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I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of sounding grandiose — I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in
the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them.

Yes, I know: We are all so very busy. Between work and family and social obligations, where are we supposed to find the time? But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of
being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to
become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.

If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your
identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?

Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.

I don’t deny that you can derive a lot of meaning from pursuing an activity at the highest level. I would never begrudge someone a lifetime devotion to a passion or an inborn talent. There are depths of experience that come with mastery. But there is also a real and pure joy, a sweet, childlike delight, that comes from just
learning and trying to get better. Looking back, you will find that the best years of, say, scuba-diving or doing carpentry were those you spent on the learning curve, when there was exaltation in the mere act of doing.

In a way that we rarely appreciate, the demands of excellence are at war with what we call freedom. For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment. Especially when it comes to physical pursuits, but also with many other endeavors, most of us
will be truly excellent only at whatever we started doing in our teens. What if you decide in your 40s, as I have, that you want to learn to surf? What if you decide in your 60s that you want to learn to speak Italian? The expectation of excellence can be stultifying.

Liberty and equality are supposed to make possible the pursuit of happiness. It would be unfortunate if we were to protect the means only to neglect the end. A democracy, when it is working correctly, allows men and women to develop into free people; but it falls to us as individuals to use that opportunity to find
purpose, joy and contentment.

Lest this sound suspiciously like an elaborate plea for people to take more time off from work — well, yes. Though I’d like to put the suggestion more grandly: The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. But demanding excellence in all that we do can undermine that; it can threaten and even destroy freedom. It steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards — the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.

Confession: I haven’t been on a long-haul train journey for close to a decade now. Somewhere between the red-eyes and the fastest route(s) available, I became a co-conspirator to a culture that thrives on instant gratification, missing out on the pleasures of slow travel in the process.

But it wasn’t always so. My childhood memories, in fact, are laced with train travel, particularly annual trips from my hometown of Aurangabad to my nani’s (maternal grandmother) home in New Delhi. The 22-hour sojourn was a summer ritual we had down-pat. The food my mother packed was always my favourite—fluffy pooris with spiced potato and okra that I was guilty of having one too many of. The flow of snacks never slowed down, as at every station, we eagerly awaited vendors with their city’s specialities, feeling much like Harry and gang spending all their galleons on the Honeydukes Express Cart aboard the Hogwarts Express. And then there were those implied competitions with my little brother — like who would be the first to spot that odd thumb-shaped mountain we always passed or guess how long the tunnel would last. It was also on these journeys that I made some of my best friends — a motley crew of Betty, Veronica and the Wakefield sisters — and was privy to the adventures of the accidental detective Chacha Chaudhary.  

Travelling for weddings — with the extended family, cousins and domestic help in tow — was a crash course on the big fat Indian family. Our maharajs (cooks) would take over the pantry to dish out piping hot snacks, and the elders would take over whole compartments for their poker marathons, while the younger lot contented themselves with antakshari, charades and rookie card games, some amicable, some that ended in tears. Not to forget those school field trips where 36 hours on the train were enough to build friendships, spark romances and form inside jokes that have us in hysterics to this day. 

As the self-isolated me reminisces from the comfort of my bed, it takes me back to a simpler time. Maybe the younger me was really on to something? That sipping on diabetic-sweet filter coffee as you aimlessly stare out the window doesn’t mean you’re letting life pass you by. And so what if the scenic route is the longer one? Time is always on our side.

It has me nostalgic for when food was about familiarity, not Instagram credibility, when zero signal bars on the phone did not provoke panic, and when sitting still and doing nothing was everything. When we were just along for the ride; with all its delays and detours, delights and discoveries; because we had nowhere to go but everywhere.

This is a missive from within my four walls. Outside my window, the birds wheel obliviously against an inappropriately cobalt sky and the trees in the graveyard swell and exhale with a vitality missing from the surrounding streets, which are mute and grey as a tombstone.

There’s a caustic irony in writing about the beauty of community when you’re alone (or in the suddenly casual parlance of the quarantined, “self-isolating”). A fortnight ago, I would have told you about the specific joy of threading together stories spun in the chaotic charm of city squares; on the crest of steel-tipped seas; along the confetti coasts of faraway shores. A chorus of places and voices that has been suddenly silenced, as the threat of the virus races over borders like a flame on a filament and it becomes clear that our curiosity and connectedness, those very human traits that drive us forward, could kill us.

Yet even as the world has contracted to the size of my flat – as shops have shuttered, planes have grounded and “be my quarantine?” messages on my Hinge profile have run riot – it’s struck me that in opposition we’re being forced to think beyond ourselves, perhaps for the first time in years. Where previously we obsessed over “self-optimisation” and success – stuck in a hedonistic whirl of self-centredness, too busy polishing the present to look either in front or behind – now we must acknowledge that we are not just parts of the machinery of capitalism, but interdependent human beings.

