I saw something somewhere, pretty recently I think, about how COVID-19 has changed and will continue to change our lives a lot, and that all the things people have lost are making them grieve. (My thesis supervisor, if she ever reads this, will die 17 times in succession and then come back from the dead…
Tag: food
Have more sugar; these feelings aren’t going to eat themselves!
This will be the first of, one hopes (for obvious reasons), a series of dispatches from Toronto, or what I’m now affectionately referring to as Quarentown. No, we are absolutely not all in full lock-down like poor Italy. This morning, the premier declared a state of emergency, Parks Canada is closed, libraries are closed, we’re…
A “right good-will draught” to end the year
It was the best, most, and first of times. 2017 was other adjectival things too, but I’ll stick to the good bits. Best reads (in alphabetical order by author surname) Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum A Favourite of the Gods, Sybille Bedford Notes from a Dead House, Fyodor Dostoevsky Old Filth, Jane Gardam Hild, Nicola Griffith…
2015: Year of the Woolf
It’s been a satisfying and frustrating year; one of highs and lows, hope and something approaching despair (never actual despair; there would be no talking about full and ripe despair); productivity and slackness; the joyful and the maudlin…. Where am I going here? Straight to Dickens, it seems: 2015 really has encompassed the best and worst of…
Marvelous apples
I’m not generally one for reading in bed, but some books simply can’t be got at any other way. One such book is Gervase Markham’s The Well-Kept Kitchen, which Penguin has so conveniently/irritatingly extracted from the much longer English Housewife. (It doesn’t really suffer for being an excerpt; I just suffer, personally, from revulsion (not…
The definition of pizza
This is another slightly revised piece from my halcyon days writing for Food Riot. “The definition of pizza” turned out to be one of my most popular posts there, proving yet again that the internet really digs it when one person tells another person to shut their piehole. ————————————————————————— A friend and I once had…
Nothing says “I love you” like canned peas cooked in the kettle
The first person ever to take me on a date was my Nana. We hit the all classy joints together, like Ponderosa and Kentucky Fried Chicken, in the town where I grew up. But the local Chinese restaurant was my favourite. It had those plastic, yet also somehow extremely plush, booths so integral to a…
Storm cellar curry
On Monday night, Toronto had its ass properly kicked by a gang of vicious, snarly weather gods. At about 4:30-5pm I looked up from whatever it was I was doing (it was so compelling that I have no idea, 48 hours later, what it was) because it had incredibly quickly become as dark as midnight…
Jam and Idleness 
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