cake for breakfast vol. 22
Hello, and happy new year - although this isn’t my first post of the year, as I published a reflections and resolutions post a few days ago. In any case, I hope that you have some things to look forward to this year, and that God will bless you with things you couldn’t have predicted or even imagined. He is really good at that, even if it’s sometimes hard to notice or remember it among the harder things.
A little update/announcement: I am going to turn paid subscriptions back on at the end of this week, after a long hiatus. That means if you were a paid subscriber before, you will start being charged again, so please deactivate your paid subscription if you no longer wish to pay. I have decided to do this partly for financial reasons - this Substack was my only means of consistently contributing to the household finances - but more importantly because I want to start writing more candidly again, on topics that I don’t want to be accessible to just anybody on the Internet.
I did some soul searching about the nature of the writing I most enjoy, and whilst I don’t want to go full-blown “confessional” in style, I do feel most connected to readers when I write with honesty about marriage, parenting, and family, in a way that I think is often lacking in the Catholic writing sphere. I believe that talking truthfully about these areas is an important part of helping each other to live this challenging vocation well.
petits plaisirs
As oft mentioned, I am not much of a coffee drinker, but I had a carton of cream left in my fridge that I had no particular use for so I thought, why not put cream in my coffee? I know “coffee creamers” are a big thing in the US but they are not at all here, and honestly, Europeans are judging you for using them (lol, kidding not kidding). When I do drink coffee, I typically drink it with a good amount of hot milk (but no sugar), as I find my stomach can tolerate it better like that. But a splash of cream definitely adds a bit of decadence that seems fitting for the Christmas season, and on a couple of occasions I even added Cointreau and half a teaspoon of sugar, which was genuinely one of the most delicious things I’ve consumed in a long time, all Christmas indulgences included.
thoughts
It’s a year now since I permanently deleted Instagram, and I remain really pleased with that decision. To be honest, I rarely think about it - I expected to go through a long period of withdrawal, but life just carried on without it and I didn’t give it much thought. Sometimes I feel a bit of regret that there were some people I really enjoyed chatting to on IG that I just haven’t managed to keep up with via other channels, but that’s just a part of life - sometimes you encounter people you click with and for one reason or another, it isn’t possible to develop the friendship.
On the flipside of that, there are some friendships that feel more “real” for having survived and thrived off IG. Some of the people who I consider to provide the most valuable and meaningful friendships in my current stage of life are people I first got talking to on IG, and now keep up with in other ways, including IRL.
As I mentioned in my reflections and resolutions post (linked above), I don’t actually use my phone as much less now than I thought I would post-IG, but I no longer get that grim feeling of having wasted loads of time mindlessly scrolling. That’s not to say I never waste time on my phone, but generally now if I’m looking at my phone I am actually reading something intentionally, like a Substack post in my inbox or some newsy article.
I’ve also been happy with my choice to keep Facebook, and have to plans to get rid of it. I do sometimes end up wasting time scrolling Facebook on my laptop, but obviously that requires me to be at home with easy access to my laptop, so it doesn’t feel as icky. I still find some Facebook groups to be really helpful, and I post much of the junk in my home in the Buy Nothing groups there.
la vie en france
English is unusual amongst European languages in that it no longer uses a formal and informal version of “you” (although “you” was the plural and formal version of “thou”). French uses the informal tu and the formal/plural vous (which is etymologically related to “you”). The basic rules you learn when learning French are that tu should be used for friends, family members, and those younger than you, whilst vous should be used when speaking to people older than you, people you don’t know well, or to indicate respect.
The longer I spend in France and the better I speak/understand French, the more I realise that the grey areas around which one to use in what scenario are vast, and also vary widely according to the individual. My husband, who is a native French speaker, says he has sometimes been snubbed by neighbours or colleagues by addressing them in the tu form, only to have them respond with vous, which is essentially a way of saying: we are not friends, buddy. I also asked a native speaker cousin, who has lived in the Paris area all his life and is a musician. He said he’s noticed an evolution over the course of his career; a couple of decades ago, he would have always referred to unfamiliar colleagues at the conservatory as vous and wait to be invited to use tu, whereas now, vous is reserved only for the director, and all other colleagues are addressed as tu, regardless of how well they know each other.
In general it’s considered best to err on the side of caution, but using vous excessively can create distance where you don’t necessarily want it. I generally address the parents of my kids’ friends as vous until invited to do otherwise, but that could be perceived by them as a way of indicating that I don’t want to become too friendly with them.
Basically, it’s a minefield, and although people make allowances for non-native speakers, I constantly feel like I’m giving a bad impression either by being over-familiar or by being standoffish. Although English is by far in the minority by not retaining this kind of differentiation, I think it’s a positive development that it no longer exists.
what’s cooking
The Christmas period is generally not a time for inventive cooking, as it generally involves a combination of tried and true recipes, leftovers, and a lot of pasta to make it through another night without having to go to the shops. One such night, however, I wanted to make a pasta dish that was more satisfying than the standard pasta + sauce + cheese, and I came across this recipe which used only things I already had, namely: canned tuna, chilli flakes, anchovies, capers, lemon, garlic, and parsley. I added in sautéed onion for good measure. It was fresh, flavourful, and went down so well that I even served it to guests a week after I first made it. Plus, there’s very little actual cooking or even chopping involved.
stuff I’ve read/watched/listened to
I’m slightly changing this section from things I enjoyed, to just things that I have an opinion about. A month can easily go by without anything that I feel desperately compelled to recommend, but usually I have thoughts about something that I’ve read/watched/listened to.
Like pretty much everyone, I read and loved Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan in 2023. Knowing this, my mum gave me a collection of her short stories, Antarctica, for Christmas that year, but I didn’t get around to picking it up until a few weeks ago. I hated it! So much! I didn’t finish it, but it evoked such a deep revulsion that I actually had to remove it from my home. It was so dark and completely lacking any kind of redemption or… point? Again: I hated it.
I also started and DNF The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, so all in all, a bad run for Irish authors, which is a shame because I generally get on well with Irish writers. The Bee Sting was also dark and hopeless, and Intermezzo, as one GoodReads review so accurately put it, was just more “melancholy navel-gazing”.
However, I read and loved Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout as my first read of 2025, as I was confident that it would be an easy and enjoyable read. It had some heavy themes - sexual abuse, suicide, cancer, and a bit of murder mystery - but it wasn’t desolate or gratuitously depressing. It felt like a novel about grace, although that clearly was not Strout’s intention.
My husband and I just started watched the second season of Shrinking on Apple TV, which is funny and charming and easy to watch even though it’s about grief. Recommend.
We also watched half of Candy Cane Lane on Prime as a silly, festive movie and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, leaving me with a profound sense of “that is time in my life I will not get back.” 10/10 don’t recommend.
A final reminder that I’ll be reactivating paid subscriptions at the end of this week, and will send out my first paid subs only post later this months. Once again, happy new year!