We’ve paid lip service to this idea for so long but haven’t really imbibed it. We pasted up blue-sky buzzwords like “crowdsourced” and “sharing economy” in our boardrooms; yet how could we honour them when our real-life communities crumbled and we all tried to outrun each other, understanding that coming first is better than coming together? When we travelled, we fetishised the “ancient wisdom” of nodding nonnas or Buddhist monks, trivialising their lifestyle to trite, monetisable catchphrases (“la dolce vita”, “ikigai”) before hurtling back to our hyper-speed bubbles.

Perhaps the funniest thing about this enforced pause is that we’re suddenly adopting the kind of “village thinking” that previously we canonised from afar. I’ve had a half-hour video call with a neighbour, who’s organising a support group for the most vulnerable in our area. I’ve picked up a jar of sourdough starter from a kind-souled baker, who’s biking free loaves to those who need them. I’ve joined live-streamed skill-swapping sessions on Instagram; set up a weekly vegetable order with local farmers; spoken to my parents every day. Yes, there are those hoarding loo roll in their attics and riding the last packed tube train to hell, but this kind of behaviour has never looked less cool.

The Okinawans have a phrase for the social support groups that see them through their famously long lives: “moai”. As we shakily start to construct our own moais – or perhaps solidify those that were there all along, shining like spider-silk – I’ve been thinking a lot about how when we can touch again, we might remember the way the distance felt. How we might rebuild the idea of “community” with the ghosts of these networks at our shoulders, renewed and ready to work out our collective knots.

This is a missive from within my four walls, which contain multitudes. It just took a village to realise.

The very first time I arrived in India my taxi driver took me straight from Delhi airport to a tea shop. At that little roadside stand, I stood in the orange dawn and learned a steaming hot masala chai wipes away the exhaustion fourteen hours of air travel wreaks on the body. My visit to India was of the work rather than spiritual variety but nevertheless, I was pulled along by the tide of energy that flows through the subcontinent. I didn’t know it at the time, but that journey would mark the beginning of a profound two year period of love and loss, in which chai would play a small but steady part.

I had chai every morning during that first trip. I loved everything about it: the taste, the ceremony, the morning ritual. The way the steam unfurls in the air of a newly minted day, the way it warms your bones in the cold Indian morning. The aroma; ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, peppercorn. The audible rush of the gas stove, the patter of stainless steel pans, the delicate clink of chai glasses. The way the streets of India come alive in all their vital chaos and in the middle of it all is the chai shop. Men reading the morning papers, women trading stories.

A chai wallah in Jaipur shared his recipe with me and once back in rainy old England I attempted to recreate it, landing on the right quantities after several failed attempts. And so chai became my morning rite, a mooring through the turbulent times of losing a father and a relationship. There’s something infinitely reassuring about watching the sunrise with a cup of warm chai in hand.

Two years later I returned to India once more, traveling from Rajasthan in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south where along the way I discovered the nuances of chai; bhar style, where the drink is taken from small unglazed ceramic cups, giving it a rich and earthy flavour, to the dramatic long pour manner of Tamil Nadu, which allows the boiling brew to cool slightly before hitting the glass. In northern Rajasthan I spent a few days in the Thar desert, drinking chai (obviously) and reflecting. This trip seemed a bookend for the past two years and the mark of a new beginning.

An old man in a village in the south told me masala chai is medicinal, that it cures all. Take it every morning and you’ll live a long and happy life. I can vouch it does wonders for jet lag, delicate Western constitutions, and perhaps especially, for the soul.

Recipe

Chai Masala Mix:

20g ground peppercorn (I like my chai peppery, so perhaps dial down on the quantity for your first batch!) 

20g ground turmeric 

25g ground ginger 

10g ground cinnamon 

10g ground cardamom pods

1g ground cloves

1g nutmeg 

Whole milk 

Tea (I use loose leaf or Clipper as their bags are plastic free0 

1/2 teaspoon honey to sweeten 

Process 

Heat the milk and tea in a saucepan. Once the milk starts to warm, add a teaspoon of the masala chai mix and stir.  Keep the pan on the flame until the milk starts to simmer & bubble. Add honey to sweeten. Et voilà. 

“I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

So says Marianne to Connell in (I don’t need to tell you which Sally Rooney novel this is, do I?) I have felt this sentiment with friends, family, lovers and sometimes even strangers. But it rings most true with a meal cooked at home and a table set for one. Because to be alone is not to be lonely. Sufjan Stevens sings “to be alone with you.” For me, it is “to be alone with food.” 

Since the dawn of time, food has been a social act. It has signalled gathering, a coming together. To break bread is to resolve conflict amongst friends and enemies. The disciples tucked into wine and loaves at The Last Supper. The best part of a wedding – and a funeral – is the snacks, right? 

We host dinner parties. We squeeze in a lunch reso at local restaurants. We sink Prosecco at bottomless brunch (2021 is the renaissance of this strangely addictive Sunday activity, I’m sure of it). We buy rounds of pints for our co-workers/uni mates/Hinge dates. We swap stories around the fire after boozy family barbecues. But that person sitting alone enjoying a glass of orange and a plate of sardines? They’re having a frankly joyous time watching the world go by, getting lost in a book or their own thoughts. 

