part. But bold In view, the Yorkshire dales, Over which we trav’lers now go, Rolling on with hay bales.

V

A path, through Yorkshire, of limestone, A pavement from weather. Food for acid rain under feet. In the dales of heather, (Harebells, Too) the wildflower smells So sweet, Its fresh scent a clear wave, Watering seeds of friendship sown, Passing Robin Hood’s grave.

VI On the hill, creeping into sight, In the Eden valley, Where a troop of cairns march on east, More miles to the tally. The Nine Mark the lost borderline, Where beasts

With devilish horns brawl. But at the sight of those cairns, fright Enters the eyes of all.

VII

Left behind, the sheep of Swaledale, Sheep of foreign Holland, Those Texel sheep with heavy heads, Now stand on brawny land. A vein, The Swale cuts through terrain That spreads, Gaia’s hardened tissue Squeezing out walkers that exhale As Richmond comes in view.

X

The trail levels out, turning black. Levelling out, turning Back the time to cinders and shale. And the ground starts burning, This path, Subject to human wrath. So frail, Birds squawk, a broken wing, And our screaming world turns to black, Our requiem to sing.

ART BY LOTTIE HASSAN

VIII Light illuminates the painting. The sun burning up high, Turns fields to flaxen gold shades With strokes of coloured dye. A sea Of lapis lazuli, That fades Through the sky’s blues over Malachite hedgerows, bordering The frame lit up solar.

XI Through Oberon’s forest, the day Tires as the sun dapples Its warming touch through emerald leaves. Each ray floats, unravels Along The rushing water’s song, And weaves Between trees that echo The sound of dell-fairies who play, Innocent and mellow.

IX Wheat fields replaced and left behind. Ahead, snaking sandstone Slides through fields of purple heather, Whilst heat swells and cracks bone. Sweat leaks, As veins bulge, forming peaks. Feathers From owls, stuck into hats, To shade the Sun’s tightening bind, As pheasants run down tracks.

XII Ghostly mist from Northern Sea veils Eastern coast in myst’ry, As wandering souls creep onwards, Burying injury. The shore Sings the tail of the score With words That sink into my chest, Falling with the final exhale, As time rides the wave’s crest.

During the summer, I undertook Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk, from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay. The night before departing, my film camera jammed. So, I turned to poetry to capture the images along the way, hoping to expose them through words rather than film. Lying in the tent at night, I recalled images from each day, rendering them into poetry. My images are developed here. ⬛

BY WYATT RADZIN

Story Untold?

Giving Ukrainian Literature Its Due

AS UKRAINE FACED renewed invasion by Russian forces in February 2022, the world’s gaze fixed on the nation with a new intensity. Swept into the spotlight amid a flood of battlefield reports, Ukrainian culture was recognised abroad in a way it had never been before. Exhibitions, concerts, bookshop shelves: each appeared in turn hoping to shed light on long-hidden Ukrainian culture – a culture which, for many, was previously unknown. Ukrainian art, which has been suppressed, undermined, and neglected for centuries, now has access to a global audience – possibly a more attentive one than it has ever had. Foreign consciousness is finally giving Ukrainian culture its due – but this impulse is more complicated than it seems.

To better understand this effort, I

spoke with Kate Tsurkan, a translator and editor currently living in Ukraine. Tsurkan has published the work of several Ukrainian authors in her literary magazine, Apofenie, and seeks out a place for them in various Western publications. Her work has become both more pressing and more possible in light of the recent invasion. “My friends and I who are working as translators,” Tsurkan says, “started something we called Operation Ukraine. We try to get as many authors as possible published in Western publications, starting out with the war dispatches.” The fruits of their labour are beginning to ripen: Lyuba Yakimchuk has been published in The New Statesman, Elena Styazhkina has earned a place in Guernica, and Artem Chapeye has become the first Ukrainian author to be published in the print edition of The New Yorker

These successes could be the beginning of a seismic shift. “The foundation for Ukrainian literature on the world stage is being built right now,” Tsurkan says. “There’s interest, but it doesn’t mean that the foundation exists yet. But it’s being built and it’s very promising.”

The fact that this “foundation” is only now being built hints at the longer Western neglect of Ukraine’s literary tradition. Ultimately, it is this historical neglect which links two issues of literary representation that have arisen in the wake of the recent invasion: the impulse to read more Ukrainian literature and the more controversial push to put aside major Russian writers.

In the immediate wake of the invasion, the University of Milan withdrew a class on Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the quickly-reversed decision was met with immediate backlash. Critics claimed that it rested upon misplaced blame: Dostoevsky lived and died centuries ago, and at times was himself a victim of repression by the Russian government. He could not reasonably be held responsible for the actions of Vladimir Putin or the Russian army in 2022. To limit student exposure to Dostoevsky simply by virtue of his Russian nationality would then be an irrational, unjust, and unproductive way to respond to the invasion. But this response misses the point. So long as responses assign praise or blame to individual authors – deciding whether or not to hold Dostoevsky or any other Russian literary figure responsible for the actions of Putin – they will continue to miss the point in the same way. Far more productive discussions centre on the questions of how and why the Russian literary tradition is as renowned as it is today, and how and why the Ukrainian literary tradition is not. The resulting answers are rooted in a long history of imperial oppression.

This history of empire is addressed by

Emma Mateo, Secretary of Oxford’s Ukrainian Society. She explains how Ukrainian culture’s relative lack of representation is “largely due to the way in which Russian culture overshadowed Ukrainian culture” and even “actively suppressed or co-opted” it. “Many Ukrainian writers, poets and artists were arrested and sent to gulags just for working in their national language and supporting Ukrainian identity,” Mateo says. Tsurkan sheds light on this issue as well, lamenting the “great crime that Russian was favoured”. She explains how in the Russian Empire “you were supposed to aspire to speak Russian, to be Russian”.

This history of repression has had a powerful impact on the legacies of these literary traditions as Dr. Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London, explains: “Why do we know Dostoevsky? Well, it’s because Dostoevsky wrote in a language which was the language of a great empire [...] which was considered important, which people thought we have to translate, we have to teach.” He points particularly to Vissarion Belinsky, a major Russian literary critic of the 19th century, who “refused to accept that modern Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian language was even possible, even though he was reading it”. Ukrainian literature was therefore regarded as the futile work of a people “fooling themselves” into thinking that their language could be the medium of a genuine literary canon. “In 19th century Russian cultural imagination, Ukrainian culture was seen as … peasant culture, not high culture,” Blacker tells me. “It’s something which has beautiful songs and ... beautiful costumes. They dance well, but that’s where it stays. That’s their place. They’re not going to write serious novels, write symphonies and things like that. And [it was believed] they shouldn’t.”

It is this history that Ukrainian literature has endured, and it is this history which today’s conversations must address. Tsurkan insists that “very serious conversations need to go on in academia about how to teach Ukrainian history, language and culture outside of this Russian colonial grasp”. Although Ukrainian literature has found a way to flourish in spite of its circumstances, it has not had a sufficient audience to bring its beauty to the world – unlike the Russian canon which has forcibly overshadowed it. The war has at last produced that audience, and the literary response to the invasion now becomes an entirely different one. We are no longer asking whether we should ban long-dead Dostoevsky to punish Putin. Rather, we are acknowledging that the same history of empire which produced the current invasion is also responsible for a staggering literary imbalance, and that the present is a fertile opportunity to rebalance those scales. “It’s not saying that nobody should speak Russian ever again,” says Tsurkan. “It’s just that Ukrainian language should be allowed to thrive, to come into its own finally, that people who live in Ukraine can speak Ukrainian.”

Blacker makes a similar point. “We hear a lot about cancelling Russia: we should cancel Russia, we shouldn’t cancel Russia. [Those who] use the ‘cancel culture’ complaint often tend to be those who are in positions of power, and historically have been in positions of power, whose power is threatened in some way... [those whose power] might be shaken and chipped away a little bit by having more marginalized voices come in and take up a little bit of their space. I think it’s much better to think of it in terms of just rebalancing.” He offers an example which might prove relevant here in Oxford: “Modern languages departments often have Russian. They almost never have Ukrainian. If we appoint a few new people to teach

Ukrainian ... instead of appointing more people to teach Russian, is that cancelling Russia? Or is that maybe just balancing out the way that we teach and research and understand this part of the world?”

The proper literary response to the crisis in Ukraine is one which sees it as an opportunity to shed light on an underappreciated tradition, even if this is at the expense of a historically dominant one. As Blacker points out, Russian culture is not going to go away anytime soon: “there is room for bringing in the previously unknown and marginalized cultures a little bit.” Says Tsurkan: “Pushkin is part of the canon – he’s not going anywhere. Dostoevsky is not going anywhere.” The resulting task, in her words, is to show foreign readers that Ukrainian authors are “just as interesting as [their] American or French” counterparts, and that they’re “all on the same talented playing field”.

