1. On bank holiday Monday I woke two of the housemates at 4.15am, and we made a pan of hot chocolate and opened the door to hear the dawn chorus. One of them sensibly remained on a chair in the garden, insulated against the early May morning with a duvet and blanket and thick onesie; the other walked out with me, into the dark, and we tramped the streets together, along the silent pavements, towards the river and fields.
We discovered that a large ivy-covered tree is home to a bat colony, members of which flapped silently about our heads in their haste to return before full dawn. A cuckoo was audible across the water. A starling clicked its beak and jittered up and down the branch. The housemate called me a boomer.
Of all the odd things I miss from last year, it’s the silence of the roads that is the greatest loss. At 6 o’clock in the morning there would be almost no traffic at all; now the birds are almost drowned out by the constant roar, even some distance away. Whether it’s hormones or poor emotional processing or a rational reaction to a damaged world, I feel angry at the traffic. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a 100% smooth process, but I do wish the world could be run by peri-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal women for a year or two. Just to see.
2. I am still obsessed with Orlando Wood’s short book Lemon (I was banging on about it back in February), and am so grateful to have so many people in my life who care about those same ideas. We’re in a left-brain cycle of culture at the moment, he explains: the left brain has a tendency to “isolate parts from the whole and to see them in the abstract… It likes to break things up into smaller parts, to categorise, and therefore favours the familiar, consistency, repeatability and predictability”. It also “prefers to see things in terms of simple and linear cause and effect. It prizes utility, power and control, and its ability to abstract and isolate things from their context enables it to manipulate the world”. What’s that you say? Wider cultural discourse and rights of individual groups, inability to have dialogues about, you say? Mmm.
My favourite part of the book is when Wood breaks down two adverts: Heineken’s ‘Water in Majorca’ from 1985, and GoDaddy’s 2018 ‘Make Your Own Way’ ad. Remember that? No, me neither. ‘Make Your Own Way’ is full of colourful images, isolated people, or tiled with images of themselves to make a ‘conveyer belt’ effect, and clean-face words which could be applied to almost any product or company (watch it to cure your insomnia/trigger a panic attack); everything is buzzword-y, inspirational, keynote, statement, unilateral, and utterly, utterly devoid of humour, humanity, or engagement.
One of the most striking things about Wood’s ad breakdown is that, once you’ve read it, you can’t stop noticing how in, say, three ad breaks within an hour-long programme, there might be one advert at most which doesn’t fit this left-brain pattern. Adverts for products as diverse as cars, period reusables, white goods, clothing catalogues, insurance, snack food, and supermarkets all, to some extent or another, fit the mould: bright images, little human connection, bland Instagram visuals, large slogans, spoken-wordlessness (better for the global market), a vague puff of do-gooding, and absolutely no wit at all. The only one I’ve seen recently attempting anything different is Maltesers, about a breastfeeding mother and her mother-in-law, which I admired for the milk-leak and loathed for the Hahahaha, aren’t women awful to each other?.
It’s draining to imagine the flat meetings and endless audience segmentation that enabled this ad trend: this sector engages on social media in the evenings and this demographic prefers a friendly looking home and our audience here is more about food as a pleasure. I’m loathe to break it to them, but for all that laser-focused research you are all making the same ads. And as Wood exposes so brilliantly, those ad campaigns are costing more and more to receive less and less engagement. Congrats, lads.
3. Speaking of left- and right-brain world views, as so often happens this episode of Hidden Brain popped up serendipitously, with the wonderful host Shankar Vedantam interviewing Iain McGilchrist about his 2010 book The Master and His Emissary. It’s just over 45 minutes and is worth every second — McGilchrist is so clear and insightful about how to tell what type of brain is leading at any given time, what we lose in a left-brain society, and what we need to do about it. (I went back and checked and only then saw the book is in Lemon’s bibliography. Bliss.)
4. For various reasons, a small toilet room here has been stuffed with balloons for the last week. It’s absolutely staggering both how not one of us thought to remove the balloons, instead bobbling through them to reach the facilities at any given hour of night or day, and also how immensely relaxing it is to go in there since they’ve been removed and humanely destroyed (I assume). It’s A Squash and a Squeeze in action, a life philosophy I cling to pretty robustly and find pays dividends. A housemate pointed out recently that whenever they are travelling in my car, they play a game to see if they can ever see another car in worse condition, and they say they never, ever can. It’s the Squash and a Squeeze philosophy that, in part, enables me to drive the dented, rusting, bubbled, scratched, lichen-furred, beloved piece of garbage I do, having previously had no driving license for almost two years after my seizure. It’s such a delight to drive any car at all.
5. We’re rewatching Ghosts, which of course I recommend, and I suddenly realised that the Captain (Ben Willbond) is the speaker of possibly my favourite newspaper-based gag in the entire run of The Thick of It. Please watch all of Ghosts and all of The Thick of It, then perhaps The Death of Stalin? All thoroughly excellent, and the latter two contain my favourite kind of Muriel’s Wedding-type comedy, where I am tearfully wheezing with laughter one moment, then gaping with discomfited horror the next.
6. I made Nigel Slater’s cardamom-spiced rice pudding this weekend, (although I times everything by 1.5 except the rice, which I up to 200g) and it was as good as always, if I say so myself. Cardamom, like capers, coriander, and pistachios, is an ingredient I’ve only come to love as an adult — I often long to make cardamom buns but am in such an emotionally entangled relationship with my sourdough starter that I never have yeast in the house, so have to rely on my favourite local coffee shop for a hit every now and again. If someone wedges themselves against the fridge door this weekend, I might attempt these.