Feasting alone is a quiet act of resilience. It’s to go against the grain of needing to prove your social value. A gentle fuck you to the status quo that tells us – I’d like to add here, primarily women – that to be alone is to be in lack. It’s an uncomfortable habit to get into. But there are some gratuitous advantages. Like: no need to reserve a table because you can always slip in at the bar. It’s far sexier. Bonus points for two dirty martinis before you get onto the small plates. Also, that whole sharing vibe when one of you is veggie and the other a meat eater? Delete. Insert whatever your stomach desires here. 

The joy of solo eating shouldn’t stop at restaurants. To ease you in, make it a ritual to cook for yourself – just you – a truly epic meal of double the portions necessary. And eating it at the table. Or on the sofa. Maybe candles? Some mood music? Eaten at a conversational pace. Because it’s tempting to wolf your meal down without thinking when it’s you and your 345th episode of Scandal (just me?). The beauty of food is about enjoying getting it on the table, and the pleasure of savouring each bite. 

Loneliness can often feel like spinning slowly, trying desperately to grasp at anything to anchor you – but everything still slips away from your grasp and you become too tired to try again. Being alone is like standing still. Grounded. Peaceful. Perhaps in front of a chopping board. Or sat down with your favourite meal (roast chicken, slow-cooked beans and mustard vin salad for me). Dig into the solitude. It will always be there for you. 

I don't remember much from childhood summers. I'm sure they were fun. I only remember more summer schooling than languid lounging. The closest beach to Dallas was six hours away, beaches were for lazy people according to my dad, and our industrious family culture thus carried on. 

Weirdly, I do remember our short-lived Fourth of July tradition: crystal digging. Instead of driving six hours south to the murky Galveston shores, we'd drive the opposite distance up to Hot Springs, Arkansas. All in service to set up sweaty shop at a muddy crystal mine among the Ouachita mountains. 

My best friend and I would swelter in clay mines while excavating uncut gems in ratty hand me downs and New Balance sneakers before retro was cool again and crystals got gooped. We'd squeal upon spotting a small hunk of quartz with its jagged imperfections, caked in mud and covered in orange iron stains. We'd lug buckets of dirty quartz back to the rental house for our dads to hose down. We'd marvel at our shiny loot.

Two decades later, I have no idea what happened to our crown jewels. I only know that they passed the original no bullshit radar: our simple third grader hearts, that cared about neither the spiritual richness of indigenous healing powers nor the manufactured marketing of touristy gift shops. Hearts for which evanescent glee was enough. The dopamine kick we got from crystal digging was somewhere in between seeing Dolly Parton at the neighbouring wax museum and buying kawaii stickers from the Japanese stationery store, which is to say: the joy is here today, gone tomorrow. The joy is—

Nostalgia, in landlocked summers.

Fun, for workaholics.

Magic, from being. 

The first thing you have to do is check the tides. I feel like an explorer— like someone who knows the names for various different knots—every time I log onto tides dot willyweather dot com dot au to find out if a trip to Lady Martins Beach in Point Piper, Sydney is on the cards. 

If you’re in luck and it’s low tide, this little skirting board of a harbour beach that hugs the very edge of Point Piper before it empties out into Rose Bay, will have a strip of sand wide enough for you to throw a towel upon. If you’re unlucky, and I’ve been unlucky so many times, you’ll misjudge your timing and it’ll be high tide. Waves so forceful they’ll give you a bit of a fright will come crashing all the way up to the walls of the houses that look down imperiously onto the water. If you’re not careful, you’ll be completely washed out. Beach bag sent floating into the sea, towel covered in sand and seaweed, phone, wallet, book—everything—soaked through. 

There is a thrill in all this. A trip to Lady Martins Beach is like a game of Russian Roulette. Are you going to find a beach or are you going to find nothing but water as far as the eye can see? Are you going to beat the tides or are you going to… not? There’s barely an amenity in sight: no public bathrooms, no shower, no coffee cart. You have to be prepared if you want to swim at Lady Martins. You have to BYO. You need to be a planner, a do-er, someone whose first thought when faced with a clear blue sky and a morning stretching out before you like a song is to check tides dot willyweather dot com dot au.

You need to be someone who understands that a good part of the joy of a beach day is in its stripped back simplicity. What you see at Lady Martins is absolutely what you get, and what you see is this: a beach like the dream of a beach, sun-kissed and serene and solitary. Even at its most heaving, on a blistering day when everyone in Sydney— everyone on the whole of Australia’s eastern seaboard—is by the water, you’ll probably be sharing this fifty metre marriage of sand and sea with about, oh, eight other people. Tide checkers, the lot of them. My sort of people.  

I love hot chips. To me, they epitomise summer. 

There are the chunky, near-soggy ones wrapped in butcher’s paper, best eaten on the sand by the sea; the kind from a public swimming pool, overly salted and oozing with oil, served in yellow and red cardboard cups; and the type from the local RSL (which are unsuspectingly the best type) brought to you in a steaming, golden heap with a side of lush garlic aioli.

