“I’ve always secretly envied people who can open up on a whim like that. It seems weirdly fun. And there might be a lot of psychological benefits to it.
You’re the final boss in a video game, and you’ve just returned from destroying the hero’s town, starting them on their journey. You retreat to your lair to plan, when one of your minions bursts in, telling you about the bizarre exploits of the hero. “Oh no,” you think. “He’s a speedrunner.”
I sigh as I fall onto my throne, my fingers rubbing at my temples.
I had been revived enough times to experience speed runners before. Those weren’t heroes. They were monsters, only caring to kill me.
“Minion 16?”
“Yes, Almighty Lord of Darkness!” The squeaky voice replied.
“Be good. Find my son Bermuda, he will be in charge and you will be his advisor.”
“Wait, sir, your not going to-”
“Face this so called hero? No, I’m going to talk to Lady Luck. We need them to get the worst luck possible. They might give up on this country if their luck is terrible enough.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then,” I sigh, turning around, activating my armor and materialize my great sword, Blood drinker. “They will have to face me.”
My armor clinks as I step towards the doorway, towards the light before I hesitate.
“Minion 16?”
“Yes Almighty Lord of Darkness?”
“If I fail, use Plan Omega, take my son and run.”
A grim silence followed. I couldn’t look at the minion. They had been loyal to me since the day I found the sword.
“But, don’t worry, I won’t fail. The plan is just if worst comes to worst.” I found the words spilling out of my mouth before I could stop it.
The minion seemed to shake themselves out of their shock as I heard a jingling sound.
“You’re right! The Almighty Lord of Darkness will never be defeated.”
A bitter smile forms from behind the helmet as I open the door. No one would know that I’ve already been defeated long ago.
In my editorial calendar, I had planned a best-of West Wing Festive episodes for December. The show had a knack for them: “In Excelsis Deo”, “Noel”, “Bartlet For America”… They brought the cutest Josh and Donna (What did he write in that skiing book?) and CJ and Danny (as Santa) moments. They brought the actors awards. They brought tears to my eyes.
So a very different post was well under way when two things happened: an episode of The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s latest show, The Newsroom, focused on rape, and Sorkin was one of the victims of the Sony hack. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I could keep watching The West Wing and still say I’m a feminist.
In “Oh Shenandoah“ (The Newsroom 3x5), a Princeton woman accuses two students of raping her. As neither of them is prosecuted, she starts a website where other victims can out their rapists. The attitude of the show (and by extension its creator and executive producer) towards that plotline was criticised the very evening of its broadcast. Summarising the arguments at charge,The Guardian’sJennifer Gerson Uffalussy lists three reasons why The Newsroom’s handling of the situation was wrong: it focused on the possibility of the outed alleged rapists’ lives being shattered if it turns out the accusation was false, it questioned the facts because “she fails to act the part of the “perfect victim”, and she gets mansplained by older (white) men.
About a week after ”Oh Shenandoah” was broadcast, an email Sorkin had sent to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was published as part of the Sony hack.
"Year in and year out, the guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins Best Actress. Cate [Blanchett] gave a terrific performance in Blue Jasmine but nothing close to the degree of difficulty for any of the five Best Actor nominees. Daniel Day-Lewis had to give the performance he gave in Lincoln to win – Jennifer Lawrence won for Silver Linings Playbook, in which she did what a professional actress is supposed to be able to do.”
Although I do find Silver Linings to be an overrated film, I disagree with him. I think Sorkin believes female characters are ‘easier’ because he doesn’t rank female acting as highly. If he does, rather than writing yet another op-ed about it, he would pen a different film from the male-dominated Moneyball,The Social Network and the as-yet-unnamed Steve Jobs biopic.
Not that any of this was a surprise. Writing female characters isn’t Sorkin’s forte. CJ Cregg might have been the first woman to hold the Chief of Staff position in the fictional West Wing universe, after Sorkin left the show, but for every CJ Cregg, you have a Donna Moss, an Amy Gardner or an Abbey Bartlet. Women who, despite their smarts, their skills and their degrees, are first and foremost narrative devices and chances for the men around them to show off their legal/scientific/historical knowledge. And as Taylor Tetreau remarked in “Why the West Wing is secretly a little sexist”, “when a woman actually does show intelligence, everyone is blown away as if it’s this huge statistical improbability and plot twist”.
When I disagree with the values projected by a company or a creative, I withhold my pounds in protest and refuse to buy their products or I ignore their work. For example, I don’t purchase American Apparel clothes because of Dov Charney (the company waited too long to oust him for me to reverse). I don’t purchase fashion magazines that publish editorials by Terry Richardson, nor do I purchase from brands that have him shoot their ads. I don’t watch Woody AllenorRoman Polanski movies anymore.
All these men have been either convicted of sexual misconduct or assault, or have been accused of it in a way I believe to be true. Sorkin is sexist, which is a different, some would say lesser, issue. His particular brand of sexism is dangerous because he gets a platform for it, watched by millions of viewers, lauded by the industry. He gets a platform to show men and women that this is how society should be. He gets a platform to explain why he’s not sexist and we all just need to chill out.