Yet bringing Ukrainian literature to global attention is only the beginning. The literary response is valuable and long overdue – but how can it be sustained? News about the invasion no longer covers front pages as it did several months ago. The initial flurry of attention paid to Ukrainian culture is already fading. “It happens whenever and wherever there’s a war,” says Blacker. “Attention gets focussed on those places, and publishers want to publish the books, … write about them, review them. But it does pass.” For Blacker, the answer is to “seize the moment” as best we can – “to establish connections which can then be used in future” and to build lasting legacies as we do so. “Maybe not all of these writers … will still be prominent outside of Ukraine in, let’s say, in 10, 20 years. But some of them will ... and the basic level of knowledge and awareness and consciousness of Ukrainian culture and literature will have been raised up a little.” Likewise, Tsurkan considers

exposing these writers to be the crucial effort. For her, the task is giving foreign readers access to Ukrainian writers whose work is powerful enough to endure on its own. “Keep trying to get … writers with such talent out there to editors, and slowly build,” Tsurkan says. “That’s the true test of time.”

Another element of this effort seeks recognition of Ukrainian literature as a tradition that extends beyond accounts of the nation’s conflict. “Ukrainian culture is not just about war,” Tsurkan tells us. “It is a huge topic in literature today – a lot of writers are writing poetry or even novels about the war. But, eventually, someday – let it be sooner [rather] than later – the war will end. And we want people to still be interested in Ukrainian culture and literature once that conflict has, thankfully, moved on.” Blacker likewise warns against taking such a limited view of Ukraine. “People are very, very impressed by Ukrainian society’s ability to resist the Russian invasion,” he says. “And there’s a bit of a danger, I suppose, that [this] can become a rather simplistic and romanticized way to see Ukrainian culture: as something that’s always attached to a kind of national struggle. It often is, but not always. There’s plenty of Ukrainian culture which is not about the national struggle, but rather the kind of things that all literature is about.”

As readers choose where to start, it’s crucial to consider the breadth of available options; to treat Ukraine’s literature as a rich and deserving tradition, rather than as an object of pity, consumed by struggle. After all, as Mateo emphasizes, to engage with Ukrainian culture as an outsider “is a way of upholding Ukrainian sovereignty and celebrating all facets of the country, rather than just seeing Ukraine and Ukrainians as victims”. ⬛ ***

Ultimately, the stories of Ukrainian literature have long been told. The world has simply not listened. Those interested might begin by considering the following authors, artists, and works recommended by Tsurkan, Blacker, and Mateo:

From Kate Tsurkan:

• Lyuba Yakimchuk – “A very feminine playful voice which remains resilient in the face of tragedy ... her own family was displaced because of the war.” Particularly her recent poetry collection, Apricots of Donbass

• Mykhaylo Semenko: “Part of what is known today as the ‘executed Renaissance’ – [...] nearly an entire generation of poets, artists, directors, who were either persecuted, forced to censor themselves, or killed by the NKVD.”

• Taras Shevchenko: “The 19th century national poet of Ukraine ... the Tsar specifically forbade him to write or to paint. Of course, he continued to do it because he is Ukrainian.”

From Dr. Uilleam Blacker:

• Lesya Ukrainka: “Global in its imaginative reach ... a big theme of unrequited love for Europe.”

• Iryna Shuvalova: “One of the best poets around anywhere at the moment.”

• Serhiy Zhadan: “He’s a novelist. He’s a poet. He’s also a rock star ... He is super, super popular in Ukraine.”

From Emma Mateo:

• The anthology Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965, which includes the work of fifteen Ukrainian authors.

• Okean Elzy: “Iconic Ukrainian rock band.”

• The Ukrainian Spaces podcast.

ART BY MATTHEW KURNIA

in conversation with henry dimbleby

BY CLEMMIE READ

WHAT WOULD IT look like if you got fast food in heaven? What if food was not only accessible and affordable, but also really good for you and really good? This was the drive behind Leon, Henry Dimbleby’s restaurant chain, beloved by the British public. Now, Dimbleby is taking his ambitions for an accessible future of food to the government, advising the Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on how to ensure sustainable distribution of healthy and cheap food for all. Clemmie Read interviews him on behalf of The Isis.

Clemmie Read – We thought you might start by giving us some idea of background. How did you get into cooking?

Henry Dimbleby – When I was in my last year at St John's College, I met a guy at a party called Bruno Loubet, a French chef with a Michelin-star restaurant. Before my finals I used to go down to London and cook with him for fun. I wasn't very good at it. I said to him, “What would I do if I wanted to be a chef?” And he said, “Why don't you come and work with me?” So that was my first job after university: going to work in a Michelinstar restaurant.

Bruno loved what he called cuisine du terroir – rough, south-western French

cooking. He loved big, strong flavours, so that was a big influence on me. He was also just an amazing man: extraordinarily proud without being arrogant. If I've had a mentor in my life, it was him. So I was quite lucky to meet Bruno – that was the start of it. I was a journalist and a management consultant for a bit, but food was what I really loved, so I left Bain to set up Leon.

CR – Was it more about learning to appreciate the old classics, rather than experimenting?

HD – It was definitely the classic French thing, where the most important section is called ‘the sauce.’ You do the meat as well, but the sauce is the essence. We spoke kitchen French, so it was all trois lapins! and oui chef!, and a lot of shouting and banging of pans. Quite old school.

CR – It sounds great! You'd think that rigorous style would take the romance out of food, but you've got so many different projects going on that food still really seems like the central thing for you.

HD – I just really love food! I'll come home from work and cook for people. It's an expression of friendship, an expression of love. And it's a flow activity: when you're making a beetroot consommé it's hard to worry about other stuff. My wife says I can't walk down the street without inviting people to dinner.

CR – I loved the Leon recipe books when I was younger - they feel like a textual equivalent to fast food.

HD – It was all about making it easy to eat good food. No more than eight ingredients and six steps. We never said that was what we were doing, but that's what we did – kept it simple. We used to send out our recipes to loads of people who weren't good cooks, just to test them and see if they worked.

CR – That's a great idea! Where do most of your recipes come from?

HD – It’s completely changed. When I was younger, I got them from my mum, or reading cookbooks, or going travelling and then trying to find a cookbook that had the recipe in. I had a little file where I'd keep the recipes –I still do. But now, it's going to places, eating, and then Googling stuff. I had a Singaporean friend over from when I was working in Japan, and whenever we went out she always wanted meat and eggs, so I wanted to make her meat and eggs. Of course now you can just look up ‘Sichuan mince recipe’, and see all

the pictures. You read it, think, “Oh that doesn't sound quite right,” and then you make your own version of it. And it's a completely different experience. But I think you have to have a certain level of confidence to do that, to go, “Really? Five tablespoons of Chinkiang vinegar?” It's a much more fluid thing now than it used to be.

CR – With Leon in particular: it's fast food, it's delicious, it's healthy, and it's not too expensive – why hasn’t it been done before?

HD – It's incredibly hard to do. You're trying to make something that's delicious, healthy, quick, consistent, and sell it for a decent price. As you add each of those things, it becomes harder to do. Consistency is really difficult. You have to make sure that you're doing things that, even though they may take a lot of skill, can be done simply in the restaurant. And it's just very hard to do. It's quite easy to get 80% of the way there, and

then it gets harder and harder. There are only some people who are mad enough to do the 90th iteration, and that's what it takes to try and square that.

The other thing going on was the brand. We knew that it was fast food in heaven – like if God went to McDonald’s –but there were lots of choices to make about when it needed to be like fast food and when it needed to be different. For example, any restaurant you go to where there are photographs of the food, the food's shit. So we started off with the dishes written on chalkboards. And I can't believe how difficult we made it for people! There were people who knew what they wanted – fine –and then there were other people who walked into this place that looked a bit like McDonald’s, but with chalkboards that said, ‘Superfood Salad’ and ‘Falafel Wrap’, and they're just standing there, panicking. And they’ve got a queue of people behind them, tapping their feet. It was just so dreadful! So we decided that we needed photographs. It was really hard when we started. It looks obvious now, but there are things like how much of the dish you shoot, what angle you shoot it from, how big it is, whether you have branding at a dish level or a category level ... all of that stuff.

And I think we finally got there. But for me, what was right for the customer wasn’t the perfect answer for the food. I always used to prefer the boxes rather than burgers and fries. But if you want to do this for as many people as possible, it’s fast food. And that was quite important to us – that we weren’t just a central London thing. So you had to do burgers because that's what people want.

CR – In terms of cost, how did you crack having food that tastes very high quality but isn't too expensive? That seems hard to fine-tune.

HD – You do what we called spreadsheet

cooking. First, you think of a recipe that is not too expensive. Peas taste good, don't cost very much. Pulses, cabbage, sweet potatoes. So you think of a dish that could be delicious, but has some of those things in it. You then make it as best you can. And then you add the cost of each ingredient for the whole thing. And then you go, “That's a delicious wrap, but we're currently going to have to sell it for eight quid!” So what do you do? You go through and say, “Well, I’m not sure the tomato’s doing enough work. Could we replace it for something else?”

The other thing you do is have some overlap between dishes. Not so much that it seems like all your dishes are made of the same thing, but if all your dishes are made of different things, it's too complicated for restaurants – they have to order thousands of ingredients. So you're playing that game as well.

When you get it right, it's fantastic. I remember, with the fish finger wrap, when we worked out that if you put quinoa in tartar sauce, it bulked it out and made it delicious. It was like, “Oh my god, that’s how you do it!” Because it was a bit weedy otherwise. But you also get it wrong sometimes. I remember John Vincent coming into the office and going, “Have you tasted our wraps recently? They’re not very good.” We went down and we tasted them and he was right. We’d salami-sliced too much, and lost sight of it a little. It's a very involved process.