Many will agree that some of the finest hot chips you’ll come across in Sydney are from Out Of The Blue (known to the locals as OTB). The compact, teeming take-away shop on Clovelly Road is an institution, and a cult classic for beach burgers. They’re $10 and come with an enormous, paper-wrapped portion of hot chips, which are quite honestly perfect. 

Each is just the right amount of greasy, enough to make your fingertips slightly glossy. They offer a beyond ethereal crunch, yet somehow manage to softly render in your mouth. The chip-to-salt ratio is also without fault—not enough salt to knock you out at once, but more than enough to make your lips just pursed at the end of your meal. And they are served at the kind of piping hot temperature that could leave the roof of your mouth with an ulcer if eaten too speedily.

OTB chips conjure a lot of summer memories for me. Awkward, semi-sober first dates on the rocks between Clovelly beach and Gordon’s Bay; tropical, rainy days squished in the car with girlfriends, windows fogged from the rising steam of our food; and drunken Sunday afternoons spent at the bowlo, before wandering up to that beloved corner to indulge in a much needed pile of crisp, fried potatoes, while sitting outside on the curb.

It’s not just OTB chips that make me fuzzy with nostalgia. It’s literally any kind of hot chip. Because these little wedges of joy are the ultimate symbol of community. Food has long been known as a way to bring people together. Hot chips go beyond that, by creating food memories to last a lifetime (insert smiley tear emoji here). 

I asked my friends about their favourite hot chip memories. Here are just a few of the responses:

Sitting with Nana in Mylstom, a small north coast town, on a grassy hill above the Bellingen river with a huge bag of hot chips. They were the best chips because they were just big cut, well cooked and lots of salt. I loved grabbing the $5 note to go pay, getting a little ticket, and the feeling of excitement when your number got called - Ingrid

Going to OTB and taking a risk on getting the “fancy stuff” (smoked paprika) sprinkled on my chips. My order hasn’t changed for 11 years and this was the first variation - Luke

My mum and I loved the chips at Milkbar at Waitara station when I was a teenager. Every once and a while we would stage a rendezvous (with me illegally texting her from my phone near the end of school). She’d pick me up with a parcel of delicious hot chips and we’d eat 90% of them in the car before we got home. We definitely kept these trips a secret from the rest of our family - Em

My family and I always go swimming down at Broadstairs. As soon as we hop out, we run to the same little fish shop by the sea, where the chips come with lots of salt and vinegar, and mushy peas, in greasy paper. They’re so hot they almost burn your sea-salt lips. It’s not so much a memory as it is a recurring activity - Lottie

Can you think of any other dish that evokes this much passion? I certainly can’t.

The thing about Venice is that the town planning is so mad—who designed this place? M.C. Escher?—that every single outing feels like a journey, which means that every single destination feels like a discovery. And actually, the thing about Venice is that they all feel like your discovery, as if nobody has ever made that discovery before, even though Venice has been around for a long time, and everyone who has ever been is obsessed with it. 

I love Venice. I love the romance of it. I love the salty mornings and the misty evenings and the tiny narrow alleys that twist in on themselves until they burst open into some sun-drenched piazza where a huddle of old Italian men in pleat-front trousers are drinking espressos and talking nonsense. I love the way that Google maps just doesn’t work there; it’s given up. You have to surrender yourself to the city and walk until you get somewhere. Sometimes you get to where you’re actually going—Osteria Al Portego, for little plates of cichetti— and sometimes you don’t. 

The time before I was last in Venice was in the claustrophobic heat of June, when I willingly paid [redacted] euros for the use of a hotel swimming pool, just to cool down. It was on this trip one afternoon when I found it: Gianni Basso Stampatore. A tiny, historic printing shop filled with stiff, clotted cream-coloured business cards and letterheads, stamped with artful logos in coloured ink. Intricate columns, lions on the prowl, seahorses with individual scales painstakingly drawn on. These etchings were arresting, but I cannot lie. It was the names underneath them that really caught my eye: Ben Affleck. Angelina Jolie. Hugh Grant. (His logo is a winged lion atop an open book; your guess is as good as mine.) 

Of course I bought some. A consultation with owner Gianni, flicking through his examples—Ben Affleck has a film camera, so cliche—helped narrow things down. I wanted my name, printed underneath an inky, navy blue shell, on neat cards about the size of a block of Tony’s Chocolonely. A few weeks later, the box arrived at my flat: 200 custom-printed cards and 200 envelopes, thick and elegant and immaculate. And everyone has got their ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Congratulations on your engagement/baby’ messages on my special, personalised stationery ever since.

I know that Gianni isn’t my discovery. That he’s been doing this for decades; that he’s the literal stationer to the stars. I know this. But I still get a special, secret thrill every time I put pen to my paper. Nothing in my life has ever felt as luxurious. And they are a true luxury: Indulgent, egotistical—did I mention these cards have my actual name branded right across the top?—chic and Italian. They are also expensive, which all pleasures ought to be if they possibly can. But only a little. I can afford this luxury. I just need to find my way back to Venice so that I can buy some more. 

