Food Porn Comment / Voice Update / Occupied

What a wonderful surprise I got this morning. It was an email from “Teri” in London. Teri appears to be a young lad from London who works for a “bespoke’ Caterer called Caiger and Company. He left a comment on my Tumblr account where I keep photos of my cooking.

By following links, I discovered his gender and by Googling his workplace and accessing its contact section, I hope he got the response to his query that I sent there. Time will tell, but I was excited to find that shots of my cooking inspired a professional to contact me and ask if what he was seeing on my photo blog were all mine.

•

On Saturday, when I had my dinner party, I could no talk. I had to use a voice I learned in therapy to speak. It allowed me to communicate and I can get pretty good at using it, but I hate speaking in a voice that is not mine.

I lost my voice because I stopped taking my antacid pills, so I renewed my prescription and in three days, my voice was back to normal — “normal” meaning about 90% there. So now I know: I do have acid reflux and my medications work.

It was worth losing my voice for a couple of days to know, for certain, that the diagnosis is correct and that the pills work —boy do they work!

•

I binge watched Occupied on Netflix yesterday. What a fabulous rush of a show. And what a treat it was to indulge, again, in a film imbued so strongly with what I take to be a Scandinavian sensibility. They are like Thomas Hardy novels; the weather and the scenery are so bleak.

It is a Norwegian series and the story is great. It’s set in the future when Norway decides to stop refining their huge reserves of oil to stop global warming. They are, instead, developing Thorium for the world. But the EU forces them to continue to produce oil and Russians occupy their country bringing about a crisis for the Norwegian prime minister and his Green Party.

It’s a fabulously clever plot and I love how it clips along. Each episode is named after the month in which the action we see occurs; season one happens between April and December and at the end of the season we are perfectly set up for season two.

Why Publish? Fame or Money.

At the party I attended on Sunday a memoirist sought me out. He’d heard from the host that my book sold out and I’d sold my screenplay. I can understand how good that sounds to someone who does not know the backstories of either project and who has unrealized projects of their own.

He asked me how I secured the deals with my publishers. I killed his dreams by telling him I published my own book and that although I wrote the screenplay it was my friend who saw a screenplay in my life story and sold it.

So I asked him: “Why do you want to publish your work?”  

As a child, I wrote for fun. I kept diaries and wrote stories for school publications and so on; my father was a journalist and editor. I took writing and literature courses at UBC and then took a fifth year in the education faculty in order to monetize my education; I became a teacher.

I hated teaching, so I quit and applied myself to my passion: Theatre. I stank as an actor, was more successful as a stage manager but the big bucks came in when I started writing. I hit my stride with persuasive copywriting. I was a whiz at grant applications and the interim and final reports they required.

My persuasive writing skills allowed me to move mountains: I convinced boards of directors and municipal councils to adopt cultural policies and initiatives. Then the shit hit the fan.

When the economic environment changed in the 1980s, endurance in the arts came not to those with artistic integrity, it came to those with big marketing budgets and not one of us in the arts — none of my peers — had marketing knowledge or experience. The entrepreneurs survived.

I could not afford to go back to school to learn marketing, but I went back to my college and asked some professors who I could effectively learn on the job and they told me that the best thing I could do would be to get a job in direct mail marketing because the things you direct mail market either sell or they don’t and if they do, you are marketing well. If they don’t you get fired. So I got a job with a friend’s business.

David was adding a direct mail component to his retail business and redirecting all his advertising money from media to direct mail. I got the job of designing and executing our campaigns and I rocked it. I even won awards — three of them — for the junk mail I developed, and not from advertisers but from arts organizations because I made our advertising material essential reading for the artists who were David’s customers.

The research I did for that job gave me a career that culminated in me teaching all that I learned about marketing art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

In retirement, came the writing I had never had time to do when I was hiring myself out as a technical writer. I wrote the best seller (and the crappy seller that followed it), two plays and then, pushed by my visionary friend, I turned the first play into the screenplay that my friend sold.

The book that sold well was not written for money. I truly wanted to write a book for Canadian visual artists. I wanted to help them by explaining all I know about the things professional visual artists need to know that are NOT about studio practice. But I did not want to lose money, so my eye was on the bottom line. My reward: It grossed about ninety grand.

All of that is to make clear what my choice was. Given that I see the motivation of writers as either fame or money, I wrote for money. I had to. I had no other skill. 

So when I asked the guy at the party why he wanted to publish his work, he said that he wanted to leave a legacy. He wants fame. Good luck with that, I said.  They all want fame and I can’t help anyone who wants fame. But when someone wants to make a living, that person and I click. That person, I can help.

If the screenplay goes into development, my last monetary writing job will be tweaking the screenplay with changes the director and producers require. Will that happen? Who knows? Come August, the producers have to renew the option agreement. If they do, that will be a good sign. If they don’t, my professional life is over.

In the meantime, I work on Rita. It’s a script because I will never write technically again. I am hooked on dialogue. And here’s the thing: it is purposeless. It will not earn me any money, nor will it or anything I ever do bring me fame — except (thankfully) amongst those I love.

So Rita is very hard to finish. It may be that that is its destiny: To never be finished. Perhaps its purpose is to be an endless paradise, a place in which I can lose myself and exercise my imagination … and with no purpose, like play, when I was a child.

Fame is for very, very few and not me. Or him. I asked the guy: “Do you think the value of your work might lie in its execution? If you are proud of it, might that not be its purpose and your reward? Do you really need anything else from it?”

My questions did not impress him; he wants validation. I heard a tree falling in the forest.

Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer of
the Apollo Project, stands next to the code she
wrote by hand and that was used to take
humanity (sic) to the moon. 1969

A Passion for Walking

It's all in this blog's title.

I bussed to UBC today and walked back along Spanish Banks beach and then up through residential Point Grey and Kitsilano. When I passed Linda and John’s house, John was gardening so we had a nice visit over coffee and diet coke.

When I did my long-distance walk in France, I felt a deep joy in living off my back. I felt free of all my possessions even thought there were many at home including a beloved cat, but Leon and my place were being looked after and I had this carefree, and I mean really free feeling that infusing me as I walked.

I get that here, too, when I walk. I absolutely love walking as much as I love cooking. And what it comes down to is a reverence for life. I feel so incredibly lucky and grateful for the life I have. I am excited summer is coming and a I am amazed I get another one.

I don’t take life for granted. I don’t take my health for granted. How could I given my history? Every day feels like a gift; I moved to tears every time I walk and get out into nature.

Even walking residential streets is fabulous. There is lots of greenery, churchyards and parks. There are boulevards and medians and lots of gardens maintained with pride. And few people. That’s what I like about residential streets. I like to walk alone.

What makes a person want to be alone, I wonder. Then I don’t. I don’t care. It’s who I am and it feels good — so does walking with a trusted friend, but walking alone as I do without music has me thinking and that does me well.

Sunday at David's

I was out the door at 9:20. I headed downtown to catch the bus to Horseshoe Bay. As I arrived at the stop, so did the bus. I took the slow bus (not the express) and enjoyed the quietness of Sunday morning. I had a window seat and no neighbour.

It was a short wait for the ferry and it was a quiet ride. I was not in a hurry, so I took the trails that paralleled the road as often as I could. It is about a forty-five minute walk to David’s and when I got there, he was working in his garden.

His garden is enormous. I looked up how big an acre is but I still have no idea how to describe its size; what is more important is that I have seen his land transformed from forest. Today, it is as he envisioned it would be; it has matured into a marvel I could not imagine when he described what he wanted to do when he bought the land some thirty years ago.

Yesterday was his and Aubin’s annual winter party and it was very crowded because everyone who knows David wanted to be there this year. Last summer, David discovered cancer in his mouth. The treatment was harsh but the invitation to the party was an indicator to us all that recovery was progressing very well. I arrived at noon.

At around three, the place was thick with guests so I retreated to his orangerie, David’s hybrid man cave/greenhouse in which his citrus fruit trees thrive, where fruits and nuts air dry and where there was delightful calm. Then I bid my adieus and left.

I walked back to the ferry terminal and once arrived back in Horseshoe Bay, the bus was waiting — this time, the express. Again, I had a window seat on the view side and it was heavenly to be whizzing along the highway with an unhindered view of the ocean knowing that incredible left overs awaited me from last night’s feast with friends.

The walk to David's from the ferry was lovely and quiet.

His lemons in the orangerie.

Aubin strikes a pose in front of just one table of food.
They laid out an incredible spread for the zillion guests
who came later in the afternoon.

David. He is a great friend whom I have known since the
mid nineteen seventies. He was, for a long time, my boss.
I love him. It's been such a privilege to be at his side all
through his incredibly productive and interesting life.

Saturday Night's Dinner

I am hooked on the chocolate cake recipe in the cookbook
from the Dunbar bakery: Butter. It is to die for.

I pulled off a pretty good night last night. Sue, Bruce, Robert, Sally and Maureen came for dinner — no big deal except that Chris and Frani arrived on Thursday afternoon to stay the night, launching me into a shopping/prepping/cooking marathon. I made an Ottolenghi dinner for both nights; last night’s was four courses.

The place was spotlessly tidy and I’d bathed and was relaxed at six-thirty, so for the first time in my life I opened some champagne and started drinking alone.

Last night was a success in many ways: the food was really great because it was an Ottolenghi recipe and I’d practiced every one before. Plus, I enjoyed myself. I did not get that “I wish they would leave” feeling I often get with company.

I’ve pretty much got this cooking thing down to my satisfaction. I love my electric knife sharpener. It made my little OCD festival —cutting the super hot red pepper into teeny weenie flakes — a total joy (as does having a huge box of disposable latex gloves so that I don't suffer afterwards). And I love my digital scale and array of cutting boards that ensure tastes and heat don’t transfer.

Most of all, I truly appreciate having the time to do things well and yet stay relaxed. It was like meditation denuding the individual shoots of cilantro one at a time and taking only the finest leaves. I could never do this if I had a lot of responsibilities. One recipe calls for caramelized spicy macadamia nuts. They tell you to mix in a quarter teaspoon of chili flakes; I do, but I grind the flakes first in my mortar and pestle so that I get more heat overall and more heat on each nut.

My parsnips, carrots and squash are all cut to roughly the same mass so that each piece cooks to the same al dente texture I like. The proximity of so many food stores means that I can choose to use only the firm meat of my papayas and mangos; I can easily get more if I am disappointed in the meat of my fruit.

And the abundance of time means things that need to drain — like my leeks — can drain thoroughly and components can cool completely before being tossed, greens can be washed and left to air dry so that dressings cling to every leaf and you can let eggs and butter reach room temperature for baking.

Plus, I began my day with a walk on the wall. And today I go to Bowen Island to see my friends David and Aubin. I have not seen David, a good friend, since his diagnosis with cancer and his treatment that has been harsh. I have a surprise for him today. I can hardly wait to tell him: I have sent his nephew, his namesake, some cash so that he can come to visit this summer from London.

FABULOUS lamp