CR – So with the Food Strategy, you've written a two-part plan, which came out last July and the July before, and it's going through the works in the government. Is that right?

HD – It's not quite like that. About 50% of what we recommended has been done. In July 2020, Marcus Rashford was doing his campaign on keeping school

meals going during the holidays, and I sent a copy of Part One to the CEO of Manchester United, a friend of mine, and said, “Can you give this to Marcus, I think he might be interested.” Then, in September, Marcus got in touch, saying, “Henry, I loved it, can I campaign for your recommendations?” It all came to a head that October. They put in place a bunch of my recommendations on properly embedding holiday activities and food programmes for all children on free school meals, extending Healthy Start, et cetera. So that was the first lot, and then in the recent Levelling Up white paper they took more. Then DEFRA took a bunch more.

CR – Do you have a food utopia that you can see happening in Britain, in terms of how we eat?

HD – Yes. The food system is one of the big causes of climate change. It produces 20–30% of greenhouses gases globally. I think there is a world where we can farm in a way which both sequesters carbon and restores biodiversity, but only if we eat less meat. The only thing people can agree on about Brexit is that it enables us to do this. We can change our agricultural policy because we can pay farmers to farm for public goods rather than just producing food.

But this certainly isn't going to come about with a government for whom growth is the only goal. If you only focus on growth, you continue to destroy nature and health. We're already subsidising destruction with $500 billion a year. Markets are incredible things, but they pollute, and create inequality. The job of a growth government should be to let people grow – to be a free marketeer –but ensure that it doesn't create dirt and inequality. Draw sensible boundaries to make sure that doesn't happen. And we are getting better. We have more trees in this country than we did after the war and our rivers are cleaner, though

they’re still full of shit. That was because of government intervention.

CR – And in terms of the future – do you think we all need to start phasing out meat now?

HD – We need to eat 30% less. But restriction is quite interesting. I’ve got a subscription to chickpeas and butter beans. Every two weeks I get them, and if you don’t use them it begins to get embarrassing! That has made me quite creative. Don’t do those bloody recipes where you go out and buy a million different ingredients and put them together. You’re not going to learn anything. It’s a bit like doing painting by numbers. Jack White used to say that if you took two people, gave one of them a guitar with a broken string and the other a studio with all the resources they wanted, the guy with the guitar would make better music every time. Restriction is what builds creativity.

CR – Just as we finish, bringing it back down to the student level: do you have any cooking advice for us?

HD – I was a dreadful cook! I remember making mushrooms and putting two bottles of oil in them. I think the most important thing is who you’re eating with and doing it mindfully. I spent most of my life in the St John’s bar eating baked potatoes with cheese and baked beans, but the times I remember are when we went out to Cowley and made an effort. That’s where you make the friends. That’s where you enjoy yourself more. ⬛

ART BY VIOLET TREVELYAN-CLARK

lysanias

BY PAIGE CRAWLEY

Setting: Between two columns. In a public square, at the temple steps. Between two dopaminergic neurons.

In a cave somewhere lies some sort of plant, some coarse but reassuring bloom of green and –maybe red, some orange. A deep dark avernus feeds it, waters it in lolling, rolling laps up shallow banks. The roots push through black, pebbly sand with persistent ease.

I wake up in the mornings and open my eyes to painful light, painful darkness when my eyelids fall tic tic shut –so I creep off obscure axes into life as some wild, half-mad creature. My fingers are clawed, grasping around little, tiny, easy things I haven’t quite found yet.

flesh is drawn to sweet the way flesh is drawn to death that bit of flesh that rests between my empty, searching ears

I pour relish down my throat like air, like divers sick on nitrogen and fear. I flush myself with plenty, space, restraint. I wish I loved the taste of perseverance – it is never long on my tongue before my stomach draws it down.

Spits. It’s a quick-twitch muscle, it’s a quick-twitch, twitching itch I’ve cobbled up from numb bits in my ear canals and sharp aches in my knees. By which I mean, I mean –

Gone.

My conscious life is a series of empty, flipping frames: “I spent an era soaking my spondyl-olis-the-sis in NSAIDs.”

Vibrates like a nightingale, my tongue; quivers like guts strung up on lyres with all sorts of lovely, limping melodies and lines of poetry, lines of quick reproach. Tastes future ancient blood, too. Knows the cost of silence. Can’t stomach the cost of speech. Oh, my tongue keeps me human, it lifts me from the earth. Of all my muscles made for working, my tongue alone can overdo its work. Of all my muscles made for working, my tongue has no need for sorrow.

As a child, I lay in bed awake, just –

Lycanthropic something inside a person who wears more denim than they would like.

And its leaves are blind to daylight.

My eyes are gouged, my feet are wrecked –but nomad I am not. I’ll shock the heavens and be here tomorrow

ART BY RACHEL JUNG

colombia: from pueblo to the capital

BY KAROL JANIUK

Taken from a series depicting life in Chinchiná, Bogota, Manizales, Santa Marta, Cali, Medellín and Cartagena. A look at the everyday through the viewfinder of a Polish photographer; the result of two months of immersion.

Local sellers at Bogota’s largest fruit market.

Shot on a Soviet toy camera Agat 18K.

BY GABRIEL BLACKWELL

love et cetera

THERE IS NOTHING sexy about tardiness, I remind my date as she rocks up outside the cinema a full ten minutes after our scheduled meeting time. And yet there is something about her arrival that immediately injects our first encounter with an air of the erotic. Perhaps it is the effusive hug with which she greets me or the kindness of the evening light on her face, but I find it all too easy to forgive her delay. Not only is it in my character to find the care-free attitude this lateness suggests attractive, but I also like to take a smug pride in my own comparative promptness. Unbelievably hot stuff. Oh, and the coat my date arrives wearing is excellent. It is fur-trimmed and cascading; her silhouette cuts quite the magnificent figure as she trips calmly along the pavement. Her conversation is similarly impressive. As we make our way into the cinema, she overwhelms me with an incessant babble of superlatives and clipped vowel sounds. By the time the lights dim, she has already assured me that this will be the best date I’ll ever go on. And, lured in by the glint of her happy smile, I find it hard not to believe this is true.

Unfortunately, there is also nothing sexy about self-mutilation, something that the evening’s choice of film never lets us forget. For projected onto the cinema screen is the sad, strange story of a solemn Irish musician, who, wary of idle chatter gobbling up his precious time, goes to extreme measures to persuade his old drinking buddy to leave him alone. The means of this persuasion are bizarre and graphic: each time the musician is approached by his estranged friend, he

severs a digit from his left hand with sheep shears. That this makes for an odd focus for our first rendezvous is clear from my date’s increasing discomfort. She winces at each bloody finger-chop and I, lacking the smoothness of a more seasoned dater, know not how to offer her the assured care of masculine comfort. There is no supportive arm around the shoulder, nor any attempt at calming words in the dark. I am blank. Well, in fact, I am coughing.

In a complete assault on my romantic prospects, I find myself struck down with a nasty head cold. Not only does the game of cough repression become less fun the longer it continues, but there is nothing more unattractive than my strained face trying to prevent yet another loud wheeze from leaking out. Sitting in silence with a total stranger is already hard enough without the persistence of my spluttery outbursts. I can tell my date isn’t impressed. With each of my determined grabs at the soothing crutches of water or cough sweets – I have sadly adopted throat sweets as my cinema snack of choice – she stirs in her chair and offers me a glance of almost maternal concern. It would all seem rather Freudian if it weren’t so excruciating.

However, I enjoy the film as far as it is well-made. And it is well-made. The sharp dialogue induces a few appreciative sniffs from me, and the Irish landscape looks at times both gorgeous and brutally cold. But, when the credits begin to roll, I struggle to see what exactly the point of it all has been. Too much bubbles away under the surface of subtly funny lines,

while this may be clever or haunting or absurd, it doesn’t make me feel. Feel love or hate or excitement or fear, or really anything save the inescapable tickle at the back of my throat. Perhaps this is its purpose. It offers some kind of satire of the emotional outpouring for which its passivity makes me yearn, and yet I am not in the mood for satire. I want something unnuanced and obvious. I am in the mood for love. And, having sat through a film set in Ireland, I am also in the mood for a Guinness.

As we walk out into the darkening night, my date and I seem similarly uncertain about what we have just witnessed. Pleased to be able to converse once again, we merrily dissect the film as we make our way towards the pub. She briefly entertains some interpretative theory that involves the queer reading of a donkey, and I roll my eyes in playful mockery. It’s quite the image of romantic bliss, and we play our parts well: me, the gormless, enraptured artist, and her, my

outlandish, charismatic lover. My muse. She talks and I listen. At the bar, we order two pints of the black stuff and split the bill. I’m starting to think I might be on to a winner.

Then my date does something that takes me rather by surprise. She takes a deep sip of Guinness and, before the froth can even bubble off her top lip, she whips one of her teeth out from her gum, snapping it quickly into a little box. It’s precious, she tells me. Can’t risk it going walkabout. Her movements are too dextrous to be disgusting, so I laugh, both out of discomfort and with the definite pulse of intrigue. This woman in front of me really is a stranger. Made up of odd opinions and removable teeth, her life has become suddenly so perceptibly

ART BY AYOMIKUN BOLAJI

distinct from my own. It flits into my sight for one night only and then, if things don’t go well, flits away again into the darkness. Our date is, therefore, not just a chat but a moment of light, an occasion for cheerful exposition. It is the opportunity to see the strangeness of a tooth being removed and to be made aware that this experience, though alien to me, is a constant fact within another person’s life.