Proust wrote of the madeleines that brought him back to a specific moment in time, almost as if it was suspended, hanging amongst the stars—yet close enough for him to grab it each time he smelled or tasted those “short, little plump cakes”. One of my many Proustian madeleine moments begins in a hotel room in a sprawling American city. I’d pull back the heavy cloth curtains just a little, gazing out from the dizzying heights of the nth floor wondering if all the people in all those skyscrapers were doing the same thing. This was before I had any understanding of morning rituals, of waking up next to a lover, the sweet smell of coffee, the long, languishing lie-ins where time would fade into the afternoon.

Instead, all I knew was waking up wired; desperate to explore and itching to leave the hotel room where my mother and brother still slept deeply (but never softly). My dad, ever the light sleeper, would be up alongside me, and we’d creep out of the room, me pulling dad across the carpeted hallway to the lift, ready to descend into the madness.

Before the advent of Google, smart phones and touch screens, there was the hotel concierge, who would happily point us in the direction of the closest McDonald’s (welcome to America). Weaving through the streets of some anonymous city (Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, if memory serves me right), we’d make our way to our final destination. Glassy buildings served up quick, everything-in-motion reflections of our journey. I was always hungry. For adventure. For action. For a sausage McMuffin.

The order was always the same. Three sausage McMuffins for me, Dad and John; a bacon and egg one for mum. Four hash browns. Three black coffees. Two orange juices. Torture is holding onto a paper bag filled with fried, salty, oily goodness, the smell wafting up as it seeps through the paper, and not being allowed to eat it until you get back to the hotel room. The pace always quickened on the way back.

I’d run into the hotel room, impatient and wild eyed, nudging my brother awake, something I’m sure his teenage brain allocated in the growing ‘reasons why I didn’t want a little sister’ checklist. But there was coffee. And hot hash browns. And soft, squidgy McMuffins. We’d all sit around the coffee table next to the window and dig in. It was something that always marked the beginning of a holiday; a ritual to rally around; something to look forward to and miss when it was over (all too quickly).

I find myself recreating this in later life. Waking up at 6am in a hotel right by LAX, right at the beginning of a two week long road trip, my brother still asleep next to me because he remembered how to beat the West Coast jet lag; me sneaking off to the McDonald’s (conveniently located a two minute walk away from the front lobby). I made the same order, but seeing as I had grown into my palate, I get myself a black coffee, too. By the time I come back, he’s awake and we continue the ritual, eating it around the coffee table next to the window.

Now, it’s a slightly more rare occurrence. A drive-thru here; a hungover pre-train meal there. Something to look forward to. Something to savour. Something nostalgic to bite into. It still tastes the same, which is perhaps the best thing about a good old McMuffin. It doesn’t change. It always brings you back to those youthful memories. And there’s not a souped up £10 breakfast sandwich in the world that can recreate that sense of childhood wonder.

In the afternoon or early evening, when the light turns from milky and gold to milky and blue, I eat an orange in the bath. An idea from the veins of the internet (Reddit circa 2016, then everywhere else)—the instinct is not my own and so it feels languid and full of plenty. The arm’s-length impulse: not something I need, just something pleasing for its own sake. 

An orange fits in your palms like the golden ball in the fairy tale. Dig your thumbs in at the crown. Feel your nails slice into the hard peel and the bright, tender sting hit your nostrils. Pull away the dimpled skin and thick, clean pith. Dig in your thumbs again and listen for the small padding noise as the fruit separates into velvety, plump, ordered segments (almost too big for your mouth, not quite). There’s a lot of water in a bath: a bit of juice running down your fingers, your wrists, your chin, won’t make you sticky—just leave that clean, sweet smell. 

I lived with a friend in my early twenties who spent parts of her childhood in Morocco. She didn’t wear perfume, just orange blossom oil. It’s possible this is misremembered, but I do also remember her eating whole oranges, and wearing a cotton robe around the house, printed with oranges. In Morocco with a man I loved, later, there were utes filled with oranges. Orange slices in the water (another unreliable memory). At the night stalls were towering piles of delicate desserts, drizzled with orange blossom water. Citrus of all kinds, stacked in shining pyramids.

‘I’m of the belief that human beings need, to live their lives, more or less the same climatic conditions as lemons,’ a professor tells his students, somewhere off the coast of Greece, in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. When she was six, my little sister ate lemons whole. She married an Italian and made her home in the land of citrus. At Christmas after dinner we eat mandarins every night, playing cards around growing mounds of peel while cold, grey winter slinks by the apartment windows. 

‘A good orange tastes of sun and sky,’ someone wrote on a recipe blog comparing 45 kinds. In the south-east of France, oranges amères—bitter oranges, the ones given as a gift of love, and used in marmalade—ripen over winter. People in villages hoard them paranoically to make homemade wine in the spring. The lip of it, of the wine, smells like your bath orange. It makes you think of gardens in Seville—of fragrant air; stiff, dark, glossy leaves; waxy flowers gleaming in the dusk. A soft, sharp, lucky scent.