Even though The West Wing errs on the side of sexism in its characterisation and plot lines, the issue wasn’t raised much when it premiered, nor is it a large part of the current West Wing discussions online. It took me multiple viewings, once I had gone past the writing, the plot lines, the walk-and-talk, to realise how sexist it actually is. The sexist criticism however has been an integral part to the reviews ofThe Social Network, for which Sorkin won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and of The Newsroom, for which Sorkin was nominated by the Writers Guild of America. Because of that very criticism, I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of The Newsroom, including the previously-discussed “Oh Shenandoah”, watched whilst researching this post.
I think that’s going to be my middle ground: The West Wing exists already, I have seen it so many times I could recite entire episodes and considering I already own the DVD box set (two of them actually) there is no consequence to me watching it or not. But I won’t support any more Sorkin projects; I will not watch The Newsroom or any of his upcoming work, including that Steve Jobs biopic. If it ever gets made…
WhenI pledged not to buy another book until I had read all those currently on my shelves, I meant biographies and fiction. I didn’t consider cookbooks. After all, who reads cookbooks? I don’t mean checking the odd recipe here and there, when I am feeling a surge of food bravery. I mean reading a cookbook cover to cover. Turns out, I am now a cookbook reader. In fact, nothing gets me to sleep quicker than reading a few recipes in a row. It also gets my cooking imagination going. Me! The put-the-fish-in-the pan and steam-the-veggies kinda gal.
But not anymore. These days, I cook. In fact, I have been dedicating a few hours of my Sunday and another few mid-week to cooking. All this because I have stopped eating sugar. Well, mostly stopped eating sugar.
Around this time last year, I had a migraine. It wasn’t my first one, but it was my worst one. Once the pain had subsided, the shock of what my body could inflict remained. So I looked into steps to prevent it from happening again. First, I went to the optician, who wasn’t impressed he hadn’t seen me in over two years. Second, I went to see Elspeth Waters, a naturopath.
Waters asked me to fill a food diary and to write down how I felt throughout the day. I thought I ate healthily - having my five-a-day, limiting carbs, drinking my milk, but Waters took one look at the diary and told me I was S.A.D, i.e. on the Standard American Diet. Being a French woman in London, I took offence. What she meant was that I ate too much sugar, not enough protein and that my diet was nutrient-poor. Her assessment was thorough and therefore freaked me out in a “what am I doing to my body?” kind of way. She suggested I increased my protein consumption, decreased my sugar intake and generally ate better food in an effort to stop what she thought was a case of leaky gut syndrome, a still-disputed ailment whereby germs, toxins and molecules seep through your bowels and into your body and bloodstream, causing a range of more-or-less serious conditions. Not fun.
So just before Christmas 2013, i.e. the perfect period for it, I decided to decrease my sugar consumption. It improved my recurring headaches but despite knowing that, I quickly fell back into bad habits. I hadn’t found a way to quit sugar and make it fit with my lifestyle.
That was until July, when I read about Sarah Wilson’s cookbook I Quit Sugar (IQS) on Felicia Sullivan’s blog, love.life.eat. Since then, her blog has been my ongoing inspiration for my new cookbook buying compulsion. She makes any recipe sound yummy and fail-proof, and her photographed results are mouth-watering, as was the case with the cooling avocado soup + cucumber recipe which got me to buy I Quit Sugar. As far as I know, Sullivan doesn’t make any money from her cookbook recommendations, but she should look into it.
It took me a few pages of Wilson’s book to realise that I hadn’t quit sugar at all (the heaped teaspoons of jam in my morning cottage cheese should have been my first clue). In fact, I was still addicted to it. But I was addicted to it in the worse way, the socially acceptable way: drinking a glass of juice every morning, having a couple of fruits during the day, a slice of bread, a few dry fruits… Because I wasn’t having sodas, alcohol or junk food and possibly because I was putting my head in the sand about it, I hadn’t realised how much sugar I was having. According to Wilson, this is quite common and the situation she was in before she quit, which I found encouraging. So last July, I decided to try it myself - to not to eat sugar anymore. I’d like to say I have never looked back, but I’d be lying.
For a start, my pantry was ill-stocked to quit sugar. I had chocolate, I had caster sugar, I had Demerara sugar, I had maple syrup and I had agave nectar. Yes, even agave nectar and maple syrup are against the IQS philosophy because what I was quitting wasn’t sugar, it was fructose. The issue with fructose has to do with how we don’t have an off switch for it, how organs react to it and so on.
The first step was to get rid of all the sugar (well not the caster or Demerara sugar, I still make crumbles from time to time). Then I had to buy new ingredients, such as coconut flour, rice syrup, stevia, 100% chocolate slabs, avocado oil… I also had to buy new kitchen utensils like a muffin tin, a blender and a potato masher. As you might have guessed, I am no cook. I know people who cook for fun, like my sister who baked olive, ham and cheese breads to sustain herself through exam time. I cook because it’s the only way to limit my sugar intake. And also because it’s a nice thing to do while listening to Serial.
My estimate is that thanks to those few hours a week behind the stove, I have cut down sugar by 80% compared with what I ate in June. There are times I am better at it than others. For instance, I still have pizza twice a month, even though there is sugar in pizza, in the tomato sauce and the dough. I also have normal chocolate from time to time, or cakes and biscuits. And I keep making crumbles because I love them and the people I (rarely) cook for expect them.