It is therefore a great shame that the lives of my date and I seem to have differed only superficially. She describes a familiar childhood of robust education and Moomin-orientated fun, of precocity and very mild schoolyard rebellions. Her stories trace a timeline against which I can almost identically mirror my own. We both have memories from the same places and can each understand the extraordinarily knowing cultural references the other makes. My date even shares my sister’s name: it’s sickening. Hoping to spend an evening with someone entirely new, I have managed only to encounter a more convivial, better-dressed version of myself.

We swig our drinks, and the conversation comes easily. I tell her just how attractive I find kindness (lame), and she tells me that she fantasises about fictional, drug-addled men (cool). I receive a compliment from a fellow drinker on my jacket (cool), and she coerces him into telling her he likes her shoes (lame). I get a bit of a headache (lame), and she smokes like a chimney (cool). It’s all fun and games, for how could it not be – neither of us wants to let ourselves down. We comfortably perform the formal requirements of jovial conversation, all the giggles and wide-eyed looks of curiosity, and sit pleasantly in the fantasy that we are ‘getting to know each other’. For dating is all mere fantasy: over the evening, I present vulnerability only as part of the

confident, dateable persona I am trying to carve. I make myself fluid and light, recalibrating the reality of my awkward insecurities into a character that anyone will like – that I hope my date will like too. And she seems to. She listens with genuine interest and talks as if she really does want me to care. But perhaps she is just entertaining the same fantasy I do, making herself similarly malleable to the requirements of the evening, to the ideals she thinks I would expect. And yet so self-assured is her conversation that I begin to doubt this similarity. She knows who she is and is happy for others to take it or leave it. When she describes herself as ‘God’s gift to man’, she defines a present given purely for its own pleasure. And personally, I’m very glad she’s having fun.

Later, as the night air chills, our talk becomes slower and more careful. My date confesses that she has never been in love, that most men dissatisfy her, and that she misses the crazed rush of teenage infatuations. Suddenly, she is being serious, and this honesty wipes the grin off my face. She tells me she wants someone to obsess over, someone to evoke a little passion. That sounds nice, I say, and she stares blankly. I stand to click the electric heater back on and she asks me if my love life has been just as unfruitful. Sitting back down, I answer with a nod and swill the last few dregs of my pint. I can’t take my eyes off them. Christ! Boring, my date chuckles. Don’t worry. It’ll come. In the future. I’m sure it will. ***

A few nights ago, I told a friend of mine that I was in love with him and meant it. I was drunk. He was leaning on the wall of his room, and I lay back on the sofa. There was a thin blanket draped over my feet. We didn’t make eye contact so I kept speaking until I realised he hadn’t said anything. He told me he felt overwhelmed,

and I put my shoes back on. We still couldn’t look at each other, and it wasn’t until I found myself cycling home that I realised I had left him. The night was very cold and dark and, apart from my heavy breathing, I was silent. In my room I didn’t cry but went to bed and slept. It was sad, but I felt too tired to notice. I haven’t really spoken to that friend since. I’m not sure that I will. ***

In the pub, my date signals the end of the evening by simply checking her phone and asking me whether I’ve had enough. While this sounds like a terrible rudeness, it is actually an act of true kindness. I can feel an itchy exhaustion growing behind my eyes, and the fact that true love has not yet bloomed is only becoming clearer. A calm silence settles on us, and we wrap ourselves in our coats. As we don hats and scarves, the date sadly transforms, purging itself of any romantic prospect. What could have been the start of something has just become a way of spending an evening, of passing a few simple hours. Of course, there is a quiet happiness in that too. Conversations have been made, drinks drunk, and films watched, all for their own sake. As we walk out the door, I realise that our fantasy is dead: it has been replaced by an easy contentment.

I hope everything works out, my date says as we stand on the street, our hands stuffed deeply into warm coat pockets. What’s everything? I ask and she responds, Oh, you know, love et cetera. I offer her the same good wishes and we hug our goodbyes with enthusiastic friendliness. She walks one way and I the other. I don’t check to see if she is looking back at me. I’m not sure that she will. ⬛

an acquired taste

Becoming Human in Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Paintings

BY NICOLE FAN

IT WAS NEW Year’s Day, 1569, and the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman Empire was alive with festive splendour: populated by an eclectic coterie of entertainers, furnished with exotic menageries, and known for its elaborate five-course banquets, it would have been an absolute feast for the senses of its Venetian nobles. Within such gilded halls, little might be expected to impress its emperor, Maximilian II, a man known for having exquisite taste. Yet, on the cusp of this new year, he found himself with a treat that surpassed all

other fleeting pleasures: not his usual vintage wines and salmon pâtés, but a set of eight delectable paintings that he greatly relished. Just what could be so compelling about these artistic delicacies – and who, indeed, was the maestro that had cooked them up?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was the painter in question, and a mere glance at his renowned ‘composite portraits’ explains Maximilian’s fascination. Awash with saturated hues, these glowing figures emerge from their dark canvases and

assert their commanding presences even from a distance. Step closer, however, and the painted vignettes turn out to be a far cry from the Raphaels and the Holbeins that we’ve come to expect from Renaissance portraiture. Within them, the sixteenth-century’s increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of identity manifests in a remarkably different way, compelling us to reconsider our preconceptions about the nature of selfhood.

Take Summer, for instance: adhering to the period’s artistic predilection for a strict representational profile, the illuminated bust of the young man seems relatively conventional from afar, albeit striking in its polychromatic intensity. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, colourful planes of flesh and fabric swiftly coagulate into a medley of summer viands: a ruddy peach forms his cheek, an upturned pear defines his jaw, and an elaborate assemblage of foliage and straw comprise his stylish attire. The flash of his grin (constituted, no less, by a ripe pod of peas) conveys a self-assured delight at his eminence. He, clearly, is a manifestation of humanist individualism unlike any other.

Arcimboldo’s artistic feat has significant philosophical import, for it demonstrates the sheer capacity of the individual to contain and cohere their environment. Indeed, his agglomerated sitters do not merely embody hosts of organic matter; rather, they unite the diversity of nature’s parts through the strength of their individuality. Thus, in Spring, a profusion of flowers never overruns its fecundity and remains tightly bound to the silhouette of its sitter, while in Earth, wild beasts are tamed as they contort themselves into physiognomic alignment. Each part is subsumed into the whole as the human subject powerfully reigns over their surroundings – a notion that would have resonated with their royal recipient,

Maximilian II, who voraciously accumulated botanical and zoological rarities from the ‘New World’ within his cabinets of curiosities. Overlaid by this ecological imperialism, the individualism displayed in the Seasons and Elements is one of conquest and possession, reflecting how objects of the natural world can be boldly assimilated into the body of a sovereign entity. To be human, then, is to have dominion over the rest of the world - and to make it bend to your will.

Yet, for all the supremacy that they portray, Arcimboldo’s paintings belie a fundamental vulnerability that effaces the discreteness of the self. Central to the strange allure of Arcimboldo’s paintings is the lack of division between the human and the elements: knock an onion off its perch and there goes the groove of a neck, along with the fulcrum that had sustained the unity of the entire head. Far from exemplars of individuality, his subjects are inseparable from – and indeed dependent on – the objects of nature that they possess. As Roland Barthes put it: “The principle of the Arcimboldoesque “monsters” is, in short, that Nature does not stop.” As entities predicated on an interdependent cohesion of parts, the tightly bound wholes of each Arcimboldo portrait therefore prove intensely elusive and ultimately vulnerable to the threat of dissolution.

If cohesion were to unravel, however, there would not be a gaping vacuum left in its wake, for objects in Arcimboldo’s paintings are not inert. Instead, they burst with the same vitality that characterises their human subjects. In Spring, blossoms spill out in full bloom; in Autumn, grapes are ripe for the plucking; in Water, fish surge forward along invisible currents. The precision of Arcimboldo’s brushstrokes further delineate the strong contours of these objects, producing a dynamism

ART BY BEN BEECHENER

so salient that contemporaries such as Gian Paolo Lomazzo commended his paintings for being “so exceptionally composed” that they were “a marvel to behold”. In contrast to the lifeless, taxidermied specimens of Maximilian II’s collections, Arcimboldo’s paintings foreground the ontological distinction of their inanimate objects, giving them lives of their own that are indifferent to the lofty dreams of human conquest.

Therein lies the paradox of Arcimboldo’s composite portraits: subjects attest to their individual excellence through possessing objects, but their interdependence simultaneously renders them possessed by their objects. In turn, objects yield to the force of human hands, but nonetheless assert their individuality through their own forms of being. The once clear-cut distribution of agency between subject and object is, evidently, complicated.

This notion is given experiential weight in our own interactions with Arcimboldo’s images: between the sentient viewer and the static canvas, where does the power lie? We gaze upon the paintings as active consumers and delight ourselves in the acquisition of pleasure, knowledge, insight. Nonetheless, we are simultaneously passive receptacles upon which they descend, enlisted in the process of evoking its dual perspectives and absorbed into the images we see. This dichotomy is encapsulated by the sixteenth-century poet Gregorio Comanini, who imagined how Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus would speak to him in verse:

Whoever you are, looking at me, A strange and deformed image, With a laugh on your lips That flashes in your eyes And stamps your face With novel happiness At the sight of a new monster.

