cake for breakfast vol. 20

I think November is my favourite month of the year: the back-and-forth of warm-then-cold-then-warm-again weather transitions to a more decisive chill, the anticipation of the festive season feels exciting but not yet overwhelming, and it’s my birthday month. It’s still pretty outside, red and orange and brown leaves still abundant, and inside is more routinely filled with the scents of stews and soups, baked goods and, towards the end of the month, mulled wine. Of course, this particular November - in fact this particular day - also brings a presidential election that has the entire world in a state of either anxiety or denial, but I’m in the denial camp, so I’m focussing on the leaves and baked goods.

How cool is this leaf we found just outside our apartment?

petits plaisirs

This (academic) year, with the littlest now in a wonderful crèche 3 days/week and the older two in school 4 days/week, I finally have time to do some regularish exercise. I’m doing a pilates class once per week, which I resisted for ages because my mum kept telling me how great it would be for me and the insolent child in me didn’t want to listen to her, but… she was right. Three pregnancies with three very large babies plus three c-sections have done a number on my core muscles, and I always feel great after the class: just the right amount of exertion, and still relaxing.

I’ve also been swimming when I can, but that has turned out not to be very often because the pool has really silly opening hours that mean if I have any other commitment on any given day, I can’t go. Swimming is obviously a giant faff and the amount of time it takes to get there, get ready, then get dry and dressed and home again afterwards, is about 10x the amount of time I’m actually in the pool, but I do love swimming and am always glad I made the effort to go.

The old cliché is true: if you want to exercise consistently, you have to find something that you genuinely enjoy and that makes sense for your life. I hate gyms, so that’s never worked out for me. I used to love running but it isn’t a good fit for this particular moment in my life. I love long country walks, but those aren’t gonna happen in our densely populated urban town. But finding a way to move your body outside of the rhythms of your daily life has such big physical and mental benefits.

thoughts

Although I have always enjoyed writing, I have never managed to consistently keep a journal. Not for lack of trying - I’ve started many - but it always felt like a chore to keep up, and I’d feel oddly self-conscious writing. Am I addressing the journal itself? My future self? Some other reader, even though I don’t want anyone to read it? I’d get bogged down in explaining details, feeling like it was some kind of record and that I needed to make sure it made sense if I were to read it back in years to come. In itself that’s fine - journalling as record keeping is obviously a well-established and valuable approach - but it never felt enjoyable or particularly useful to me. The only journal I ever completed had entries spanning several years, and I had to really force it.

Earlier this year I was trying to sort through my thoughts and feelings about something messy I was dealing with, and I decided to type it out in a Word document. I wasn’t really thinking of it as “journalling”, so much as externally processing and organising what was in my mind. However, I realised that all that self-consciousness and boredom I felt when journalling by hand was absent when I was typing up my thoughts. Since then, I have not been doing it especially consistently, but I find it really useful when I have a lot of mental noise going on and I’m trying to talk myself off a ledge.

So although the notion of writing in a journal by hand is more romantic and cosy, I have found that typing on a laptop works better for me. The broader lesson here is one that I find myself having to learn again and again, which is: do what works, and not what you think you ought to do, or seems like a nice idea but doesn’t actually serve you.

la vie en france

You know how there’s that legend that there are 421 Scots words for “snow”? (I don’t think that’s true btw, not least because it doesn’t actually snow that much in Scotland). Anyway, that’s how it feels with the French and yoghurt. There are so many different types of just… plain yoghurt. There’s fromage blanc, fromage frais, yaourt brassé, faisselle, petit suisse, yaourt nature, yaourt à la grecque… although there are noticeable differences in texture, consistency, and acidity, French people view these as different as cheddar is from mozzarella, or Gorgonzola from brie. The menus at school and crèche typically feature a different type of yoghurt for each day of the week, and kids learn to appreciate each one as its own delicacy.

The other thing that used to seem crazy to me is that when served for dessert, people will often add in a spoonful of sugar or jam. There are sweetened and fruit flavoured yoghurts available to buy, but it is more common to buy one of the plain varieties and add something to sweeten it at home. I guess I grew up viewing plain yoghurt as the “healthy” but not desirable option, so adding sugar or jam to it would have been counterproductive. Here, plain yoghurt is not considered a boring alternative to sweetened varieties, so adding something sweet is just another way to enjoy it.

Whenever I complain to my yoghurt-loving mum about crappy French supermarkets, she counters “but you have so many types of yoghurt!”

what’s cooking

I’ve been forcing myself to learn to cook pork since it is cheap, healthy, and the most environmentally sustainable meat, but for some reason I never got in the habit of buying/cooking it. I’ve made two really successful recipes, and both were really easy yet felt like quite sophisticated meals:

• Roast pork with mustard and apples - this was so good, and everyone enjoyed it. It took no more than 20 minutes, and I served with mashed potatoes and some green veg.

• Pork marsala with mushrooms was less of a hit with the kids, but a big hit with my husband and I. Much umami, much yum. Also took around 20 mins. Served with rice and veg.

things i thought were good

• I’ve never really enjoyed poetry, not from lack of desire to appreciate it, but from feeling like I don’t really “get” it. That said, I’ve never tried very hard, and I’m aware that a big part of it is probably simply that I haven’t figured out what kind of poetry I enjoy. To that end, I’ve been really appreciating the Poem of the Day newsletter from Poetry Foundation. The poem can be anything from Shakespeare to Yeats to Maya Angelou to Instagram poets. Sometimes I roll my eyes despairingly and sometimes I find something I love, and note down the name of the poet for future exploration and appreciation.

• I’ve recommended

  Sarah Miller
  ’s Substack
  Can we read?
  before, but I particularly enjoyed her recent post (ok, I now see it was September) Some Dos and Don’ts for Reading Aloud. I don’t need to be persuaded of the benefits of reading aloud to kids, and it’s one of the things I most enjoy doing with my own, but there were still things in here that I found really useful - e.g. her comments on reading “levels”, and offering books to the child you have (ok, I guess we’ll keep adding to our collection of Marvel Origins stories…).

• And while we’re still leaning literary, if you’ve ever wanted to read either The Iliad or The Odyssey but have felt intimidated, can I recommend Emily Wilson’s translations? Both had long been on my list of “some day” reads, but I felt like they were probably going to be a slog. However, I chanced upon Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and it is so crisp and clean and downright readable, it took me by very pleasant surprise. She’s also the first woman to ever have a translation of either text popularly published, and what’s discouraging is that when I first saw it I thought it must be some novelised spin-off à la Madeline Miller’s Circe. My brain just assumed that if the “author” was a woman, it couldn’t be such a “serious” text as The real Odyssey. Sigh.

Here’s hoping that the election rolls out as smoothly and undramatically as humanly possible which seems… unlikely. See you in December!