What I have realised, is that I don’t like sugar. When you don’t have it anymore, or at least when you diminish your intake, sugar starts tasting different. Large quantities of it at once are burning. When I have it, it goes straight to my head. I know now that my sugar intake isn’t so much about taste as it is about reflex. It’s about the “I have worked hard, I deserve some chocolate” or the “I have been to the gym, who cares about that slice of cake” mentality. It’s about finding solace and comfort. And that for me has been harder to replace and retrain than educating my taste buds to not having sugar and therefore to realise what a number of foods really tastes like. I reach for sugar when I am stressed, then I am grumpy at myself for eating it when I get a headache, which in turn makes me more stressed (I’m working on it).
The other difficulty has been to find ingredients and dishes that don’t include sugar. It really is everywhere. I had a moment of despair during the last fashion week when, walking through the Waitrose ready-made-meals aisle, I could barely find one dish to buy. Hence my new routine of cooking up in bulk on Sunday afternoons. Although I still need to be careful with recipes made from scratch. Pancetta often contains sugar, as do pâtés and most breads.
Which brings me to my cookbook buying fever. Wilson’s two books and her website are great, but they only go so far. Although I have no problem making the same recipe again and again (I make her apple pancakes, with added grated ginger every weekend), sometimes I want diversity. Which is where love.life.eat has come in handy.
While I was experimenting with eliminating sugar, Sullivan was experiencing a food change of her own. She realised she couldn’t eat gluten anymore, an imperative a lot scarier than what I was attempting. In the process, Sullivan has been trialling a number of cookbooks, experimenting with a wealth of food and ways to cook them and she has inspired my own cooking. So into the Amazon basket went Angela Liddon’s The Oh She Glows Cookbook: Over 100 Vegan Recipes to Glow from the Inside Out, Juli Bauer and George Bryant’s The Paleo Kitchen and Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley’s The Art of Eating Well. I also bought Gwyneth Paltrow’s two cookbooks because they seemed to fit my requirements.
Although all those books can be dubbed ‘healthy’ cooking, or at least would like to label themselves as such, they all use fructose. I have to amend most recipes, swapping maple syrup with rice syrup and sugar with stevia. Or omitting sweeteners altogether, especially for recipes which contain fruit as I find those sweet enough anyway.
The common point between those books (and Wilson’s) is that they start with an introduction which roughly goes: I was having significant health issues, ranging from feeling sluggish and having slight headaches all the time to more serious ailments like an autoimmune disease or really bad blood tests. Then I started looking into my nutrition and decided to document it on a blog, either as a way to further my business or to share my journey with the world. Since then I have been feeling so good, my health problems have healed and no new one has appeared. So I am writing a book to share my experience and help you heal yourself. This is food as medication (although pleasure is always mentioned) in a way cookbooks of yore never thought.
Reading these introductions, part of me felt dubious. Until I realised that quitting sugar had stopped my headaches, that I slept better and more importantly that I - the girl who always sneezes and gets into fights with her sister about tissue overconsumption - had only gone through two boxes since July. I used to go through two boxes a month, my Waitrose order history proves it.
Another common point of these cookbooks: they are obsessed with ‘nutrients’. Everything has to be nutrient dense, it’s exhausting at times because, although the point of these books is to show they can be combined, I still think taste first, nutrition second. No, I won’t eat a spoonful of coconut oil because it is filled with nutrients, will stop my sugar cravings and will keep me full. There are behaviours in those books I can’t get my head around and choose to ignore. I am puzzled when I read rave reviews about the benefits of having your own garden because I grew up in the French countryside and I have seen the difference in ingredients between what’s at home and what’s in London.
Something else I find annoying: cookbooks have different covers, sometimes titles, in the UK and the US. I’m sure it has to do with marketing, but I am still trying to crack the reason why British public gets Paltrow’s book as Notes from my Kitchen while the US enjoys My Father’s Daughter. I doubt if anybody on either side of the Atlantic bought the book for Bruce Paltrow, sorry Gwyneth. It doesn’t mean though that the measurements are done in a UK-appropriate way. Both Wilson and Paltrow’s books measure in cups and I spend so much time converting, at times with appalling results, I have decided to invest in a set of measuring cups which, as it turns out, aren’t the tea-drinking kind.
Of the many nice things I have experienced quitting sugar, the improved health, the cookbook discovery, the best one has been the community. I was lucky that a colleague of mine decided to do it a few weeks after me and talking recipes over, getting inspiration from the lunches she cooked, sharing muffins and jointly saying no to the afternoon cakes has helped. As have the numerous blogs and Twitter feeds I have found documenting people’s sugar-free journeys - their successes but also their difficulties.
Prime among all the difficulties is the way people react. People tend not to like it when you are quitting sugar. One of Wilson’s theories is that we all know that it’s bad, but few of us decide to come through and therefore negative feedback is really jealousy. This is a nice, ego-boosting way of rationalising it but I think part of the problem is the lack of education. We have been told for so long that fat is the enemy, with sugar being tacitly accepted, that it is hard to change this food paradigm. My only response is to try it yourself for two months and if it doesn’t work for you, revert back.