The vivacious “laugh” of the viewer and his “novel happiness” convey the ease with which he asserts his power by aesthetically evaluating the framed image. Yet, it is the painted Vertumnus that goes on to deliver eloquent lines to the mute “[s]pectator”, charging him to “[s]ing the praises of the painter, / [a]nd kneel to the great Rudolph” that he represents. The balance of power is further reversed when the lines are recited aloud: once the viewer-asspeaker inhabits the “I” of the poem, he metamorphoses into that “strange and deformed image”, becoming the “new monster” to which Vertumnus laughs gleefully at. In the strange aesthetic experience of Arcimboldo’s paintings, we teeter precariously on the frayed edges of preconceived distinctions –between subjects and objects, collectors and possessions, coherent wholes and component parts.

Suspended in this existential continuum, the ‘human being’ is less a noun than it is a verb – after all, the solidity we accrue can just as easily come undone with the tug of a cherry stem. Savouring the delicious contradiction of what it means to be human, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings are a masterclass in representing the collective nature of individualism and the participatory world that we inhabit, inviting us to look, and look again, and then to see ourselves anew. ⬛

thursday night

THOMAS SETTLES INTO the most lived-in velvet on the train and says that he and Noelle might break up.

I acknowledge the information with a nod and lift and lower the ball of my foot on the metro’s rubber flooring. The train’s pretty deserted. Thomas keeps pushing back the time he picks me up. He doesn’t care when we eat because it’ll happen at some point. When he talks about his relationship like he wants me to have an opinion, it seems like a challenge.

“Where do we get off?” I face him and think about my smile.

“Stalingrad’s next,” he replies. He brings up the gallery show he came from before this and observes that the metro car looks like one of the photos. “Life intimidating art,” he says. Not sure if he deliberately got the idiom wrong. Thomas showing me the ‘real’ Paris is the pretext for these Thursday nights

when we deviate from the straight line of our otherwise unaligned schedules.

December slaps us in the face when we exit the station. Yellow skies slide into a dark blue that hangs from scraggly branches and slips into exchanges made in Jardin d’Éole. We grab a bite on La Villette Basin. The hostess checks our passe sanitaire, we’re the cutest couple she’s ever seen, and he winks at me. They’ve stopped serving, but for us, us, she’ll make an exception. On the outdoor terrace, a dying heat lamp flickers above Thomas and me. He orders a beer –“Want one?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” And when our chilly soups arrive, Thomas says he cheated on Noelle with Marie: “Very much a Covid thing. I’d been with Noelle for so long, and Marie…,” he sips the beer and swishes it around his mouth, “Well, same with her boyfriend.”

Marie and I met during my first week

BY SONYA RIBNER

in Paris at Thomas’s soirée. She stole my hand from a cheese plate and whirled me into her orbit. It gave a thismight-work-after-all kick of hope to my decision to study abroad, like inserting the final screw into an IKEA set-up. That night, Thomas said Marie and I should be friends.

“So when you said that Noelle doesn’t like Marie...?”

Thomas dips bread in my soup and bites into it. He says, “I feel like you and I know a lot about each other, but we’re not that close.” I never know if he’s very direct or if he just doesn’t have the right vocabulary to be indirect.

“I think we’re close.”

He glances at my interlaced hands on the table. “Not even wine?”

“Why do you keep asking?”

“You’ll enjoy the jazz more.” The club doesn’t charge at the door on Thursdays because the performers who study at the conservatory nearby get paid in alcohol. “Although it’s not very good.”

“It’s not that surprising.”

“Yes, well it’s free.” He’s slightly offended when he thinks I agree.

“No,” I look straight at him. “You, Marie, Noelle. I’m not surprised.”

***

Marie yanks back the door to her Montrouge studio and throws her arms around me. Her bergamot and lilac wrap around our embrace. “Thomas isn’t coming, by the way.” I’m not sure why she whispers that as she hands me a bottle of champagne filled with sparkling water. She adds, “Make sure I don’t get with Louis. He’s starting to take

me seriously.”

Louis is the kind of person who translates niche food items on menus for me when we all go out, without making me feel bad, so I dislike that Marie makes me an accomplice in rendering his actions meaningless.

Étienne sashays across the room and wraps his arm around me. “Meuf, you left this at the bar yesterday.” He slips my lighter into my clutch with one hand and twirls me with the other. Étienne studies Classics. Words like philology and hermeneutics mean something to him so he moves quick and often to stop himself from overthinking.

“Been looking everywhere – thanks.” He grips the kitchen counter and leans forward. “But you don’t smoke?”

“A special person gave it to me.” No one ever questions that.

Every quarter-hour, laughter rises an octave and music gets more relevant. Someone protests against going out at all because the vibe is so good here, but Louis fires back that we’ve been in lockdown for a whole fucking year so we’re not missing a chance, tonight is the rave. And Marie is cosmic after midnight – that very unique joie de vivre of a ballerina who busted her ankle and had to quit her passion for a degree in Biomedical Sciences. More dancing, ket for anyone who wants on the kitchen counter, people filling reusable bottles with vodka. Étienne slurs in my ear this is a catastrophe. He claps his hands, “Mask up bitches!” All fourteen of us file out of the apartment and board the 8 to Lourmel.

When we arrive, the storage facility appears deserted. Up-tempo techno thrums something low and ill-defined.

Marie and I wander towards the indigo glow ahead and start to sense the simmer

of people losing their minds together. Ultraviolet on the walls reveals: JE PENSE PAS, DONC JE SUIS CONTENT. Louis rushes Marie from behind, she kisses him hard, and he ropes her into the rave’s indistinct heartbeat. I should follow, be a good friend and all, but maybe that’d be overcrowding, so I hang back.

Étienne snags my hand and weaves to where his boyfriend has carved out dance space for our friends. And, of course, Thomas is here.

“You have more of a social life than I do.” He’s continuously surprised by me, and I can’t figure why I feel accomplished for clearing the hurdle of his underestimations.

“Who’d you come here with?” I ask. He knows the subtext.

The plainness of blue jeans and a white tee gives Thomas a dependable look against other people’s variations of black and the jerks of an ever-changing BPM. “Look at Marie!” He points to her making out with a girl I’ve never seen. “Really in the moment. She got this way after she broke up with her boyfriend for me.” His eyes always start a sentence that he waits on me to finish, telling me to do something, to act, to do it, and to do it now.

“If I split with Noelle, I’ll probably go wild too.” Thomas guides me into the centre until we can’t avoid colliding. He drops his head to my shoulder, hair grazes my neck, smooth lips going up, up.

I look over and around Thomas for Étienne but only find tightly packed bodies and the sweaty spaces between their curves.

“You look tired,” Thomas says.

“I’m not.”

“Want a drink?”

“No.” I move in closer to him. “Is Noelle here?”

Thomas dances and nods – half to me, half to the people around us.

I start to edge away through the crowd over to the musty wall in a no man’s land of the rave. I sink into my craving for a drink. I must be an optimist because these things are always better in my head. I stopped having alcohol a few months ago when I realised that I relied on it to make me fun, but that it also explained my inability to control the things around me. It’s hard on these take

up, and that I’m not having fun.

Now we’re veering toward 4am and an aimless contempt. Alcohol tiptoes on the dark side of our subconscious. No one assumes responsibility for every little big thing we wanted to happen tonight that didn’t happen. Marie texts, let’s go, and I trudge out to find her.

“Hi.” She’s slouched against a trash can and pats the cold concrete for me to sit down. “Je me suis pris un râteau ce soir.”

“You hit yourself with a rake?”

“No!” Marie lets out a hard laugh, “No.” More pensive. “I got rejected.”

I offer my hand. “Louis?”

“Never Louis.” She staggers to her feet and throws her arm around me. “This guy said he liked me, but tonight? Let it go. I wasn’t in love, but it hurts. I get why you don’t drink.”

“That’s not really it.”

Marie throws me a side-eye, “Big night?” I scruff her hair, and a smile gets the best of her. “Why’d you mention Thomas before?”

“I didn’t.”

“Back at the apartment. Did he say something to you?”

Marie giggles to herself. “J’ai dit. This guy.”

We walk through the early morning, crisp with fresh rain. Soft halos encircle yellow streetlamps. Back at my building, Marie drags her feet on the carpeting of the fourth-floor hallway and says she feels dirty. We head into the shower room where the glint from the dinky bulb is cruel to our self-images but we’re past caring. She tears her clothes off, turns the faucet on, and sinks to the brownish tile, trembling. I run to warm the bread, and when I’m back, she stares at the toast as if it’s the biggest decision she’ll ever make, then retches. I comb her hair back with my fingers and bring the crust of the bread to her lips.

Eventually we shuffle back to bed. She snuggles into the sheets. By the time my makeup’s off, Marie’s asleep. I peel off the comforter and lay beside her.

***

I didn’t know that Marie hooked up with Thomas for a second time as I stood in line at Carrefour City, clutching Sprite and a package of Le Petit Beurre to my chest. The person behind me lifts their chin so that I move forward because I’m still in my headphone-slumber-airplanemode. I twist my tongue around my dry mouth and walk slowly to self-checkout, rubbing crud from last night out of my eye.

