When reading certain baking blogs I often wonder how people can take themselves so seriously.

Arguably, I should A) fuck off back to reading about Art in the age of mechanical reproduction
and then discuss what it means to take yourself seriously/ re-classify what I think of as the appropriate forum for seriousness and B) steer clear of discussing sincerity on a blog of my own creation because dayum girl, that shit is meta and you are similarly self indulgent.

I could even, C) talk instead about the fact that the northbound Jubilee line is absolutely brimming with men who look like they have just got out of prison (it brims with crims perhaps?) and that today I was in a carriage with the following ‘characters’:

i. grim knife-wound man, eyes like a bulldog about to tear apart a delicious newborn child.
ii. sniffy fart man, who let rip upon sneezing. He did the latter every ten minutes.
iii. angry man, who could not understand why HE WAS NOT IN A SEAT.

How ever, I am nothing if not weak-willed and thus, steel yourselves, for here we go.

Sincerity and grim saccharine sweetness are apparently bedfellows. Perfectly excellent cooks can mar a recipe by deciding that, midway through instructing you to cream something, they break off and discuss deep love, the need to connect, the rustic charm of their kitchen or the universal quest for love.

The above is suitably cutesy to put you in the right mood.

I just wonder if baking really is about love? Baking is fascinating – who doesn’t love edibel science – and it calls for skills different from those employed in cooking. My sensitive palate (sneaky brag, sneaky brag, sneaky brag) is precisely bugger-all use during the baking process, whereas my risible lack of skill with scales is suddenly catastrophic.

Similarly, ‘cool’ substitutions don’t work either. Bananas will never be the same as egg, and granulated sugar has more in common with gravel than with caster sugar.

So yeah, baking is interesting. But it is also the pursuit of braggarts. Nothing is better recieved than a cake, even if the recipient is thinking ‘Oh look, you smug bitch, another dramatically iced eight-layer sponge to get through whilst I am trying to lose weight.’

Nothing is more smug making than having made something yourself. Even if nobody wants it and you have to force it down their ungrateful throats.

‘This? Oh, it was nothing – just a little something I whipped up over the last 72 hours.’

Baking is a way of saying that you are organised. Skilled. That you excel at things. That you are in touch with your coveted feminine side. That you are kind and considerate and have a sense of fun. That you could probably parent well. That you are generous and aware, Amelie-style, of life’s little pleasures. That you are wholesome and naughty. That you own cookery books and will maybe one day own an aga and a husband who works doing something vastly high-paid that does not encroach on his work-life balance and that allows him to be creative.

Forgive my cynicism. Perhaps baking is pure pleasure, golden love, and giving. For most people I am sure it is. But to co-opt the aesthetic of baking into a discourse of femininity, aspirational ownership, generosity and female achievement is weird. And rife.

I have little to know knowledge of how to radically re-possess baking, ridding it of all these connotations. Who knows if I even want to? They certainly don’t stop me baking – nor do they stop me feeling smug – nor do they even stop me using bananas instead of eggs, early grey tea instead of milk, and sometimes icing sugar instead of actual sugar.

Having rambled sufficiently, I am off to lie down. Feeling really quite grim at the moment – no idea why – and am self medicating with sleep and paracetemol.

Easy on me

This weekend involved tagine, harem pants, a million new people to meet, hookahs indoors, sticky grenadine on the floor, making drop scones with a hangover, Brixton market, winning my first ever physical fight, and finally remembering what this song is:

Not bad.

See you on the other side.

People Reading Poems

Poetry is wonderful. But in a world where we consume words in public spaces, it is not usually possible to read it aloud.

This is a terrible shame. In most poetry, the sound and feel of the words is at least as important as the form or the punctuation. It is as if we are reading in black and white, rather than glorious technicolour.

So, a girl I know, who, as a translation student is hyper aware of the importance of sound, rythm and speech patterns in understanding and appreciating verse, began a website.

People Reading Poems

It is, quite simply, a collection of people (not the author) reading poems that they like. Genius.

Weird, right? Internet pictures are so odd.

It is such a rich, glorious resource. It has helped me understand poems, discover new poets, and enjoy the multiple voices of people, alive today, who also love words.

Reading a poem aloud has never been easier, even if you aren’t an actor.

You can record them straight onto your computer or, if you fancy, download the audio programme audacity, which allows for easy recording and saving in a number of easy-to-email formats.

In a blue peter style, here is one I recorded earlier, using audacity. See how easy it is?

So go on, check it out! I promise it will change your life. And if it doesn’t? Then read me a poem that adequately expresses your feelings of betrayal.

Meeting at gateposts to swap fortunes with thieves.

I would like to read your tarot. I would. I need practice. You need your fortune told. I don’t promise futures -can’t and that isn’t what its there for. But I can tease out threads and be as a mirror for things you were looking for.

It works best, like all curious things do, by candle light. Incidentally, candle light is also best for eating, bathing, and dreaming. I like the way it warps everything out of itself and into something glamorous. A visual trick, an ocular hallucination.

Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.