Science says comparing yourself to others is a sure road to unhappiness. Comparing yourself to fictional characters, responsible for nothing, with no consequence to their actions and only answering to the whims of the people who wrote them might be even worse.
Re-watchingSex and the City Seasons 1-6 (SATC) this summer, I haven’t so much been questioning why I don’t have a wardrobe equal to Carrie Bradshaw’s, why I don’t have brunch with my friends every weekend or why I don’t get dates. I love my wardrobe and I know why I don’t have brunch or get dates more often: I’m not interested. It’s just not part of my lifestyle or plan at the moment.
Six seasons didn’t make me wish I had a life similar to the SATC characters. Instead, six seasons made me wish I wanted a life like theirs and question why I don’t. Shouldn’t I want to see my friends more? Shouldn’t I have three friends to complete me? Shouldn’t “having a boyfriend” be one of my goals for the upcoming months?
I am pretty content with my life at the moment, and I have been for a few months now. No, I don’t “have it sorted” but I feel I am exactly where I should be and more importantly, exactly where I should be to get to where I want to be next.
Last month, I launched the new website I had been working on for six months, Women in Foreign Policy (#wifp). The aim is to inspire girls and young women to pursue a career in foreign policy by featuring women already working in the field. It’s been a lot of hard work and I still spend at least 15 hours on it every week. This block of time, though a significant part of my not-at-work hours, has made me less stressed because I have finally landed on a project that crystallises much of what has been important to me for the past few years and which I had been struggling to articulate: foreign policy, women’s rights and women in the workplace.
Women in Foreign Policy demanded a new prioritisation of my life, which was easy and natural as soon as I had decided to launch the site. Out went the TV series, the friends I had been seeing by habit rather than for pleasure, the cinema sessions. After the website became a definite, these things were not sacrifices, not even compromises. I had taken one big decision, which meant all the other, smaller decisions required as a consequence were easy to reach.
As a result, the lifestyle I am leading, in many ways a slight extension to what I have been doing for years but with more purpose, is the opposite of what SATC argues for.
SATC is all about human interaction. There are scenario reasons for that. My weekends, between barre classes, sugar-free cooking and typing on a computer wouldn’t make for good TV. As an introvert, I recharge by spending time on my own, writing this blog, reading a book, and so on. Social situations exhaust me, sometimes even when they involve my favourite people.
Introverts are absent from SATC. Susan Cain, who has made a career arguing the introverts’ case in booksandTED talks, said to The Guardian that “society has a cultural bias towards extroverts”, a phenomena particularly visible in American series and films. So with every SATC episode I watched, I felt I should reach for my phone and text a friend to meet up. I never did, because launching the site on my self-imposed deadline of 1 September was what mattered most this summer. Seeing friends was for previously-agreed dates, not for last minute whims. Judging by SATC, this makes me a terrible friend but in my book, it’s because friendships need investment and I invest best when things are organised.
Of course, interactions with men to romantic ends, something my life has been void of, are as important in SATC as interactions with friends. As much as I enjoy the characters of Big, Petrovsky and Steve, I have no interest in getting a real-life equivalent - it’s not part of my current life plan. Although most friends and family have stopped bringing up the topic beyond an irregular tease, SATC made me feel that, just a few days after my 28th birthday, I should be yearning for a mate or fear ending up an old maid.
By myself, I feel good about those decisions. Being forced to question my choices, even by a TV series, is good. It’s part of the reason why I am where I am now rather than in the dull lull I was in two years ago, a dissatisfaction I could have carried forever. However, although I am truly happy with my decisions, I need to learn to be at peace with them, even when the representation of a different lifestyle reverberates the image of my life as a boring, lonely and odd choice.
Maybe it’s the upcoming school year. Maybe it’s the change of season. Maybe it’s confirmation bias. Of late, my Feedly has been filled with more articles than usual about wardrobe clearing, often illustrated with photos of Carrie Bradshaw pondering the content of her walk-in closet.
With my impending move to a new flat the floor below mine, last weekend I set to rationalise my closet, which comprises of: two chests of drawers (one for underwear, one for trousers and capes), four under-the-bed drawers (for jumpers, sportswear, pyjamas and handbags), one wardrobe (for dresses, skirts, hanging tops, folded shirts, t-shirts, scarves and stripes), an in-wall closet (for coats, jackets, hats and two boxes of out-of-season clothes) and a set of apparent shelves (for shoe boxes). I don’t have a walk-in closet; I have a walk-in bedroom filled with clothes.
I wasn’t just motivated by the prospect of moving. After five years working in the fashion industry, and 18 months writing about foreign policy on the side, I am going through a phase of fashion ambivalence. Maybe Leo should have said: ”There are three things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ‘em: fashion, laws and sausages.” (The West Wing 1x04 “Five votes down”). Last month, slightly sickened by the contrast between tweets on Gaza and tweets on seasonal trends, I purged my Twitter feed of most fashion-focused accounts.