When I get back to my place, Marie tells me that it happened again a couple weeks ago like she’s trying to prove a point. She laughs short and coarse and pours some of the Sprite into one of the glasses on my dresser. She exhales after another gulp and says she appreciates

me getting the soda and biscuits, and also that it’s frustrating how being a student makes you less generous, never knowing if you’ll get anything back.

I often think about how close Thomas and I sit on the train together, as though it excuses why when people talk about him it sounds personal to me. It’s a closeness that’s different to what we have when we dance. I rub the nape of my neck.

Marie and I do la bise and agree to check out some guided film viewing happening at the university soon. I go to my desk and try to focus on a paper I’ve got due tomorrow, but the blank page’s cursor blinks at me one too many times. I’m tired of hearing myself think. I take a book to a café by Saint Sulpice.

***

Some time passes, and now it’s Thursday night. At 9:47 p.m., Pigalle Station coughs out Thomas and me onto Boulevard Clichy. Loud neon signs find their reds and blues stretched by wet pavement. Soles of the city hopscotch in and out of tonight’s technicolour.

“Did you have a good time at the party the other night?” Thomas asks.

“Yeah.”

“Noelle and I, of course, got in a fight about whether she should go to my place – well, our place – or her family’s apartment afterwards.”

“Forgot how many students live with parents.” Sometimes I wonder if our company is a means to an end. With us the end always approaches, which is worse than the end itself.

“Cost of living and all.”

“Right.”

He pauses. “We’re probably going to break up.” ⬛

ART BY EVELYN HOMEWOOD

Tres poemas de la generación del 27

The Generation of ’27 was a group of young Spanish artists, poets, and authors, most of them left-wing and opposed to Franco’s regime. These three poems, written by members of the group, navigate the links between the natural world and the human experience through the theme of wind. Here, nature can act as both a distraction from and a conduit for exploring internal struggles.

Mi ventana Concha Méndez

El viento bate espadas de hielo.

– No abriré la ventana –

El viento decapita luceros.

– No abriré la ventana –

El viento lleva lenguas de fuego.

– No abriré la ventana –

En telegramas de sombra que van llevando los vientos se lee ya la Gran Noticia que conmueve al Universo…

– Yo no abriré mi ventana –

My window Concha Méndez

The wind wields blades of ice.

– I will not open the window –

The wind smothers streetlights.

– I will not open the window –

The wind spits tongues of fire.

– I will not open the window –

In shadowed telegrams carried on the winds, the Great News is read and moves the Universe as one…

– I will not open my window –

¡Ay!

Federico García Lorca

El grito deja en el viento una sombra de ciprés.

(Dejadme en este campo, llorando).

Todo se ha roto en el mundo. No queda más que el silencio.

(Dejadme en este campo, llorando).

El horizonte sin luz está mordido de hogueras.

(Ya os he dicho que me dejéis en este campo, llorando).

El viento y el alma Luis Cernuda

Con tal vehemencia el viento viene del mar, que sus sones elementales contagian el silencio de la noche.

Solo en tu cama le escuchas insistente en los cristales tocar, llorando y llamando como perdido sin nadie.

Mas no es él quien en desvelo te tiene, sino otra fuerza de que tu cuerpo es hoy cárcel, fue viento libre, y recuerda.

Federico García Lorca

The cry leaves a shadow of cypress on the wind.

(Will you leave me in this field, weeping?)

Everything in the world has been broken. Nothing remains but silence.

(Leave me in this field, weeping.)

The lightless horizon is bitten by bonfires.

(I have already told you to leave me in this field, weeping.)

The wind and the soul Luis Cernuda

The wind blows in so passionately from the sea that its age-old cries infect the night’s hush.

You hear him only in your bed, tapping incessantly on the glass, crying, calling, lost and alone.

Yet in your sleeplessness he does not own you, but for another force your body, today, is a cage. It was boundless wind – and memory.

BY THALIA ROYCHOWDHURY

But in a city now populated with Starbucks and profit margins, I found one of the last remaining bastions of Murakami’s fabled Tokyo. An institution kept alive by nostalgia, shaped by over a century of social, political, and literary legacies, the radical heart of Japanese café culture: the kissaten.

Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh in Shinjuku was my first encounter with a kissaten. The waiters’ uniforms immediately struck me, their neat brown waistcoats and bow ties forming a strange

ensemble redolent of a period drama. Every moment I aimlessly sipped away at my latte, the strangeness intensified. A European-style coat of arms arched above me on the wall, flanked by dramatic Renaissance era prints, and lamps shaped as miniature chandeliers illuminated the red brick interiors. It was only my fellow customers – salarymen typing away at laptops and gossiping retirees – that reminded me I was in 21stcentury Japan, not an art-deco Viennese

café. That, and the jazz rumbling away in the background.

Unlike the bustling, concrete streets that surrounded it, Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh seemed content to bask in an imagined, European past. But kissaten were not always safe, stuffy cafés. Murakami’s works show that these now unassuming coffee shops were once hubs of social transformation and a defiant youth culture.

Kissaten first emerged in the Meiji era (1868-1912), alongside Japan’s self-styled ‘opening-up’ to the Western world. The early Meiji government reformed its government along European lines, and, with this political emulation came a growing curiosity about Western popular culture. This included the introduction of an exotic new product: coffee. Kissaten imported this enticing taste of Europe, a Japanese facsimile of an imagined Western ideal. However, though Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh’s name is clearly designed to bring Japanese consumers an enigmatic, vaguely Scottish fantasy, kissa are not concerned with simply emulating the West.

I realised this as soon as my lunch order arrived. Rather than the classic spaghetti bolognese I had been expecting, the smell of soy wafted from little pink fish eggs perched on my pasta beside pieces of ramen-esque nori seaweed. A bowl of cod-roe pasta, straddling the line between the foreign and the familiar.

Kissaten accrued their own unique cultural currency in the Showa era (1926-1989). Offering cheap coffee and a place to smoke, they soon began to draw in a burgeoning intellectual class. Students and the mo-ga (modern girls) who scandalised older generation with their adaptation of Western, flapperstyle clothing, began to frequent kissa often located near university campuses. In 1926, the unimposing cafés appeared

in author Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel, Naomi. Tanizaki uses the titular mo-ga Naomi, and the kissa she frequents, to explore the encroaching Westernisation of the period. As such, kissa firmly entrenched themselves in Japanese literary culture, becoming a shorthand for the Showa era itself.

Several decades later, Murakami explored the same dynamic of the foreign and the familiar. But in his work, instead of being an exotic Western presence, the kissaten simply form a part of Tokyo’s identity – as they do today. For those in Japan’s capital the West is no longer some alien curiosity but instead a part of everyday life. While I gaped, the other customers of Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh remained unbothered by the mock-European décor, far more focused on work. Both Murakami’s protagonists and modern Tokyoites casually enjoy spaghetti and jazz records without judgement.

Much like the city itself, Showa-era kissa constantly adapted and evolved to their Tokyoite customers’ tastes, producing the radical subgenre of the jazz kissa. The postwar youth, unable to afford imported records, came to these kissa to listen to the café owner’s curated selection. The master, often the sole employee, not only controlled drinks and snacks but the music selection, an atmosphere far removed from typical, politely-distanced Japanese service culture. In my attempts to track one down, I soon realised that these jazz kissa are few and far between nowadays. Their prices have skyrocketed far beyond a student budget, in order to cater to a hardcore jazz connoisseur crowd, banking on nostalgic patronage from an older crowd. But, in the Showa era, these were not elitist spaces. Instead, the social aspect nursed a relationship between customer and kissa-owner –able to discuss jazz in an intimate setting – that evolved beyond transaction.

The literature of Haruki Murakami, who writes of the cafés of his student youth across his oeuvre, memorialises the culture of the jazz kissa. Murakami worked a part-time job in jazz kissa, Old Blind Cat, in Shinjuku, and later started his own joint before becoming a writer. His most famous novel, Norwegian Wood, is set amidst the same milieu. Narrated by a student in the heart of 70’s Tokyo, the peak of the kissa scene, the book overflows with jazz kissa, such as Dug in Shinjuku, where the protagonist enjoys a vodka tonic with the daring and free-spirited Midori. During my visit to Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh, I was finally able to grasp the atmosphere he wrote so longingly about: the rich smell of coffee, a Thelonious Monk record playing in the background, and the gloomy interior’s intimacy, all aspects I had quickly skimmed over on a first glance, the translation merely describing it as a café. I realised Murakami’s Tokyo was never a myth, but was rather a literary resurrection of the past.

This nostalgia fuelled the unexpected success of Norwegian Wood, striking a chord with the Japanese public. At the time of the novel’s publication in the 80s, a stagnating economy and society led to a widespread disillusionment across the country. Norwegian Wood memorialised the optimistic, intellectually curious Showa era, an age before the financial bubble burst and recession, political stagnation, and Conservatism followed. This was the age of the kissaten. The same wistful longing for the Showa past that made Norwegian Wood a bestseller, undoubtably still ensures the continued

existence of kissa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Shibuya districts. Murakami’s work solidified the transformation of the kissaten from an exoticised Western curiosity to a uniquely Japanese artifact, symbolising the lost potential of radical Showa student subculture.