Leave the peel on the edge of the bath. You feel like a human cocktail, in your enamel glass. When your bath is finished and you carry the peel to the bin, it forms the ghost of an orb in your hands. Afterwards, your fingers smell clean and bright.

Colazione all’italiana, breakfast the italian way, a joyful, sugar-filled, and chaotic affair. One that always starts with coffee. Whether at the bar or home, mornings for Italians means coffee, first and always. The bar is an institution. Step into an Italian cafè in the morning and you’ll see people crowding at the counter, chaotically but very specifically ordering their drink: caffè ristretto, macchiato, macchiato doppio, in tazza grande, in vetro. You’ll lean against a polished marble counter and savour a pastry, watching uniformed baristi whip up endless cups—spoons in different positions silently indicate the type of coffee they have to make. 

Sugar dominates. Pastries rule the bar offering—from the plain cornetto, to the filled version with cream, nutella or honey, to the local versions that differ from place to place. In Rome you have maritozzi alla panna, in Tuscany budini di riso, in Naples sfogliatelle. 

At home, a traditional Moka coffee maker is queen.  No coffee beats the Moka for me, not even at the bar. It is a joy—an object I love not just for its purpose but its design: the Bialetti branding (of the original Moka machine) will forever be my favourite branding. The little man with the raised hand in the logo brightens my every morning. Somewhere between dreaming and lucidity, I try to not to forget any of the ritualistic steps to start the Moka (if too sleepy, I tend to burn it): water first, coffee, lock, fire, five minutes, wait. The smell of the bubbling coffee wafts throughout the house. 

On most Italian breakfast tables you’ll find biscotti—cookies, usually simple ones, to dip into caffèlatte or tea. Dipping pastries into your coffee and milk is seen as very rude by many countries abroad, but it’s such a typically Italian way to enjoy it. I cannot recommend it enough. 

If you have a caring old school mamma, nonna or tata, you’ll find a crostata di marmellata on the table, otherwise there’s fette biscottate, a kind of rusk, or bread with jam. My chicest friends have pane toscano—tuscan saltless white flour bread, something few people understand—with butter and anchovy paste. There is little room for protein in Italian breakfasts, and little for fruits—a fresh orange juice is enough. And while you won’t find any of the healthy ingredients so many other countries prioritise in the morning, what you will find is ritual and sugar and joy. 

In his 1983 travelogue Sans Soleil, the filmmaker Chris Marker advocated for “those memories whose only function was to leave behind nothing but memories,” the moments in our lives which may be banal, perhaps meaningless, but leave their after-image imprinted on us. 

In the same spirit, I would like to advocate for “those meals of no nutritional value whose only function is to leave behind nothing but indigestion.” Those meals of no culture, of little skill, of questionable provenance, whose premises should have been interrogated in their formative design stage and thrown out entirely. Foods that do not adhere to any good notions of taste of propriety. Senseless foods. Foods of chaos.

The food writer and Delhiite Sharanya Deepak recently described these dishes to me using a beautiful Hindi term "Bakchodi vaala khaana" which can be translated as ‘foods eaten simply to fuck around.’ South Asian food has some good pedigree here. In this valuable genre of foods you can find Delhi’s own tandoori momo, Karachi’s Zinger parathas and pizza samosas. It is a genre that includes Korean corn dogs made to look like pineapples with cubes of potato, French tacos, and the Domino’s Japan fish and chip pizza, created to enrage and enthrall Italians and Brits alike.

In London, the epicentre of this food is Whitechapel. Rather than the no-go zone it’s been portrayed as in the right wing press, or the crime-ridden slum of Victoriana, it is now a district where the only criminal transgressions are culinary: doner kebab quesadillas, masala fries served in martini glasses, naga burgers. In my line of duty as a restaurant writer I would usually avoid these atrocities, but lockdown and being bored of my own cooking has somewhat broken me. This is how I ended up eating, in a completely sober and sound state of mind, a Ferrero Rocher naan.

This Ferrero Rocher naan was basically the aspirational Pakistani version of a Nutella pizza, one-upped as a dare. It was filled with a layer of crushed chocolate and hazelnut, topped unnecessarily with chocolate sauce, butter, and a single, solitary globe of Ferrero Rocher. It transcended notions of sweet and savoury, Pakistani and non-Pakistani, good and bad. There needs to be more place for this kind of food, whose value is not social, nor nutritional, cultural or conceptual, but recreational. Food that we can only describe with regret and shame the next day. Food that has the capacity to outrage some, enthrall others, and allows the rest of us to sleep easy, simply knowing that that it exists.

“I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

So says Marianne to Connell in (I don’t need to tell you which Sally Rooney novel this is, do I?) I have felt this sentiment with friends, family, lovers and sometimes even strangers. But it rings most true with a meal cooked at home and a table set for one. Because to be alone is not to be lonely. Sufjan Stevens sings “to be alone with you.” For me, it is “to be alone with food.” 