My ultimate aim, by clearing my closet, was to make space. Not space I can fill with new items, as is often the drive behind a closet clear out in fashion magazines. Not even space so that I can spend less time in the morning deciding what to wear. I plan my outfits for the week ahead every Sunday, a routine that takes no more than 15 minutes and means I always know what to wear. I want to create space because creating space to think, creating space to act has of late been a mantra of mine. I wanted my wardrobe clearing to be the equivalent of my 30-minute lunchtime meditation session in Saint Faith’s chapel at Westminster Abbey: something that would help me stand still.
That’s for the intention. The reality has been somewhat different, as I have only managed to fill two large black The Kooples canvas bags with unwanted clothes and shoes, and flogged a few items on eBay.
Considering all the writing available on the topic, clearly I’m not the only one struggling. Wardrobe clearing (or detoxing, or rehab, depending how hip and conceptual you want to make it) is a burgeoning business with companies like Wardrobe Mistress(UK,starts at £595), The Organized Move (Southern California) and Clos-ette (USA) offering it as part of their services. It’s not just for busy-ness, practical or can’t-be-bothered reasons. Strangers have no emotional attachment to your clothes, nor are they under any misconception that you might just wear it, one day.
My dresses are particular culprits when it comes to the “I might wear it one day” illusion. Yes, I own a few that still have their labels on. Back in November 2012, I wrote about these dresses as “concept clothes”, items “generally bought in the sales, because I either think I look hot in them, have been lusting after them all season long or think they would be perfect for a cocktail party or a date, never mind I never go to either.”
Had I stuck with the intention for my wardrobe clearing, I should have gotten rid of these. Piled them high on my bed, folded them and filled another (couple of) those large black The Kooples canvas bags with them. But I couldn’t. They’re just too pretty, too exciting, too promising (although of what?). More importantly, looking at them makes me happy. As a middle ground, I swore I would wear them in the next few weeks. But then August decided to pretend it was October, and since the concept dress is never warm, that didn’t happen either. I could probably wear them under my latest concept coat: an oversized, laser-cut olive leather lace number I promised myself I would buy when I first saw it on the runway. I eventually purchased it last month for a fraction of its original price. Because I am so worried about damaging it, it remains in my credenza at work - as I don’t want to carry it home when there’s even the slightest chance it might get rained on. When it eventually gets home, I am thinking of hanging it in my bedroom so it can be admired every day. It’s not a coat, it’s art.
The “if you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it” rule features in pretty much every single wardrobe clearing article. Other recurrent themes include sorting your clothes by type, then by colour and making sure that you can see everything. Inspecting my wardrobe recently, a friend was surprised by how organised it is. I have my mother to thank for that, as she always classified our clothes by type and taught us to iron. Well-ironed clothes fold better and are easier to sort than not ironed ones, fact. Ironing is a great time investment when it comes to your wardrobe. It’s also a great thing to do while binge-watching Netflix or box sets and, if you’re anything like me, takes out some of the guilt of spending time Just Watching TV.
Another favourite wardrobe cleaning advice is to only keep clothes that fit you, not just body-wise but also lifestyle-wise. As my body hasn’t changed in 10 years, this isn’t one that helps me chuck out clothes. In fact, when I go back home, I still wear some of the t-shirts I bought age 15. I have been working in the same place for over four years now and I think my colleagues might get worried if they saw me going a full month without stripes. And yes, since this is fashion, I have even worn some of the concept dresses to the office, when I needed to self-justify not giving them away.
Most of my concept dresses come from MAJE, which brings me to the last recurrent advice I have noticed about clearing your wardrobe: only keep items of clothing you can match with others you own. No point owning a great silk shirt if you have no bottoms with to wear with it. I solved that problem a while back by only shopping at a few brands, which is why my wardrobe is exclusively made up of Burberry,Kookai, The Kooples, MAJE, Petit Bateau,Des Petits Hauts,SandroandZadig et Voltaire. I know they’ll always fit together, likely because the same team always designs them. Even though inspiration and fabrics change season to season, they stick to the spirit of what made their brand popular and as such, it makes their clothes easy to mix and match.
This isn’t an article however about how I couldn’t clear my wardrobe because it’s already perfect as it is. I am proud of my wardrobe. In fact, when I think about whether or not me, aged 10 to 15, would have been happy of what it is like, my measure of success in all domains, I am sure I would be blown away by the wardrobe I have put together, in absolute modesty of course.
Going through my wardrobe, trying to apply the clearing out advice found online, made me realise how much I love the clothes I have. It also made me realise I take issue with these type of articles because of the consumerism they exemplify.
If you believe The Devil Wears Prada, Anna Wintour archives and reorders the content of her closet every season. But Anna Wintour has a duty to the business model she represents to show that clothes should be renewed everything six months (or less, if you count pre-collections). That goes through the editorials and articles in Vogue as well as her own public appearances. You and I? Not so much. Buying trends, datable, obvious trends is what creates the clear out need as their shelf life is short and they will have to go to make space for the next ones.
My other issue with the concept of a wardrobe clear out is that it presupposes discontent with its content. But if you know who you are and what your style is, if you have decided on what image you want your clothes to project, and if you’re not buying compulsively, is there any need to clear, beyond the ill-fitting, the stained and the broken? Hand on my heart, I can say I know every single item in my wardrobe right now, and love every single one of them. So they all stay.
