sweet bread/salt water

It's been a bit of a funny month - I realize I have said that every month - but April felt long and strange. The tarot card I had mapped for April was the King of Wands: Rhea, who reads for me every year, told me that this was a time to enjoy myself, host, be hosted - and to be honest, last month felt like the first time in a long time I have allowed myself to actually be in the world, be social, while working a huge amount, too. I'm used to working and then just... sitting around playing Zelda in the quiet, but something about this month drew me out of my shell.

So, rather than writing about the weird or the work, I want to tell you about two important things. I hesitate around writing earnest, literal nonfiction about my life, lately. I get to around one essay a year. But look, I think that these two things are bigger than photographs or captions. I need to remember them, and feel an innate desire to talk about them, and that's what this place is for, in some ways, I think. So no sauces this time from me, though I swear I will tell you about the sardines soon. No songs. Just the bread and the water, for now. Thank you for waiting for this newsletter, and for being here.

*

Sweet Bread

In London, the hotel room didn't have any windows. It was white and grey and purple, and time stood very still there. I had a deadline, and a meeting, and a show, and no windows. The space, low ceiling and too-big television that I never turned on - had the distinct feeling of being like a little cell on a big ship. A space craft, or a boat - both of those things kind of hotels in their own right. I don't travel alone very much anymore, but this time I was by myself, eating almost exlusively meal deals from the Tesco in Shoreditch, or any open M&S I passed in the evening on the way home. I used to live like this. Packet sandwich to packet sandwich, strange, cheap hotel rooms all linking together to become one space, adjoined by heavy fire doors, unlocked by hundreds of odd little key cards. A low beep and a click. The heavy thunk of a lock, and you're on your own. A sequence of bland meals and unfamiliar ceilings, a late twenties, a life. So there is something nostalgic to this, now on the late side of the pandemic as my life picks up speed again, rather than a discomfort at the lack of daylight, or cutlery.

L meets me one afternoon outside the strange hotel, and we walk to a tiny pub in a railway arch together, with her small, woolly dog, Mollie. When we were in college together, L had always said she wanted to run a cafe - she emigrated right after we graduated, and worked a set of jobs that I found in turns glamorous (restaurants!) and daunting (teaching small children!). We keep in touch in an easy, quiet way. She wrote me letters when I lived in San Francisco. Sent me errant cloth napkins from the big-name restaurant she worked at, which I used as dish-towels until they came apart at the seams. We exchange voice notes, sometimes. Wave to one another across the internet, our lives gone in different directions entirely, but remaining in touch. I love having relationships like this: tidal, easy. Our boats pull into the shores of eachother's lives every so often, fortified by time.

L and I drink little beers for hours and we talk about where we're at, both of us working for ourselves, her for the first time, me thick in it, years in it, weathered by it. She runs her very own cafe now - The Can Club - a bustling, bright, yellow and white arch that I visited with CB when we were over in January. I had felt something under my ribs move with pride for her, in that space. How incredible to grow something from the ground up, how rare to say you will do something and then, to do it. I stopped just short of cheering when I walked in the door, like you would at a football match, giving it a full throated you love to see it - because it was a busy morning. Every table filled, alight.

For our pub date, I brought L a notebook from Badly Made Books, (my favourite stationer in the world, this one had a pattern composed of fruits and vegetables, L being both a vegan and a tremendous chef, a lady who grows things and makes them delicious) remembering that she had said she was thinking of starting a diary again. They are the notebooks I use: robust, thick paper. There's something comforting to me about giving friends the same paper I write on, too. It's funny, her handwriting stands out in my memory from years of letters: a rare thing to get to remember about someone, in a world where all our correspondances are in pixels and neat, even font. She brought me something, as well. Packed in baking paper, carefully folded and tied with twine, half a loaf of banana bread she had made. Thick, substantial slices with nuts and chocolate chips: one for each morning I had in town. A set of breakfasts.

I've been handed toast and pastries this spring. I've been handed sweet bread, and compassion. To be fed, I think, is to be loved. I found the tiny bundle of breakfast deeply moving, in the unexpected way that I do the occasional poem or song or picture. The plate of jam toast, the fresh croissants, ciabatta cut in half studded with sweet tomatoes. I think a bit about the silence of the 2020-2022 wash, how void of community it felt, how unmoored I became. How I didn't need to be made any weirder than I was before the lockdowns, to be honest. How somehow, despite this hermitage, I still wash up on the coast of the lives of people I have loved for a long time, who bring me things to eat. How I made banana bread over and over again during the lockdowns, watching bananas turn rancid in my silent apartment, and how it truly never tasted even nearly as good as the low spice and warm flavours of L's. How the crumb was immaculate. How it was vegan! Not an egg in sight! This is the ancient thing, isn't it, about breaking a fast. Eating something after a long night with nothing in your belly. Being fed. Being ready to start a new day, nourished and warm.

