I chose the tagline ‘Food and Places’ for this newsletter because the two are the primary lenses through which I view the world. What am I eating, and where am I doing it? The first of the two has dominated the last few editions, so here is something where place and how we relate to it come to the fore.
I’ve been sitting on this piece for a while, going back to it, chiselling, and reformulating ideas that first materialised when I was walking home from the first drinks I had last spring with the sun on my face (even the thought of drinking with the sun in my face feels like a distant dream right now). Once the sun had set, I was surprised by the biting cold that still lingered in the air.
Now, as we celebrate making it past January, some thoughts on what it means to experience - and maybe embody - seasons.
I’ve missed the seasons that punctuate life in the English countryside. Growing up surrounded by my parents’ more-or-less lovingly tended garden and gorging on the produce that it cyclically offers up, nature’s rhythm became second nature (sorry) to me.
For over a decade, Mum and have I walked the same paths that crisscross the fields behind our house. As an early teen, I internalised the joy she got from the different iterations of that same route throughout the year.
Sometimes the clay-heavy mud was so damp and sticky that it would clump to our shoes until lifting our feet became almost impossible. Sometimes we’d walk through the sheep fields and find them littered with tufts of the wool they’d been specially bred to shed without needing to be shorn. The frustrations of a path rendered inaccessible by the river Adur’s periodic floods were soothed by the knowledge that it was only temporary: before long the waters will retreat, and we’ll be able to make it over the stile and back to our regular route towards West Grinstead.
If this is how seasons help us relativise, it’s also why they are so steeped in nostalgia. You can smell summer’s departure in the air long before the leaves start to turn and the temperatures begin to drop. Seasons simultaneously bind us to a single moment and remind us that that same moment is transitory.
Going to university in a small (and very green) city a few hours from where I grew up, my relationship with the seasons shifted, but not momentously. I remember being sad about missing the peak of bluebell fever in the woods nearby, but I would still be home in time for the end of elderflower season, and for the inevitable glut of courgettes from July onwards which had us harvesting the smallest possible fruits by the bucketload as soon as they appeared.
Now that I live in a foreign city - albeit one with a climate almost indistinguishable from the UK’s - my perception of the seasons has taken a bigger hit. In a city, we are often shielded from the subtler shifts of the seasons, they boil down to weather patterns, hours of daylight and promotional flyers from food shops telling you what to eat in a given month.
Even after four and a half years in Belgium, I’m not quite attuned to the subtleties of seasonality here. I’m coming around to the idea that to truly feel a season, to know it deep in your bones as I do in my parents’ garden, you need to have experienced its cycle enough times to recognise the shifts in the air as part of a wider pattern. It’s something we absorb through years of service. Years of service that the effects of the climate crisis are rapidly rendering obsolete.
Arriving briefly back in Sussex in early March last year, I was reminded of the time it takes for these seasonal shifts to happen. My first impression was of the bright yellow daffodils: a sure sign to me that we were past the worst of winter and ready to get on with longer, warmer days. But wandering around the garden, it became clear how far we still had to come. Most of the trees were still skeletal, and the vegetable garden offered up even less than it did in the depths of winter. At least in December, there were still the last overhangs from autumn’s bounty. In March, the plants are only just starting to wake up. Putting down roots, maybe, but offering up fruits, not yet.
We commonly think about seasonality purely in terms of food, but I’m increasingly convinced that we are seasonal beings too. I am more sociable in spring and summer than I could ever dream of being in the depths of winter. I have different habits, different needs. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Alicia Kennedy talks about seasonality for tomatoes as being ‘the moment at which the mundane becomes spectacular’ and I think this is true of a lot more than food. We, too, are seasonal. We are spectacular at different points in the year, and in different ways.
Often, if we compare ourselves to the seasons, it tends to be on a macro level. It is common in life, in literature, to translate seasons into different stages of life: we shift the circularity of an annual cycle into a linear one. According to the popular imagination, the ageing process means a slow walk to winter.
To me, this way of looking at things means we lose sight of the beauty of the rhythms that punctuate our lives more regularly. I can’t help wondering whether we would cope better with darker winter days if we were more used to looking at them through the lens of seasonality. A period of rest to recharge, wallow in the domestic, make crumbles. We don’t begrudge a cherry tree for not bearing fruit in mid-December, and it’s only with age that I’m beginning to extend the same charity to myself in the winter months when all my body wants to do is cocoon. I know when the sun comes out again I will be ready to be a social butterfly once again.
How this seasonality looks in real terms will depend on each of us. Unfortunately, as it does with most things, capitalism tends to get in the way of this: most of us can’t just choose not to work for half of the year because our energy levels are lower in winter.
Like push and pull, the excess of one season leads one to crave the next. In the same way that experience teaches us to recognise the seasons in nature, I think we can learn to recognise them in ourselves, and slowly come to act in a way that honours that.
I hope you enjoyed this essay from Lizzie Wrote This. There is a lot more to come. I hope you’ll share it with someone you love.
Baker’s dozen
13 good things from the past few weeks:
It was finally light enough for a post-work run in Bois de la Cambre.
Drinking the delicious coffee my friend brought back from Mexico is making mornings working from home a little brighter.
Reading Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, which I am enjoying immensely. I realised it’s the third year in a row I have read something by him at this time of year. If nothing else, I am a creature of habit.
I made a crumble. I really think I have nailed the art of making crumbles exactly as I like them (which is all any of us should be aiming for in the kitchen anyway, right?).
I made Nigella’s mirin glazed salmon which was an absolute treat, it’s a favourite in my family so eating it feels like home.
Had a much-needed lazy Sunday sprawled on the sofa surrounded by books.
Colleagues bringing us cinnamon rolls to work for breakfast.
Booked tickets for a long-awaited trip to Asturias ✨
Buying concert tickets to see Half Moon Run and Arlo Parks in September.
Made my first ever French 75.
A flapjack from Kami.
Some very good olive bread from my local bakery.
Teaching my friends the joy of Notion. Iykyk.
“Unfortunately, as it does with most things, capitalism tends to get in the way of this: most of us can’t just choose not to work for half of the year because our energy levels are lower in winter.”
I love how you put this and how you’re weaving climate, capitalism, food, and psych into one crafty piece of fabric. We can’t just choose not to work for the winter but we can choose to allow ourselves the rest and find the beauty in some hibernation. And still, looking forward to spring coming soon