My secret crumble: lessons from 15 years of crumble baking
My sister Camille, who claims Bree Van De Kamp as her Desperate Housewives counterpart (at least on the cookingfront), once shared her theory that you can pretend to be a good cook by mastering one savoury and one sweet dish. My sweet one: the fruit crumble.
I build entire menus around the fruit crumble, the perfect comfort food. It works on children and adults, it is adaptable to any season and to any fruit bowl, it is a great way to use leftover fruits and it is almost impossible to mess up, unless you leave it in the oven a bit too long.
Not that I have been a stranger to crumble disasters. There was the blueberry and peach crumble that burnt just short of being inedible. It taught me that to bake a crumble to perfection, you should turn off the oven as it is still slightly undercooked and leave it to finish baking as the oven cools down. But aside from that near carbonisation, most incidents occurred at the topping-making level, particularly at the flour-adding stage.
Camille and I started making crumbles in our early teens, after we found a recipe in Julie, a girls’ magazine she had a subscription to. Even though neither our parents are the crumble type, the crumble is linked to memories of Nevers summers and pêches de vigne, the flavoursome, fleshy white and red peach that grew in our gardens by the basket-load. We would gather the fallen ones in the warmth of a late summer morning or the heat of a mid-afternoon. Camille would get on with the peeling while I would make the topping.
One year, we decided to welcome our parents back from a work weekend away with our special: a pêches de vigne and stewed apple crumble. Too much enthusiasm getting the flour out of the packet meant our parents were met with a yummy dessert, a just-cleaned-to-the-last-corner kitchen and two freshly showered daughters. Ten years later, making a summer berry crumble for 12 in my London flat, windows wide open to deflect the July heat wave, a draught that turned the kitchen white surprised me. Not what you want two hours before guests arrive. So this is my second crumble-baking learning: adding flour needs to be handled with care.
And while on the topic of topping, here is my third lesson: use salted butter. Most recipes advise unsalted butter but I find the salt, contrasting with the fat of the butter, the sugar of the crumble and the slight acidity of the fruits gives the desert an additional depth of taste. Possibly because the salt-fat-sugar combo is so addictive.
I also differ from many recipes when it comes to assembling the topping. I never use anything but my fingers to do it, first because it was one of my favourite parts of the baking process when I was cooking with my sister, and as such is fuelled with memories, and also because no fork, no pulsing gives as good a result. Now for the less glamorous details: you need to really wash your hand and trim your fingernails. Also: no nail polish. I never put the mixture in the freezer or the fridge, although that’s something I only heard of recently, rather than because the eventual result is bad.
I keep mentioning contrast and texture because this is what makes the crumble the perfect dessert. To add crunch, I often add almond flakes. Some recipes suggest multiple types of nuts, or even oats, but I stick to almonds, because I also include ground almonds in the dough and I don’t want to overpower with too many flavours. Almond flakes burn easily so it’s best not to add them from the start. I tend to scatter them on the crumble at the same time as I turn the oven off.
Making the perfect topping however counts for naught if the fruits aren’t quite there. They need to be perfectly peeled. Biting into a spoonful of melting, fragrant apple and ginger crumble and finding a little leftover of skin isn’t the contrast you’re going for. I count the time it takes to peel the fruits in terms of TV shows. For instance, a rhubarb, pear and apple crumble for 15 is a three West Wing-episodes crumble.
To reach the required texture, so the fondant perfectly contrasts with the crunchiness of the topping, some fruits, particularly winter ones, need to be stewed first. This is another chance to add depth, for instance with cinnamon or mint. The spice is more powerful if it was added at the stewing stage rather than on raw fruits, before putting the dish in the oven. Plus the spice used is an indication of what to serve with the crumble: rather than vanilla (expected, safe and boring vanilla) go for cinnamon or ginger ice cream. If you’ve added either to the fruits it will complement them perfectly.
Not all fruits should be stewed though: for a mango and apple crumble, you should stew the apples but use the mango raw. Same for kiwis. Summer berries don’t have to be stewed but doing so will increase the juices, which means they will ooze over the topping and slightly candy in the oven. If your stewed fruits have rendered a lot of juice, apply a very thin layer of flour to the bottom of the crumble dish to keep the desert moist rather than runny.
After 15 years of crumble-making, I have settled on the following ingredients and proportions for four people, essentially a twist on The Guardian’s “How to make perfect crumble“ recipe:
100g of plain white flour
50g of ground almond
35g of Demerara sugar
35g of caster sugar
125g of salted butter
And here are a few recipes I am hoping to try over the next few months:
Do you remember Earl Spencer’s oration in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of his sister Diana, Princess of Wales? His promise that “we, your blood family”, would protect her sons, rang odd. By most accounts, they were on the estranged side of family relationships. His diatribe was lauded as perfectly capturing the mood of the public but also criticised for attempting to appropriate Diana’s memory.
Remember how when Alexander McQueen died, fashion journalists made a point of telling the world they called him “Lee”, highlighting that only the ones who really knew him called him by this intimate moniker. It was a badge of honour, a way to give their articles more weight. McQueen probably never had so many close acquaintances.