Since the dawn of time, food has been a social act. It has signalled gathering, a coming together. To break bread is to resolve conflict amongst friends and enemies. The disciples tucked into wine and loaves at The Last Supper. The best part of a wedding – and a funeral – is the snacks, right? 

We host dinner parties. We squeeze in a lunch reso at local restaurants. We sink Prosecco at bottomless brunch (2021 is the renaissance of this strangely addictive Sunday activity, I’m sure of it). We buy rounds of pints for our co-workers/uni mates/Hinge dates. We swap stories around the fire after boozy family barbecues. But that person sitting alone enjoying a glass of orange and a plate of sardines? They’re having a frankly joyous time watching the world go by, getting lost in a book or their own thoughts. 

Feasting alone is a quiet act of resilience. It’s to go against the grain of needing to prove your social value. A gentle fuck you to the status quo that tells us – I’d like to add here, primarily women – that to be alone is to be in lack. It’s an uncomfortable habit to get into. But there are some gratuitous advantages. Like: no need to reserve a table because you can always slip in at the bar. It’s far sexier. Bonus points for two dirty martinis before you get onto the small plates. Also, that whole sharing vibe when one of you is veggie and the other a meat eater? Delete. Insert whatever your stomach desires here. 

The joy of solo eating shouldn’t stop at restaurants. To ease you in, make it a ritual to cook for yourself – just you – a truly epic meal of double the portions necessary. And eating it at the table. Or on the sofa. Maybe candles? Some mood music? Eaten at a conversational pace. Because it’s tempting to wolf your meal down without thinking when it’s you and your 345th episode of Scandal (just me?). The beauty of food is about enjoying getting it on the table, and the pleasure of savouring each bite. 

Loneliness can often feel like spinning slowly, trying desperately to grasp at anything to anchor you – but everything still slips away from your grasp and you become too tired to try again. Being alone is like standing still. Grounded. Peaceful. Perhaps in front of a chopping board. Or sat down with your favourite meal (roast chicken, slow-cooked beans and mustard vin salad for me). Dig into the solitude. It will always be there for you. 

There’s not much I can tell you that you don’t already know when it comes to the psychological benefits of cancelling your entire day on a whim.

But there may be a chance I can still catch you before you decide how to spend your Cancelled Day. Perhaps you are currently lacing up a sneaker for a jog in the bright, unexpectedly generous winter sun. Or maybe you are reviewing text messages, memorising the details of a plan to meet a friend for a picnic, moments before you set out. It’s possible you are perusing a grocery list, considering whether you really need bay leaves to pull off Julia’s classic Beef Bourg, a project you have had on “your list” for months. 

Read this next bit carefully, then do as I say immediately: tear up the list. Text your friend to say you’ve come down with food poisoning. And for fuck’s sake, take off your sneakers. Then, open your preferred audiobook application of choice, navigate to the Explore section, and go from there into “Psychological Thrillers.” 

And then? Go to town.  

There was a time I consumed media other than pulpy thrillers replete with unreliable narrators who have undisclosed identical twins, triplets, secret sons, and step-daughters who step out of the woodwork, the shadows, and the literal shadowy woods, typically with a vengeance, and often to commit patricide. A time when I sometimes read nonfiction in hardcover, or enjoyed the latest Paris Review. I knew not of the various ways a decrepit and evil old lady could crawl into a house by widening a hole in the decking little by little over the course of several years with a thumbtack, or of how laughably easy it is to hire a man to install pin-sized cameras in really any type of ceiling. I call that time The Before.

Let me tell you, The Before absolutely sucked compared to The After. Catch me at any moment in The After, on the brink of having my mind blown by an inconceivable yet completely titillating twist fabricated in the mind of someone much more creative than I am. Knowing full well my neighbours could be not at all who they say they are, and proceeding accordingly in the shared recycling area of our building. Being able to rattle off five or six ways a person could fake her own death to start anew, at a moment’s notice. The After rules. 

Now, need you cancel your entire day to pace the length of your apartment to enjoy a twisted ride on audiobook? No, but it increases enjoyment by roughly tenfold. Here is why:

First and foremost, you can listen to the whole thing in one go. 

Then, there’s the clear fact that walks are good for the body and brain. This is well documented. However, walking outside introduces all sorts of elements that could impede your wild sojourn: noise interference from cabs, the distracting scent of a freshly pressed panini. Your apartment has way fewer distractions, assuming your roommates are off working in bedrooms, and/or your significant other has taken instruction not to bother you while you are pacing. 

Physically pacing the length of your apartment—which, if it’s like mine, will require you to turn on your heel every few seconds to pace back in the opposite direction—may have the added advantage of amping you way the hell up, as if you yourself are a trained detective, hot on the trail of the mystery, not a ne'er do well who regularly spends the day in last night’s pyjamas.

As if those weren’t reason enough, the single obvious downside of listening to a thriller on audiobook is completely neutralised: you can’t be worried that an unhinged mastermind has snuck into your home to act on his proclivities, because you have been there the whole time. You would have heard him come in!