No. Really. London furnished us with a sunrise and a sunset of incredible majesty, and although I fell over (I slipped on a biscuit, prosaically) it has been a wonderful day.

I have spent a lot of it preoccupied with the moral implications of biography.

I do not invite you to join that meandering thought, however. These ones are more fun:

And please, come and have your tarot read. I promise to light candles, wear a silk scarf, and get you drunk afterwards.

And it went a little bit like this:

Lips aside (but not aside at all, in fact, brought into sharp focus) I like Lana Del Ray. She makes me feel like I did when I was fifteen, urgent, unsettled, as if my skin is too thin and I might laugh, or cry, or swallow the world up. Nostalgic prompt.

This song makes me think of first kisses.

And then, I was chasing fifteen year old Alice through the internet and fell over this.

First kisses. I had several. What? Thats how people like me get a bad name. But mine came in categories. I bet yours did too. There was never a certain contender for first-kiss stories, the way there are for periods or cigarettes.

There is this place in Edinburgh where I seem to kiss.

Yes, really, outside here.

The corner away from the main street now has a bus stop. You can sit on the wee granite windowsills and get a cold bum until the bus comes.

That was where the first proper kiss ever was, on my first ever date, back in the days when I was still hysterically frightened of going up town alone. Fear was one of the main features of my adolescence, but this date was worth it.

His name was Camp Craig – a moniker he, too, adopted – and he was ginger, thus uniting two of my endearing ‘types’ – effeminate men and men with red hair. I met him at Saturday drama class. I don’t think we fancied each other a jot. With hindsight, and a wanky sense of my own importance, I might argue we were a delightful early queer coupling. We weren’t. We just liked each other’s cool trousers.

We dates rather chastely for about two weeks and putting me on my bus home, he pressed his lips to mine.

I actually own a print of those cherubs, because I have absolutely no taste whatsoever.

Then there was the kiss on the bus (remind me to tell you that story some time).

And then of course there are all the other ones. Oddly, I am still at least facebook friends with almost all of my important kissing friends, and thus cannot elaborate. Camp Craig, however, evaporated.

In news not to do with kissing, someone exceedingly generously gifted me BFI membership. Shit is about to become a lot more cultured, as they say.

I am overdosing on Azealia Banks, a new low being listening to her at work, bobbing my head as I cut articles out from the Daily Telegraph. Democratised culture is a wonderful thing, and juxtapositions are to be encouraged (although, if we go via LaGuardia school of performing arts and Prince William’s ‘hip-hop dancing’ then the juxtaposition slips into curious collage, shedding all false notions of polarities of authenticity) but sometimes I wonder what the snobbish god of culture thinks, looking down on me.

I imagine he weeps.

Other things I have been doing involve ambitious editing programs, egyptology, and this website here.

I am now helping to revamp, and make new, this wonderful venture.

Go and read about it and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read a poem aloud and send it in. Your favourite one. All you need is a book and your laptop. You can even remain anon should you so choose!

Email your poems to: jenny[at]peoplereadingpoems.org, and you can be a poetry rock star.

Before

An old poem.

Before
Come in to the garden,
watch the black-beaked ships sail,
out of the harbour, out of the stone walls, out of their safety
into the sea.

Rest one hand in my hand,
whilst the storm clouds thicken,
black against the white cliffs, black against the sunset, blacker than our shadows
over the sea.

Wait a while beside me
for the twilight’s fingers,
silent on the pine trees, silent on the red house, silent on our out-breaths,
lighting on the sea.

In the next year of being here, lets dance more.

New Year and I am ill. Lying in bed a long time makes you think. It also makes you mental, grouchy and prompts people to tell you that you ‘smell ill’.

Ew.

However. Here, as a distraction, and an homage to what I hope will be my future good health, here are several things I want to do this year.

Hesitant to ‘resolve’, but totally scornful of calling them ‘Revolutions’ of any other self improving smug bullshit.

So. A list. I have a friend who is a goddess for whom everything appears effortless. I imagine as I write this that I am her. And that these things will come to pass.

1. Learn to drive. Because frankly, this is getting beyond a joke, and my chauffeur has not yet found me in London.

2.Learn to like avocado. Baby steps, guys. I can’t promise olives, or even oysters, but surely, avocados?

3. GET MORE OF YOUR FUCKING WRITING PUBLISHED YOU TWAT etc etc. I mean, with less guilt, and more poems. But you get the idea.

AVOCADO REMINDER

4.Exercise. Everyone else does. And they look nice, often.

5.Invest in expensive shoes. Because all my shoes are shit: none fit.

6.Have more fun. Not the sort of fun that involves painting using those funny numbered kits, but the sort of fun that involves taxis, cold streets in high shoes, and not caring so much that everyone around you is a total bore.

7.Get my bloody brace fixed before I go insane and tear my teeth out.

8.Visit more places.

9. Learn to cook more things – specifically, meat. All meat.

10. Enjoy myself. Seriously. Less anxiety, more healing, more trusting and loving my silly tiny body, and for the love of god, have something amusing to tell my children when, over one of those funny painting kits I am forcing them to do, they ask me if I was ever young.

This came up when I googled 'fun'.