Last week, I read a French Vanity Fairfeature on Patrick Pelloux, an A&E doctor and columnist for Charlie Hebdo accused by some of his colleagues, as well as by the family of some of those who died in the January 2015 attack on the magazine’s office, of appropriating post-shooting grief for his own ends, including helping with his own grief.
Whether public or private, everyone’s grief is different. There might be seven acknowledged stages, but we go through them at different pace and in different ways.
When my friend Phil died on 27 December 2014, I was surprised by how many people claimed to know him well. These people, from all periods of his life, from high school to the BBC, from climbing to orchestra, were all legitimate friends.
My surprise partly reflects how, whereas Phil excelled at social relationships, I lead my life with the idea that I can only have a finite number of “real” friends. He’s shown me the opposite was possible, but I have yet to figure out how to transpose it to my life.
There was something in the anecdotes that people told - it felt like everyone was trying to claim their own memories of Phil, but also show that they did spend time with him, that they were close. That time will never be expended, there is no second chance to improve the relationship. Sometimes it was more about proving to ourselves that the relationship with Phil had been as good as it could have been. Maybe it’s part of the “guilt” part of the grieving process.
I saw Phil for the last time a year ago this week. He made dinner with pantry leftovers, in an attempt to get rid of as many cans as possible before leaving for Canada. It wasn’t his best culinary effort. That evening, there was a lot going on, between his Banff Centre plans and some work mess my end, and we didn’t have the conversation I really wanted to have. There would be time, when he came back from North America. We talked about how quickly the next six months would go. Between Christmas and the summer, he would be back in no time. The next six months did go quickly, but mostly because his death turned them into a blur, both when I was living through them and in retrospect.
After Phil’s death, every time I spoke to someone about how sad I felt, they told me that it would get better or (my favourite) that I would get other friends (fuck you). My mechanical answer when people say they are sorry is “it’s fine”, as it was when my grandfather died. That was 2.5 years ago and really, it’s fine now. Ten months on, I don’t feel any better about Phil’s death as I did in the first days of 2015. It hasn’t gotten better; I have just learnt to live with it.
Phil isn’t the only friend I said goodbye to this year, but he’s the only one I think of so much, likely because the other ones are all alive and, judging by Facebook, doing well. Those goodbyes were based on the realisation that we’d grown apart. They were goodbyes of acceptance. Or to borrow from Veronica Mars’ opening credits, “A long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven’t thought of you lately at all”.
I don’t have enough retrospect yet to know what 2015, the year I was 28, will mean in my life. Earlier this month, when I turned 29, I took stock of the past 12 months and realised it has been my most reclusive year to date. I went four months without seeing anyone who wasn’t a colleague, a barre class teacher or my flatmate. I didn’t even realise it at the time. I barely have a memory of these four months, though I know I read a lot and watched a lot of Netflix, the only two things that would cancel out the white noise in my head.
I tried blogging many times, about books I’d read, films I’d seen, marketing initiatives, idiotic fashion decisions, but never had the thought power to finish these articles. I’ve only posted one real entry since April, about the Audrey Hepburn exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Writing it reminded me how much I like thinking, analysing and then publishing. Yet I’ve had the hardest time carrying a thought to its end. I couldn’t carry my thought far enough to make it interesting. For me, who lives a lot in my head and who pays prime importance to how well my brain works, this was scary. When I decide to write a blog post, to go and see a movie, to write up a Women in Foreign Policy interview by the end of the weekend, I do exactly that. This year, so many to do lists went uncrossed, so many goals unmet, that I stopped creating either altogether. At work when people told me I was organised and productive, I smiled and cringed.
AtWomen in Foreign Policy, periods of high determination and productivity, when I created Facebook ad campaigns to gain new followers and emailed women to interview, alternated with periods when I burnt bridges and stopped responding to any email. For most of the year, the one thing I have wanted was to go back to sleep, both in the physical sense and in the metaphorical sense of “let me forget”. There were too many questions, none of them with answers, and the prospect of everything and anything was exhausting. Sometimes in the summer, I think I actually burnt out.
Most of my questions, sprouted by Phil’s death and my sister’s wedding, were about my relationship with other humans, something I don’t normally spend much time thinking about.
InThe Road Less Travelled,M. Scott Peck takes the example of a woman whose life is regulated and reclusive: she always goes to church at the same time, sits in the same place, has few-to-no friends or relatives, has been carrying out the same meaningless job for years. This fictional example illustrates Scott Peck’s point that some people choose to live a life “devoted to avoiding risk” by fear of being hurt if they get too deep in human relationships. I have been doing a lot of that this year, going home and going to bed, knowing to the minute what the day would include. I also had times of wanting to do something completely reckless, like resign my job, get drunk or pick up a guy in a bar. I never followed any of them through because they all just seemed so… tiring.
When Phil died, speaking to people he knew, hearing about him at his memorial, the overwhelming feeling was that he was one of those friends who changed the world. His death saddened me as much as the idea that he wouldn’t be able to achieve what he was meant to. Some would make an argument that Phil was always meant to die young, that he had achieved his purpose on earth and that it’s my role now to make sure that he didn’t die in vain. Every time a famous person dies young, there is at least one op-ed to explain that they will forever be crystallised in common consciousness as full of the promises and possibilities, and it’s no different when the person dying young is a friend.