Kissaten are some of the last personal institutions still found in contemporary Tokyo, recalling a time before Japan’s economic and political stagnation. A modern era where black-suited, overworked salarymen flood out of packed offices into even busier trains, as convenience stores line every street. An era where the inhabitants of nearidentical apartments have conditioned themselves to gulp down a chain coffee each day, syrup masking the taste of their overpriced blend. Where the promise of expediency threatens to close the doors of kissa like Coffee Aristocrat Edinburgh – a dying breed of Murakami’s authentic city. But where else can over a century’s worth of complex negotiation, between East and West, personal and transactional, radical and nostalgic, coalesce into an unassuming order of a coffee?

The future of kissaten, while uncertain, is kept alive in literature, and that brief flash of Showa innovation endures for millions of readers, the nostalgic vein still bubbling over. While the real city has long since succumbed to neon-lit commercialisation, those like me, longing to escape into the pages of Norwegian Wood, can still uncover pockets of the Tokyo Murakami so lovingly writes about. Within the kissaten, captured in the pages of his novels, in the minds of millions of readers, Murakami’s Tokyo remains stronger than ever. ⬛

ART BY ELSIE GRAY

BY ELSIE GRAY

swimming against the torrent

The modern cinematic experience faces a sustained dilemma. Once offering new models of seeing intended to tempt back waning audiences, the cinematic spectacle has become a parody of itself. An ethics of experience has supplanted film-viewing itself in the discourse surrounding the medium.

Martin Scorsese acknowledged this shift in an infamous 2018 interview, drawing a distinction between auteur-led “cinema” and the gaudy “theme parks” of modern superhero films. This dichotomy reproduces itself at many levels in the current state of cinema, both from a standpoint of cultural critique and for enterprises that seek to offer experiential alternatives to theatrical releases.

Secret Cinema, a London-based events company, is such an enterprise that has flourished in recent years and has made a particular comeback since the end of the pandemic. Spectators are offered a host of experiences accompanying classic blockbuster films, screened at initially undisclosed locations that are revealed as part of the merry-go-round of the viewing, generating viewer interaction and a level of covertness unavailable in the usual cinema-going experience.

The experiential promise of a unique screening is complemented by the types of films that Secret Cinema usually shows: immensely popular blockbusters with established fan communities. Rather than undercutting the esoteric and covert promise of the endeavour, Secret Cinema doubles down on its eponymous guarantee by allowing its audience to experience something they are already familiar with. The secret is itself the experience, which is conceived entirely outside of the particular film being shown.

BY LUKAS OSCAR LACEY-HUGHES

The promise of secrecy marks the inability of the usual theatrical cinematic experience to satisfy the normative

viewer. These companies have even moved beyond films, screening any media that aligns with their model of excessive over-consumption. Indeed, since 2017, Secret Cinema has presented marathon screenings of huge Netflix titles like Stranger Things and Arcane, suggesting a shared trajectory between the extra-cinematic spectacle that Secret Cinema offers and the mesmeric indulgence of the binge-watch.

Such a quest for secrecy, as an antidote to the waning prowess of the cinema as a viewership model, seems like a symptom of the state of media consumption in the digital age. This poses a wider question, which translates especially to a variety of alternative viewership models that have flourished in the last decade: namely, how do we keep hold of the mysterious power of secrecy in an age where everything is immediately accessible? The online forum and video-sharing archive Karagarga shares such concerns and even provides some possible answers.

My introduction to the website occurred when I came across a Goodreads account that had been giving polemically low ratings to 20th-century philosophical literature. When I visited this user’s profile, I came across an enigmatic proposition. In the description box was a sentence that seemed out of place on a Goodreads: “Selling Karagarga invites for $75.”

What I came to learn about this summoning statement opened me up to an alternative culture of film viewership. Amid the majority of pirated activity online, this particular forum stands out in terms of its orientation and dedication to the archival preservation of obscure, lost, and damaged films. Karagarga is a forum made possible by the technology of a BitTorrent tracker, through which media files can be shared peer to peer over a decentralised

network. BitTorrent is a special kind of server that creates metadata files with competing, overlapping instructions, thereby coding downloadable media files to be transferred across multiple server addresses at once. It is a programme that generates the majority of pirated activity online. BitTorrent had an estimated 150 million active users as of 2012 and is used on prominent piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, Putlocker, and Library Genesis.

In contrast to the mainstream piracy which seeks to democratise audio-visual media through a series of debasing alterations, diluting the file quality in favour of convenient access, Karagarga prioritises preservation and cultural fulfilment. It cultivates a curated library of obscure arthouse media and wields upload quality as the benchmark for their films’ preservation. Its mission, to “create ... a comprehensive library of arthouse, cult, classic, experimental, and rare cinema from all around the world”, is something which paradoxically must be conceived outside of the normative supply chain of entertainment consumption.

This distinctive logic places Karagarga in a unique position. While piracy can be seen largely as an extension of the aim of content streaming, where media files, entertainment, and mainstream titles can all be accessed immediately through the internet, Karagarga’s platform is a closed community. It is invitation-only, and once an invitation is secured, a member’s account can only be maintained by developing a certain ratio of file-use to file-upload. In short, even before entering the forum, a prospective user must have obscure titles to disseminate and thereby preserve on the platform. As a result, its users are a close community of curators, filmmakers, cinephiles, tastemakers, and cultural historians.

BY POPPY WILLIAMS

Of course, where there is exclusivity, there are illicit attempts to gain such hallowed access. Karagarga invitations can be bought online for one-off fees at fairly affordable prices, as can buffered accounts. While such accounts are almost never maintained, the availability of short, privileged access to the treasure trove of lost films upholds its intended effect of fetishised obscurity.

These attempts to buy into the esoteric suggest the tantalising effects that withheld secrecy creates for those without privileged access. This raises another important question: does such esteemed taste differentiate the project as a historical archive of artistic merit and cultural achievement, or does it rather assert itself as a holy grail of overconsumption? Must a cinephile make their way through the IMDb Top 100 list to become the final boss of patrician taste?

The forum has strict rules regarding quality and playback compatibility and does not accept uploads that are deemed to be mainstream. Site moderators have written that while “the definition of ‘mainstream’ is very elusive and almost impossible to state precisely”, each moderator limits their definition of mainstream to “Hollywood or Bollywood movies made after the 70s”. “Classic Hollywood movies are allowed and welcome, even though some of them may enjoy mainstream popularity,” they say. “We have high respect for their artistic quality and importance in cinema history”.

In stark opposition to the emergence of Secret Cinema, Karagarga’s rules themselves prohibit the upload of any films that engage in the aesthetics of the big-budget Hollywood event: “We draw the line with the advent of the bigbudget Hollywood blockbuster (with movies like Jaws and Star Wars) which brought on a rapid deterioration in

the quality of movies.” The spectacle of the cinematic blockbuster is the exact inverse model of what Karagarga tries to perserve.

Karagarga’s success at maintaining a closed community does ensure it flirts regularly with a particular brand of elitism. They concur that their upload guidelines about what is counted as mainstream or obscure are subjective, but this brings with it several assumptions about aesthetic quality and archival priority that do not map as easily onto the separation of mainstream and underground that the site valiantly sticks to.

The hyper-fetishisation of obscurity, coupled with the need for users to interact with the site and continually upload films, floods the site with a variety of diverse titles. The proliferation of such titles, however, and the unknown aesthetic territories they carry, waters down the very judgements that the site perceives as central to its mission. Obscurity is prioritised over merit when the two should go hand in hand.

Compared to other similar sites, committed to archiving the cheaper, kitschy side of Hollywood and international B-movies, Karagarga purports to host titles that are in some way or another cultural relics: either hidden masterpieces, or symptoms of other cultural and aesthetic practices. Questioning whether Karagarga’s exclusivity comes at the cost of a particularly granular and patrician ‘taste’ misses a larger point, which is that exclusivity must attach itself to valuejudgement in order to avoid becoming stale – the shared peril of all online endeavours. And while Karagarga’s model seems supremely unique, perhaps the sentiment behind it isn’t.

It turns out that, on the Internet, even the esoteric can wane with the trend-

ART

cycle. Esoterica is itself a paradoxically widespread feature of online culture – a sentiment of which Karagarga is perhaps symptomatic. The Internet’s fascination with the esoteric speaks to a larger anxiety about the nature of taste and media in the digital age. Visit any online micro-community engaged in contemporary media, be it film, music, literature, or art, and they will always skew towards a reification of obscurity and nicheness over time. This has even filtered into more recent trends in meme culture, with esoteric concepts fuelling the absurdist rationales behind popular videos on platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube. The ironic distancing through which these communities cycle in order to actualise the ‘niche’ they idealise is precisely what Karagarga must armour itself against in order to truly provide an archival resource.

In another sense, however, the esoteric is part of a much larger intellectual and cultural tradition, despite its reification online as a touchstone for irreverent and Dadaistic humour and commentary. Such traditions show the value, and longterm success, of attempts to formalise communities and cultures around a promise of secrecy. From Gnosticism to Kabbalah, traditions that value the secret inner truths of the world have survived by the very adaptability of that secrecy to new myths. This preservation effect is named by many academics as the paradoxical ‘open secret’ – a structure of knowledge which, while being widely known and disseminated, maintains its cloud of secrecy.

