Recipe for January
And a bumper harvest of culture to see you through it.
This week’s Chasing Angels is strange and long. You might want to scroll to the treats at the end. You might find treats in the middle.
You might even want to listen to it, because that’s a thing now too. Just press the play button above.
Recipe for January
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A hot bath and a book.
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Making an art of the little things.
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Taking time to write letters that usually only get written in the mind.
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Doing a workout on the sofa by the fire with your stomach muscles achingly defined from laughing so relentlessly at old Dylan Moran standup. Warming down your stomach muscles with the gentler exercise of watching Cunk on Earth.
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Making a little writing shrine last thing at night before bed, so, when you wake for your just-out-of-dreaming writing slot, the book is open at a clean page, with your good pen laid out. And there’s all the things you need beside you to make tea without waking anyone else in the house. A whole hour. A whole hour to make mistakes in. A whole hour to imagine in. A whole hour to try writing sentences in new ways.
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This poem by a writer I’ve never heard of but will now hunt down. To grab and wrestle his writing to the ground. One poem: 20 lines. Even after reading it over and over and over and over I can’t hold onto it. It’s still running ahead of me, running around me through me. The kind of poem that reminds me about poems.
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Fantasising about who I’d love to interview in a completely unbarriered world. Listening to a song I love and imagining chatting to its raspy-throated, gap-toothed, pixie-punk singer, Lola Olafisoye, who makes me feel charged like I’m going into battle and winning… Whenever I hear her voice-like-a-cry-for-life.
Thinking upon the alchemy of a song.
How can sound ingredients so infuse forever together that people leave their seats and move their bodies about in untoward unstoppable expressions of space and breath? How were sounds once thrown into the cauldon of time together to do that to us still, now? How?
Why, lovely dancing, are you so lovely? Dancing in the garden because the puppy wants to be out there in the rain smelling and jumping off little walls over logs up off little walls over logs up off little walls into the lavender to smell it and whoop – round slip round again – so I might as well remember I have a body and like to lalaabout in it too. What’s rain?
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Not stopping to read this as I’m writing it. Just carrying on regardless because at 6 this morning my mind was slow and stiff. Thinking about yoga. Staring at a flat white page.
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In a world where typing a question into Google makes answers appear like angels… As if all the answers are out there right now for us to help ourselves to… All of the past and all of the future answers just waiting for us to call them into being with the right question… In this world, I like to google the gap-toothed singer, Lola Olafisoye, and discover that she is hardly there at all, in the wifi.
I suppose her power came before the phones made us use them for everything. She came before, in the flesh of real time.
That night, twenty years ago, when we saw her alive, walking down off the stage to dance with us, we were there with the wholes of us. Every consciousness completely wrapped in the moment we were all making together.
No camera phones held out like a shield.
Which is why I can replay that night in my memory forever. And it still moves in my mind.
So what if her genius has slipped between the cracks of the internet? Is it sad to find so little of her? Slightly sad. And wonderful that she’s escaped.
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Have you ever tried to zoom in on a real, printed photograph, sliding your finger and thumb slowly apart, like you do on a phone screen - before realising…. Oh?
In the same way, in a world where typing a question makes answers appear like angels, a part of me feels sure I can google, ‘What percentage of novelists wrote their first drafts with a pen and paper in 2022, and what percentage straight onto a keyboard?’ And Google will duly provide me with its accurate, omnipotent answer.
I really want to know the answer to this question. How, physically, to write it down makes all the difference to what happens to words once they’ve come out of me.
Once, I made a series of poems by writing out the best lines from my travel notebook, cutting them all into tiny strips of paper and regrouping them into new families that created little worlds together. It worked.
In the days when I wrote poems, they were always written by hand. Poems could only be committed to screen at the very, very last moment, when I was sure that every comma was already in place. They’d be written by hand in various drafts at least twenty times until they were ready. Because setting to screen is a dangerous moment. Do it too soon and the magic might fly away. You might stop hearing.
But gosh, it’s difficult to trust brand new thoughts to a screen. How could a whole novel’s worth of thoughts be managed into shape? All the hotel laundry bundled into the same washing basket?