In the post, a week after I got home, she had sent me a teacloth and a little letter, her handwriting just the same. Ten or so years after I first received the contraband dishtowels sent across the world to me, another fabric link in a long chain. This one is patterned with stars.

*

Salt Water

I'd spent time during the last few years watching the small tribes of women I know migrate towards the ocean on social media. It seemed to me to be a thing groups of friends did together, people who already knew each other already, but nobody I ever felt confident asking could I join in with. Swims seemeed to me like an elaborate, athletic brunch, a girls' club. A display of the community I profoundly missed, and was too nervous to just put myself in the way of. Less about the water, and more about the people meeting the elements together.

I can see the sea from some points in the mountain suburb I live in. A hovering blue entity past the tree line. An abstract notion, and something I missed. I was reared by the sea, spent many days and evenings as a teenager traipsing the northside coastline, all salty air and salty humour. I've been in the drink a little in the last few years: notably, with a friend from abroad, a far more experienced swimmer and dipper than I. I treasured these small few days we had letting the Dalkey water lash us cool in the heat, the toddle back to her house in towel ponchos, the hearty dinner and summery wine afterwards. With a friend from my podcasting life, one day, too. These afternoons rang out as rare bright notes in an otherwise very quiet time.

At the start of April, though, S reached out and asked would I like to catch up, and go for a dip. I frankly almost took her arm off with the excitement. We hadn't seen one another in around a year, and what better way to bridge that gap than to walk, screaming, into the ice cold water of springtime, gasping and swearing. We did it every week last month, in the end, and may well do it this week too. S is confident with the water, able to let the ice knock her lungs and push through, but she's patient with me as I step in little by little, feeling the burn and the numb start at my ankles and crawl up. I am very candid about the fact that I am a little bitch about the cold, folding my arms tightly across my breasts, my hands tucked under my armpits. I can get in, just at my own pace, and she reminds me of that, even though she's ahead of me. It feels good, too, to scream aloud with someone. To be allowed to react the way your body wants to: to cry out at the shock of cold, and for it to be expected, and permitted, given the circumstances. There's a lightness to it. An absurdity. A 'what the fuck are we doing?' until, of course, your whole nervous system lights up and you feel absolutely alive, on planet earth, somehow, against all odds. Hot blood in the icy drench. Soft, strong lungs and kicking legs. We get out, then we get back in. We get out, then we get back in. Easier, and easier, each time.

Together, afterwards, we've taken to sitting a few minutes with a little flask of tea that she always remembers to bring (herbal, like a kind of nourishing perfume) and watching the truly seasoned swimmers migrate in with either their tiny casual washbags and towels under their arm, or their full rig, Dryrobe swaddled. Either way, they all feel to me like they're just not afraid of it, the cold and the burn that comes with it. I tell S, sardonic, that'll be me in no time. We watched one lady strut in in the late morning, a full face of makeup on, and lipstick to match the pink flare on her bathing suit. She sank her body into the ice water as though it were tropical. We watched her, mystified by her stoicism, her glamour. To our ears, she did not scream 'Fuck' once, the way we did. She did not make a noise at all. When she got out - after swimming almost to the yellow buoy in the distance - her makeup was still perfect. Her hair, dry. I think of the power in her body. The tolerance she had built. I want that. I want to be part salt, all water, unafraid.

We listened to two women bitch elaborately about wedding party invites as they tread water near us. They wore sunglasses, both, like secret agents of the sea, leaving land to talk smack. We walked out over the wet sand on the day the tide was out, as far as the buoy the pink lady had swam to, only to find ourselves just up to our hips, impossibly far from shore. We traipsed the shallows drinking coffee from flasks, particularly early one morning. The sun glittered and cast our shadows long.

I get it, you know. The clusters of Irish people becoming shoals at the coast. I'm happy to join them, to join in, and to have a pal by my side. S called it 'witnessing eachother', and she's not wrong. The water is both deep, and not that deep. It is both mundane, and supernatural. It will get less cold as the year goes on.

*

That's my late dispatch, friends. Thank you for your patience. My confidence has been in the pits, so rattling off a newsletter has felt a bit more dicey than it previously might have, and I'm glad you're here to read along with me. I really thought I was going to write about banana bread, and the sea, but it turns out I was writing about people, again. So much of it all comes back to people, doesn't it?

Thank you for subscribing, for coming close to the experiences that I've had this month. I'll be back to snack chat and book chat really soon. Like, I really have been eating a lot of sardines, and I've had some amazing sauces I really have to tell you about. I'll explain more about what's been going on in the S Tier newsletter, if you fancy it, and look, an extra special thank you to those of you in the S Tier who held on for me last month. You're getting a double class to make up for it, and you'll get more later in May too.

I opened by saying that my Tarot card for April was The King of Wands. My card for May is The Chariot. We move. We're holding on tight, white knuckled and full of hope.

Until next time,

This, or better!

<3

Griff

P.S

P.P.S

As usual, my apologies for wonky spelling or grammar. I'm fighting for my life out here. I'll fix it in the archive if there's a glaring error, I promise! <3