A while back, reading Carl Bernstein’s biography of Hillary Clinton, I realised that no matter how you explain her career, whether it’s grit, spirituality, ambition, determination, network or smarts, the only reason Clinton can run for President is because she is alive. I’m sure there are many other women born at the same time as her who could have run too, but died before they had a chance.
Phil will never get to change the world, no matter which shape it would have taken for him, because he isn’t alive anymore. But I am. 2015 has been a year of questions. In the midst of all the questioning and the tiredness, I started feeling that I owed it to him to make the best of the fact that I am alive. I don’t know which form it will take, and it hasn’t made me less tired. But after a year of questions, I’m ready for a year of answers.
Every time I peel an apple, I think of Phil. I peel a lot of apples: grated into pancakes, stewed with grilled halloumi cheese, cut into morning bakes…
Every time I put an apple on the cutting board, split it into four wedges, take the pips out, I can picture myself in a similar kitchen two summers ago, asking Phil if he’d want some. I was having a dinner party, to which Phil had arrived on time, somehow. He was hanging out in the kitchen, ostensibly to help, but really to get a bite of whatever would be served.
I think about Phil every time I see a folded bicycle on public transport. When the cab driver has Radio 3 on, after a long day at work. Anytime I listen to classical music. Every time I struggle to understand a new economic policy. I have thought of Phil more since his death than I did when he was alive.
The apple is just one of those things I didn’t know I associated with Phil until he died. At the time, it was too small to be note-worthy. These days, cutting an apple punches me. People say peeling an apple will be normal again, eventually.
Pierre also died late 2014. Yet Pierre’s death doesn’t matter because Pierre never existed. Pierre Clément, lawyer and Spiral character, was born from the imagination of some of France’s most successful scenarists. In the latest series, they kill him, senselessly.
I read spoilers so I knew Pierre was going to die. Yet seeing it on TV, a mere six hours after I learnt of Phil’s death, affected me more than it would have in any other circumstances. It projected the image of grief as we know it, as pop culture presents it, as we are told to feel it. Laure and Joséphine, Pierre’s ex- and current lovers, burst into tears and fall into each other’s arms at the hospital. It was the image of grief as I can’t express it.
I didn’t burst into tears when I was told Phil had died. I think I made a cup of tea, but my memories of those days are fuzzy. I am sad, but sad for me doesn’t translate in tears. Sad for me translates in heightened anxiety. Sad translates into nightmares and in moments of complete panic. Into constant feelings of flight.
Before feeling sad, I felt nothing. Not in the sense of ‘who cares?’ but nothing as in too many things to process, which amounted to little more than cotton wool. Then the Christmas break ended and work was intense. There was menswear show copy to deliver, data to reconcile, tight deadlines to meet, late night cab rides with Radio 3 on. After Pierre’s death, Joséphine increases her caseload as a lawyer.
Throwing oneself into work is another way pop culture tells us characters mourn. It was the image of grief as I could express it. In fact it’s not a great way not to deal with it. Every moment I wasn’t at work, even now, I struggled to focus. But work was another matter. I had two of my best, most efficient months at work.
And this is where the third death, or rather the next 19 deaths of the title, fit in: the Charlie Hebdo shooting. I was trying to focus on work and there was death, again, unavoidable, talked about by everybody. After 7 January, I kept going to bed thinking that when I would get up the next morning, none of it would have happened. Phil dead, 19 people dead in Paris. It all seemed impossible. Not just surreal, impossible. News headlines, sitting down with people to exchange memories of Phil; that didn’t make it more real.
I knew intellectually that it was true. But even though I understood the reality of it, that Phil doesn’t physically exist anymore, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t define what feeling it would be like. I still can’t. I’ve been back to Phil’s flat, expecting every time he would turn up, while knowing he wouldn’t. Maybe that’s what feeling real is like: knowing what could have been but will never be. Knowing what I would want to tell him, or share with him, but can’t. Knowing that none of the things I thought I’d do with Phil, as we grew older, would ever happen. Knowing that I will never create new memories with him.
Phil will never come over to eat one of my crumbles, he will never run me through why my argument is wrong, he will never smile at me or listen to me in that way that made me think I had a true friend in him. But I’ll keep cutting apples into crumbles; I’ll keep wishing he were there to explain something to me or just to have a chat and enjoy dinner with. Always.
Tracey De Santa from Grand Theft Auto V doing a (mostly) first-person-view private dance.
A little something different this time around! A few glitches with her model because I had to swap stuff around, and there’s a few instances of clipping since I had to basically trick her into playing her animations while facing roughly the right direction which took longer than I’d like to have spent pushing a virtual twenty-something around a strip club for. Animating the camera on this was really fun!
Anonymous asked: “Most of my sentences start with the word ‘I’ or a character’s name. It makes the writing feel monotonous, but I can’t seem to fix it or change my habits. Any tips?”
What is most likely the issue is that your scenes contain only action. “I do this” or “he does that.” That’s not so much of an issue, but once you include more exposition and especially since it’s first person, the thoughts and feelings of the main character, the issue will likely resolve itself.