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I shouldn’t have looked at the weather forecast. The stream in our garden is already over the lower steps. The fields are flooded. The gauntlet of January.
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But…
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A book for the hot bath.
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Laying the morning out before bed.
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Taking time by the hand and leading it where you’ve always wanted to go.
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I promised you treasure
Now, what mood are you in? The mood for…
PLAY
Maria Bartuszova in the new wing of the Tate Modern made her living capturing play alive.
‘All life’s ribbon frozen mid-fling’
Alice Oswald
The freeze framing of squishy textures and poke-at-me things.
Go and see the exhibition. Or at least get your plaster of Paris out this weekend.
JOY
Miriam Margolyes gives a valuable lesson in growing old disgracefully. Why have we only just clocked she’s a national treasure? Well she is. A brave attention grabber who gives you back your attention wrapped in birthdays.
Jacob Collier’s mother deserves an award, for helping another young national treasure develop his extraordinary gifts, while grounding him in humility and deep inner belief.
I’ve already watched it twice last year. Probably need to watch it again very soon. I know I’m late to the party, but boy do I love Licorice Pizza. Zany, fresh, raw, playful, charming, nostalgic, challenging yet comforting… It could be featured under any of these subheadings, to be honest.
EASY COSY
The Detectorists Christmas Special. But only if you’ve already watched the three other seasons. If you haven’t, go back and start from the beginning you naughty child. Perfect, PERFECT January homework.
Rose tea. Buy it. Place three rosebuds in your cup. Add boiling water. Wait 3 minutes. Drink and… say ahhhhhh.
Morning Glory (a guilty pleasure, but Diane Keaton can get away with anything).
As Good as it Gets - an oldie, but such a goodie. New to Netflix for the Christmas cosy fest. Don’t miss it. Scrooge finds love.
About Time. Don’t switch channels until you’re at least 1/3 of the way through. This isn’t the sickly-sweet romcom you think it is. Bill Nighy at his best.
Speaking of whom, I haven’t watched it yet, but everyone says Living is unmissable. You can find it on Amazon, but why not treat yourself to a trip to the flix and let your senses go gooey for an hour or so?
THOUGHT-PROVOKING
Postman’s Park in London where people who died saving others are memorialised, each with their own tantalisingly brief ceramic epitaph. Mesmerising.
My gap-toothed singer, Lola Olafisoye and the truck driver. An unlikely, lovely pair of voices. Alive on this earth. Unearthed by Google.
Emily. This is one you really should go and watch while it’s still at the cinema, if only to experience the sound. I went with my teenage daughter, we both loved it.
The Father. Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman lead a small but perfect cast. As close as we might ever get, maybe, I don’t know, to the devastation of alzheimers.
Lanny. It took me far too long to read this brilliant book someone very kind gave me a lot of Christmases ago. Well worth the wait.
Femininsts, what were they thinking? I’m only just beginning to appreciate how truly rad those ’70s feminists were. Beautiful, brave, more relevant than ever. You might find this documentary a little slow. Good for doing the knitting to. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. But wow these women. I thank them all. And if, like me, you need a reminder every now and again of how in-our-power we’re capable of being as women, here it is.
SO WRONG THEY’RE RIGHT
[Mum these are not for you.]
Fleabag (forever. I doubt I’ll live to love any show as much as I love Season 2. Watch it all again, you know you want to.)
The Duchess. Definitely wrong.
Am I being unreasonable? Watch it just for the son’s performance, and because its weirdness will reward you right to the very end.
Toast of London. I’ve finally been won over.
Last but not least. Thank you for high-fiving me through the bulk of motherhood, Motherland.
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Happy enJOYment everyone. Thank you, as ever, for getting this far.
Deepest, dearest thanks to my first ever subscriber last week. I don’t think my earnings have ever meant so much as that first subscription did. Pow.
Love, love, love your writing, Agnes! A beautiful read this Saturday morning. And lots of lovely recommendations to savour. Also, I went to see Living over Christmas – really worth seeing. x