These conflicting accounts of the ‘esoteric’ pose a question to sites like Karagarga, since their embroilment in online habits is so directly linked to the very function of their technologies. Will its central impulses be liquidated by the cyclic milieu of the ‘esoteric’ meme culture online? Or will it be able to work out a kind of ‘open secret’ – a true

community whose central orienting principle remains veiled and adaptable? If film-lovers are to continue to cherish the site, the type of esotericism it skews towards must continue to be sound. An interest in arthouse-adjacent media is seemingly on the rise, with distribution companies like A24 taking the cake for franchising a wheelhouse of independent titles, but whether such titles will filter into Karagarga’s catalogues remains to be seen. While the ambiguity of their status as ‘arthouse’ does muddle the platform’s harsh rules regarding obscurity, the increasing marketability of arthouse titles challenges Karagarga’s ability to watermark cinephilic ‘taste’ from the shadows. Moreover, does this not simply re-assert established claims of elitism?

This question may elude movie-viewing culture for a while longer, but Karagarga’s ambiguous and secret trove of titles hangs over the conversation around modern cinema and will continue to do so, perhaps more for what it excludes from archival annals than what it provides. What Secret Cinema, pirated content, Netflix, memes, and Karagarga all have in common is their reliance on misplaced economies of attention. Whether catering to expert viewers, thrilled customers, or bored consumers, and whether extended or fetishised, all these models of engagement shift attention, in one way or another, away from the aesthetic experience itself.

What Karagarga fails to preserve in its archives is perhaps the most elusive and fragile ‘open secret’ of all: the effluent wonder of the cinematic spectacle itself, where viewing a film becomes a treasured cooperative endeavour. In our modern climate of declining international audiences and a waning independent picture-house scene, perhaps it is this encapsulation of cinematic experience that we are most at risk of losing. ⬛

BY JAMES TURNER

wisteria

Love never came and raved but bent low and whispered: spring wisteria that once dipped its neck to press its pretty face to yours. You bent too, to listen, and every building stooped to see your sunlit form find silence in the street.

ART BY BETSY MCGRATH

BY LOTTIE HASSAN

“greedily she engorg’d without restraint, and knew not eating death”

BY ZOE DAVIS

last meal last meal last meal

Walking home from dinner last night,

A party thrown by our friend, Five courses to celebrate the end Of a five-month divorce,

I asked you what your favourite dish was.

Me, I said, I’m stuck between the starter –Frisée leaves supporting

The meat of a blue king crab Razor thin chives and strips of lemon zest

All balanced on top: Acrobatics for an appetizer –And that dessert.

Do you think you could get the recipe from her For that dessert?

In the dark evening light

I could just make out the shadow of your pursed lips And wondered if complimenting a divorcée’s dessert Was bordering on tactless.

You forced a smile.

It was wonderful, you agreed, Delicious, scrumptious, everything and more.

If I had to choose –And the way you said it was like a branch breaking –It would just about be what I would have For my last meal on Earth.

You let go of my hand

And let the night air fill the space between us.

And although I kept silent, I still want you to know That when the last meal comes, It’s not the garnishes I’ll remember.

The pesce spada of our honeymoon.

That month we passed through Italy, From the fast-paced north to the languorous south, Looking up at the sun-dripped skies

Criss-crossed with clotheslines. A seafood restaurant – a boat ride out from Naples. We paid a man with a dinghy to drive us out, The white motorboat skirting close enough to vacationing yachts So that we felt drowned in luxury. The menu was all in Italian, And I was flustered, especially in front of you –Your rose-flushed face that I still saw underneath the wedding veil.

A neighbouring customer leaned over from the table next to us, The swordfish, he whispered.

Pesce spada, the waiter confirmed. It came out with a wedge of lemon, a ribbon Of darker muscle fluttering down its thick edge, A cacophony of vegetables serving as orchestral accompaniment.

The waiter handed me a serving spoon And I cut you a handsome portion. I watched you take a piece before I had any: You slipped the fork into your mouth, Engulfed the flaky meat in one bite, Salivating.

The neighbouring customer winked at me.

The waiter gave me a nod. Please, you said, Gesturing at the remaining fish between us, A piece with the olive. ***

Your mother’s minestrone.

Labor Day weekend: we arrived late that Friday night. Driven back by a storm, we walked through the door, drenched Clothes clinging to skin, and your mother clung to your arm. Frantic, she didn’t notice the water pooling at our feet Because her only thought was food.

There was nothing, she lamented, The remains of her dinner long soaking in the sink. You tried to tell her we weren’t hungry, and it would’ve been convincing

If the woman hadn’t raised you.

Throwing open cabinets and drawers, She was embarrassed by the emptiness –A mother out of practice. Until her mind pounced on the vegetables she’d picked that morning From the garden out back.

A wicker basket was hefted into the kitchen, The late summer cornucopia.

Like a general, she ordered us into an assembly line, You chopping the eggplant, Me peeling the carrots, Sheaths of orange pushed aside for the trash, Only to be saved by your mother’s deft hands.

For stock, you and your mother said in sync, And it was then that I saw where you came from, Perhaps for the first time.

The vegetables were put to simmer in a pot, And I watched mother and daughter work in tandem.

She grabbed the olive oil, You the salt, A pinch between thumb and forefinger, A long glug streamed from above. All it needs, the two reassured me, When it’s garden fresh. This is all it needs.

But then your eyebrows shot up, A self-satisfied look of alarm. We were missing one ingredient, and you tore to the pantry, Returning with two bay leaves. Dropped into the pot, they skimmed there across the surface, Lost sailors in a vegetal sea.

Trust me, you said, the bay leaves themselves, they don’t have much taste.

But when it’s all put together, Let’s just say – if they weren’t there, You’d know.

And not long after that, When I sat at your childhood table, And you spooned the soup into a bowl, And I sipped it, In that cavernous living room, minutes to midnight, All but us and the crickets asleep, I thought there’s nothing I’d less like to know, Than what this all would be like, Without you here.

***

The night of the izakaya’s opening. A trendy Japanese spot in the Lower East Side. The chef’s famous, you’d told me weeks ago, Letting me know with a tilt of the head That it was now up to me

To snag a reservation.

Walking into the restaurant, we were surrounded by twenty-somethings. In knee-high leather boots, at least five sunglasses

Currently being worn indoors.

Pete Wells is somewhere here, A goateed man confidently told his date, His left shirtsleeve pushed up to reveal a tattooed pair of chopsticks. I felt my knees ache there, I felt my hair thin there, And you looked down at your grey linen skirt, Ran your hands up and over it in an attempt To iron out the wrinkles.

When we were finally seated, it was at a table near the door –Not the sushi bar I’d requested. But with a sideways glance you told me not to make a fuss, So we waited there an hour, The opening and closing entrance letting in frequent bursts of January air. You shivered: I gave you my jacket And you bashfully took it –The old couple’s brief return to prom date flirtations.

It was another half-hour until a waiter finally came. He asked us if we’d enjoyed our meal, And I realised he thought we were waiting for the cheque. A rush of blood beelined for my face, A vein in my temple pulsed, But you reached across the table, Took both my hands into your own steady pair. We’ve had a lovely meal, you said, And that wink in your smile, The warm embrace of your hands, Convinced me you were telling the truth.

***

For my last meal I want to be submerged headfirst: A baptism of first bites, A lamentation of last ones.

To emerge breathless, To be neither sated nor starving –From my gut a constant stream Of unwavering desire.

I want all the tastes and splendours of the world

To cascade miraculously on my tongue: Not particularly god-given, but not particularly not. I want to ascend into the sublime

As easily as a knife cuts through cake. As easily as bread rises in the oven. As easily as the dinner gets made When you sit there at the kitchen counter And read the recipe out loud To me.

ART BY LOUIS RUSH

Run my tongue along the edge of the knife, Drag my finger along the rim of the bowl.

If I never bring this fork to my mouth again, Then I want even this final bite To feel no different from the first. I promise not to leave the table Until my plate shines clean.

For my last meal on Earth let me swallow you whole.

team list

Editors-in-Chief

Susie Castledine

Dowon Jung

Deputy Editors

Anneka Pink Oliver Roberts

Shao-Yi Wong

Mia Wu Magazine Non-Fiction

Samuel Moore

Antara Singh Olivia Burgess

Vivian Gu

Imee Marriott

Finlay Miles Isaaq Tomkins

Online Non-Fiction

Sophie Lord

Clemmie Read

Philippa Conlon

George Duncan Shanti Lara Gionvannetti-Singh

Dannan White

Magazine Fiction

Nicholas Champness

Zoe Davis

Iris Campbell-Lange

Amber Forrester

Natasha Fox

Aryaman Gupta

Anieshka King

Hebe Yu

Online Fiction

Helen Edwards

Max Marks

Coco Cottam

Enkhtamir Erdenebulgan

Veronica Fu

Leila Moore

Tom Philip Noah Wild

Creative and Media Ben Beechener

Elsie Gray

Ayomikun Bolaji

Alfie Carter

Lottie Hassan

Evelyn Homewood

Rachel Jung

Matthew Kurnia

Betsy McGrath

Louis Rush

Violet Trevelyan-Clark Poppy Williams

Marketing and Events

Sara Hashmi

Hannah Porter

Faith Leong

April Li Isla Sutton

Investigations

Anna Dowell

Edward Rhys Jones

Efan Owen

Wyatt Radzin