Nothing doing
A diminished appetite.
I haven’t felt much like writing because I haven’t felt much like eating: insides too coiled up to give way to hunger. The sticky confluence of small, private sorrows and large, unfolding catastrophes has sapped my strength and my appetite. I don’t feel like eating, far less cooking. I’m tired all the time, even when my sleep is uninterrupted. Every day, my energy dips to ruinous levels by early afternoon. All I want is to lie in bed in the blurry half-light of not-quite-consciousness.
A blood test reveals a litany of deficiencies: iron, B12, D. Now, instead of eating according to my whims, I must think about practical outcomes. I parse each meal for protein, research non-heme iron sources. Every day, I dutifully swallow tablets: a round pink one that leaves the taste of chalk in my throat, a warning-red oval, a yellow bead the colour of sunlight. And still, on too many days, I lose interest in eating long before my plate is empty.
This has happened once before, in another city, at another time. Then, too, I was caught in the claws of something I could not shift. Then, too, my appetite waned. My doctor told me I should think of food as medicine; that I should take my medicine even if my appetite didn’t demand it. So I did. And it must have worked eventually, because eventually I became well.
It hasn’t all been grim. There have been bright spots, moments of grace. A wedge of burnt Basque cheesecake, somehow both dense and yielding, shared over good conversation and too many glasses of wine. Peeling back the skin of the first mango of the season, its flesh all perfume and sweetness. How watching a stranger in the supermarket open the cardboard flap of an egg carton and solemnly inspect each egg can elicit a sudden rush of tenderness.
For the moment, I will eat the things I know my body needs. Protein. Iron. I will sit in the sunlight and let it warm my skin. I will make a reservation for dinner with my dearest friends, because what is food without good company? As Sybille Bedford once wrote:
“Nothing can go very far wrong at the table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating. There must be talk about food.”
With ordinary luck, this will pass soon enough. There are tables waiting for me. There is wine to be drunk, conversations to be had. Soon, I think, I will be well.
In case of interest
For The Age, I wrote about Kraftwerk’s machine-perfect performance in the age of ChatGPT.
Good things to read
“I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal.” Dwight Garner on the long love affair between writers and the martini. – via LitHub
“Surrounding me are around forty-five grandfather clocks, positioned like guards. At 2 p.m., the clocks unfurl into a chorus of chime melodies, ending with a defining double-thrum in different keys.” A visit to the American Clock Museum with Nicolette Polek, via GrayWolf Lab
“In Barcelona I was an apostate visiting a shrine of former devotion, a lapsed Catholic come to refuse the waters at Lourdes…” The always good Jago Rackham on sobriety, via Greed
One more thing!
A tiny gift guide for the season, mostly beautiful things for the home: a box of beeswax tapers; a rather singular candleholder to go with it; everything required for a perfect breakfast; Moroccan wine glasses made from recycled glass; a chic little butter keeper; the tea I drink daily; an investment wall hanging; an ultra luxe candle in a vessel worth keeping; the only martini glasses you’ll ever need.