As for how to assimilate back to your life the next day, when you must face the cold hard truth that you are not a detective solving the triple disappearance of three tragically beautiful young girls on the same day, three decades apart, I don’t have much helpful advice. And I would spend some time researching it for you—I really would, believe me—but today, I have my hands full with several pressing cases.

Of all three-act productions that mealtimes inevitably stage, breakfast—not dinner, lunch nor afternoon tea, if you take it—is the most capricious and intimate. Menus, waitstaff, courses: none are as surprising as when they appear at breakfast, a repast that can range wildly from corner-of-toast while running out the door to unlikely food combinations such as popcorn eaten with milk and sweetener in 1800s America. A wanton pomp has been given to this mealtime by the leisure classes and the tradition of ceremony has continued, unabated, by glamorous and weird celebrities.

Some took it easy. During the Gilded Age, upper class married women were allowed a more luxurious start to their day, receiving a breakfast tray while still in bed to reflect their status, while unmarried women would eat with the men in the dining room. Princess Margaret stretched time like molasses, enjoying her breakfast in bed at 9 a.m., then spending two hours listening to the radio and reading newspapers “which she invariably scattered over the floor” before heading downstairs at 12:30 p.m. for a vodka pick-me-up.

Others, like Marilyn Monroe, weaved the act of breakfast into a pleasurable routine. “I’ve been told that my eating habits are absolutely bizarre, but I don’t think so,” Monroe told Pageant magazine, before explaining her indulgent routine. “Before I take my morning shower, I start warming a cup of milk on the hot plate I keep in my hotel room. When it's hot, I break two raw eggs into the milk, whip them up with a fork, and drink them while I'm dressing. I supplement this with a multi-vitamin pill, and I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry."

How they eat, more than what they eat, limns a celebrity’s most revealing and intimate habits, like the ‘original’ platinum blonde Jean Harlow, who was so absurdly social that she would reportedly break into friends’ homes early in the morning to cook for them. For the first three years of her life, Candice Bergen ate with her famous ventroliquist father and his dummy Charlie, who would tell her to “drink your milk” and whom she believed was her brother. Her father would not speak directly to her.

Then there was Joan Crawford, so devoted to breakfast that it was, fittingly, the last thing she ever did. On a May morning in 1977, and despite feeling very ill, Crawford allegedly insisted on making breakfast for her housekeeper and a devoted fan that had spent the night at her New York apartment. She returned to her bedroom, and called out for them to go eat. She pulled up the covers, turned on the TV and died of a heart attack. Breakfast can be a long sojourn, a quiet bite, or a labour of love, but its defining pleasures in the eyes (and bellies) of the famous are made less in the details and more in the romantic, varnished truths of how a bit of private indulgence could start the day off right.

The park I frequent is a fraternal twin, split forever from its other half by the asphalt ribbon of Manhattan’s Second Avenue. I prefer its western side, whose shrubs and fuschia flower beds appear more verdant, and where there is—on the outer seating circle, near a cast-iron gate—a bench dedicated to “Charles Raisch III,” with the hopeful inscription LOVE LASTS FOREVER. 

On weekdays, I head over at breakfast time, palms wet from Dunkin’s iced coffee. Occasionally, I’ll bring coconut yogurt and a spoon from home; most times, I forget. My morning routine, solidified over the last year and a half, has little to do with actual foodstuff. What has become crucial is the ritual emptying out of my brain—a clamorous, hyperactive organ, prone to wheeling off-course and swivelling between diversions like a sped-up pendulum. I sit on Charles Raisch’s green bench, a public loveseat, far enough from the blare of car horns that they’re rendered white noise. There, for 20 minutes or so, I focus on birdsong. 

Listening to birds, really listening, is meditation akin to cloud watching. The object of one’s attention is slippery, evanescent. It is new, new, still new again with each subtle modulation. My presence is irrelevant to the warblers’ morning performance, a reminder of my relative smallness. Birds vocalise for themselves, for fellow birds—to attract mates, to signal virility and dominance, to make use of the quiet—just as clouds shapeshift across their great canvas of blue, irrespective of our witnessing. 

Birdsong is at its loudest and most rambunctious during the dawn chorus, an event that begins around 4am and can stretch beyond daybreak. (In temperate countries, the chorus is most noticeable in spring.) When I can’t sleep, I eavesdrop from bed. There’s a small canopy of green outside my window, and dainty-seeming winged creatures, whose species I cannot name, launch into bright, restless melodies in the dark. Hours later, when I arrive at the park, the jumbled soundscape is still enough to engulf me. 

Recent studies from the University of Surrey suggest certain birdsong can have a restorative effect on humans. We’re calmed by quiet or high frequency chirrups, or by complex sound structures like melodies. There are so many birds above me, around me, arriving in roving formations and sounding off in not-quite unison. I notice their rhythmic patterns, interruptions and syncopations. Their chorus morphs into zapping pulsations, blithe and unsteady. I am below average at many things (maths, bills, whispering), but excellent at noticing. Each morning I practice, for no one but myself, and momentarily quiet the looping thoughts. Who knew a full breakfast could be so cheap?