Comfort & Joy
Pudding, porridge, cream and salt
You’re writing this with a diagonal stripe of sunshine across your face. One of your cheekbones feels warm and the other, cool.
How can you continue like this? You can’t see your screen for floating dust, and your reflection is blotting out the words as you type them. But you won’t move. Sunshine can’t be taken for granted, not on the brink of June.
Teatime. Your son is describing a lunch-hour spent with the Environment Club, baiting and trapping school grounds.
“We got one rat,” he says, with relish. “But we accidentally killed a hedgehog.” He holds up his hand, palm-side down. “It was totally flat, like this.”
You look at the splatter of your spaghetti bolognese, then put down your cutlery.
You’ve grapes and gingernuts in your bag because this week, you’ve reason to be a hospital visitor.
There’s the usual low throttle of background noise, and gleaming, squeaky floors in this place. You’re here in the early evening, making your way up to the ward along brightly lit corridors. But the patient you’re visiting is asleep in the half-dark, as their room lights haven’t come on.
It’s pleasant to sit in this state of in-between, with the streetlamps of Newtown twinkling into life and the tops of double-deckers rumbling past. Even the hard chair feels nice. Hospitals are a portal, like a rabbit hole or magic wardrobe, transforming you as you go in. You’re a member of the public until you walk through its doors, after which you’re either a patient or someone who loves one. Each has its role and responsibilities and each, to some degree, has their heart in their mouths.
You become a mother in a place like this. You became bereaved. Life and death were met on equal terms, capably and quietly, by people wearing coloured Crocs with charms on them.
You gaze at things for ages, things which don’t warrant this much attention, but attention is all you have to offer in a setting like this. You look at the sharp, concertina creases of the disposable bed curtains, honeycombed at the top, offering the type of privacy that isn’t wholly certain.
You think about all the people you met today, some in surgical caps with their names embroidered on them. Sitting in Hold 1, a strip of the ward floor visible, you watched all the feet briskly passing your bay: each pair in clogs, soft-soled trainers or papery blue overshoes. Beds were wheeled silently past, each of them crisp and empty. Your only job was to wait, as it wasn’t long now.
That was this morning: forever ago.
Darkness outside and eventually, the rattle of the heated trolley. It’s time for dinner service and tonight, a porter has with him a young trainee. “We need a fish and a crumble,” he’s saying, as they come to stop outside a nearby room. There’s a sliding sound, then the snick of a cabinet closing. A small, unexpected drama might lie in wait for them so he adds, “Now, one thing we must never do is a move a patient.”
You close your eyes for a little while and float on this idea. How thoughtful and reassuring he sounds. How much pleasure is clearly taken from this work, of nourishing people back to health with soup, thin crescents of sliced fruit, and a modest bit of pudding. Everyone likes to see a laden tray and be offered something hot; it’s a soothing chance to keep calm and carry on. When a meal is carried into this room, fussing around it will give you something to do.
You’ll go home, eventually, and eat your feelings. Tinned peaches and a vast, childish jelly. Spoon it, hold it in your mouth before swallowing. This feels like sharing, somehow, these few minutes of party food, even though you’re resting a hip on the kitchen counter with nobody else around. The sweetness hits your pleasure centres, and you radiate a weak kind of goodwill, thinking about everybody looking after everyone else tonight, this bowl of a city soaked in people caring for people; the pouring-over of it, splashing until it fills, like so much heavy cream.
Muffins for the classroom lunch. You’re not paying $10 a punnet for out-of-season blueberries. You buy a value pack of frozen ones and biff those in, instead.
Your daughter’s mixing the batter, and asks you if it’s meant to look like this? She tips the bowl towards you. It’s a throbbing, almost radioactive purple.
“Let’s see how they turn out,” you say at last. “We can always disguise them with icing sugar.” In the end, she’ll tell you not to bother. The boys in her class will eat anything.
There’s a dog you haven’t seen before in the off-lead park. He’s black, beardy and joyful at being released. His owner has unclipped a metal chain he’s using as a leash and wrapped it around his waist. He looks like a medieval knight.
This dog is a good retriever, he tells you. Bred for ducks, with an oily coat to repel water. He has a soft but powerful mouth; he once dragged back a deer.
Yours is outclassed and goes into a corner to strain.
You pause at the traffic lights outside a grand masonry facade — a former bank, which for years now has been an acclaimed silver service restaurant. It has Corinthian columns and the smooth, fondant look of a wedding cake.
It’s early evening, and a lighted candelabra has been placed at one of the windows.
That’s all you can see inside the frame. No waiters or diners in the background, no evidence of anything modern or representative of business; just candlelight trembling in an old building.
There’s a generosity in this, of doing something only for the beauty of it.
Good Enough to Share with You
It’s been such a week, so a shorter newsletter than usual!
I’ve just finished a quirky Irish novel, Leonard and Hungry Paul (Bluemoose Books, 2019). It describes the apparently uneventful lives of two friends who never left home and on the face of it, seem maladjusted. But the book invites us to slow down to their pace and see things from their perspectives. They’re happy as they are, more or less, whatever the world expects of them.
It’s not as sugary as it sounds, as Rónán Hession packs the story with dry asides and moments of growth, which bring the characters a mild sort of pain. I especially loved the boringness of the setting — brick and tile suburbia of the least glamorous kind, somewhere unspecified; Irish, but not performatively so.
It’s been made into a BBC series which I’ll watch over winter (it’s free to stream on TVNZ+). It’s bound to be a cosy experience.
By the way, I borrowed my copy from the library. It took months to get to me. I’m about to return it so snap it up, Wellington!
I’ve my friend Ness to thank for recommending The Golden Spurtle, a Netflix documentary about a Scottish village hosting its 30th annual porridge-making competition.
It sounds treacly but this being Scotland, it adds salt and stands up by itself.
I watched the film in two helpings. The first leaned into the eccentricity of the contest and its competitors, who come from all over the UK and beyond to cook on mobile burners inside the village hall. It was beautifully shot, each scene framed like a painting, with gleaming background details. There’s a woodturning shed, for example, so beautifully lit and outfitted that it feels like a diorama.
But the second half lifted it from the ridiculous to the sublime. You realise, as you watch, that this is a village on the wild edge of something, kept going almost entirely by retirees. The porridge is a metaphor for the old ways of rural Scotland. By the end, you could weep for the quiet nobility of the competition, and the pride ordinary people take in their well-stirred, well-salted lives.
Oddly, it’s an Australian-made film, which somehow makes magic out of oats and hard water. It makes you fall in love with Scottish boomers, hobbyists, and the women doing the washing up.
Give it a taste. You’ll like it.
The latest edition of Karori’s new community newspaper, The Local, has hit mailboxes! We’re an unlikely suburb to have produced a world-class bohemian, but we did, and this month’s column wishes to smush this in the faces of trendier Wellingtonians (I’m looking at you, Island Bay).
Our most famous local was an avant-garde, romantically reckless, non-conformist genius! Sure, Katherine Mansfield couldn’t wait to get out of here, but Karori fertilised some of the most glittering short stories of the last century. If she were alive today, I bet she’d be queuing for a Brumby’s pie like everybody else.
Stunning writing about time spent in hospitals, Leah. Hope your loved one is doing okay.
The trick for using blueberries in baking is to toss them in a reserved tablespoon of flour before adding them to the wet mixture, though the finished product tastes just the same xx
Lovely writing Leah. And I agree with other readers - the description of the hospital visit was spot on. It resonated with me. Thank you.