interview with balance the grind

Image by Jeanine Stewart

Thank you to Balance the Grind for featuring me in their Conversations about Work, Life and Balance series.

It was great talking to them about my (not quite) typical working days, long and winding career paths, juggling freelance life with PhD life, writing, courage, self-compassion and changing your narrative.

“It has taken a while to untangle my sense of self-worth from my productivity and achievements but ultimately it has resulted in getting what I always wanted – being able to do work I love, having more control over my time and the freedom to follow the deepest, truest yearnings of my creative soul. That is the engine that drives me now.”

You can read the interview here.

are you going to behave today?

I was in a cafe today, with a new friend. We ordered our drinks - a chai for me, a peppermint tea for her. The server asked us breezily, “any of the sweets? Or are you going to behave today?”

Those words rang in my ears all day.

Not because I was angry. Or confused. Or sad. Maybe I was all those things. But I think I was more curious than anything. Why is that an acceptable thing to say? My friend didn’t even seem to notice the question. We just said no and continued our conversation. But if I had ordered a cake, would that have meant I was MIS-behaving?

It got me thinking about the belief system - that is so ingrained in our (white Western privileged) culture - that assigns moral value to food and food behaviour. Where some foods are “good” and others are “bad”. Where if you make a healthy choice you’re “being good”. Where if you’re slim it is assumed you have self control and if you’re overweight, you do not.

I have spent the past decade actively trying to free myself from that system.

And in the process, I have realised how much our (white Western privileged) society rewards people for conforming to the idea that you have to be slim to be successful and happy (I was one of them!) and shames and punishes those who don’t.

I have done a lot of untangling of the diet culture these past few years, and pondered my own role in it. While I know that I never actually said the words “losing weight is the answer to all your problems”, I can see why people thought I was because I didn’t have to. For a time, my very existence was a walking advertisement for the lie we are sold. Lose weight and hey presto, you’ll get to live the life you’ve always wanted! You’ll be popular, people will like you! Everything will be great!

And yes, that was my life, for a while. But like everything, it only appeared perfect on the surface, and it came with a price.

I know this all must sound strange coming from someone who started a weight loss blog 15 years ago and who revelled in the loose jeans, in getting to goal, in being admitted to that secret world where nothing tasted as good as being slim felt (which is bullshit - a fuck load of things taste that good!). It was only once I achieved it that I realised how dangerous it was.

Staying in that world depending on me following those rules. The confidence that came with the achievement was so incredibly flimsy, still so heavily reliant on external validation. All it would take was one card to be pulled out for the whole house to come falling down, which is exactly what happened.

But I’m now living beyond the after photo. The after photo was a golden time, and in many ways I’d have been happy if life could have carried on like that forever, because the highs were so high, so unforgettably wonderful. But the lows….well, if you’ve read The Latte Years, you’ll know all about those.

Nothing lasts. Change is the only constant in this crazy life. You cannot freeze time. I’d much rather be here, now, where I feel less concerned about what I look like and more about what kind of good I’m doing in the world and what sort of legacy I will leave behind.

A life where I know that eating a piece of cake is, in every sense of the word, good.

remembering valerie lester

‘Do with your writing what you’re doing with your life,’ Val advised sagely. ‘Be brave.’

- from The Latte Years

Val and I on one of her friends’ boats in Annapolis, June 2007.

My beloved friend, and the wonderful writer, translator and scholar, Valerie Lester passed away in June. How grateful I am that our paths crossed when she visited Hobart nearly 20 years ago. I owe her a great deal.

She was one of my greatest and most enthusiastic cheerleaders, set many wheels in motion for me and, as per the excerpt from my book above (which she loved), always encouraged me to be resilient and brave.

“I exhort you to keep writing,” she said in her last email to me.

Bloody Mary’s (I think!) in Annapolis, July 2007.

A few weeks after Val’s passing, I learned I had been accepted into my PhD program, which I’ve now begun in earnest. I would have so loved to share that news with her. My PhD project was inspired by a tiny bit of research she asked me to do for her while she was writing her book about Phiz (Dickens’ principal illustrator), so it’s been nearly 15 years in the making. I hope I will do her proud. The project so far has been thrilling and I think it's going to be a real adventure. I'm so grateful to Val for leaving the first few crumbs on the trail for me.

What a talented, generous and fascinating person she was. I have so many happy memories of her and her husband Jim when I visited them in Annapolis in 2007. Most of them involve jazz music, poetry, and gin and tonics! They were both such dear friends and I miss them both very much.

With Val and Jim, Annapolis, July 2007.

Go well, dear Val. Until we meet again.  

when july was summer

Gin and tonics in our backyard last July.

Last July, it was summer, not winter.

Our one-way tickets to Australia were booked.

London wasn’t home any more. It’s a hard feeling to describe, when life is carrying on as much as it always has, but now there is no point buying plants for the garden, or that piece of furniture, for you know now there is an end date, and soon you will leave this corner of the earth. The house you live in and love will soon be someone else’s. You will disappear. It will be as if you had never been there at all.

Here is something I wrote at the time. Just some little observations. Things I wanted to remember.

Tom and I walking up to the street fair, July 2018

8 July 2018

The third weekend in a row of high temperatures, the sun beating down, unfiltered by cloud. My shoulders tanned brown. Tom and I walk up to the village Green, where there’s a street fair. They’ve closed the road by the train station so the usually car-choked streets are filled with donkey rides, Enfield for Europe protestors, gin and tonic stands, a Mini convertible we know no one will win. The smells are intoxicating - Caribbean food, curries, kebabs, Vietnamese tofu grilled on hot coals, halloumi fries piled with pomegranate seeds.

England are playing Sweden in the World Cup in a few hours so giant television screens are set up on the green, the air full of expectation. By the time we walk home with food for lunch, the streets will have emptied significantly. A few hours later, roars, screams and cheers will signal that England have triumphed. 

I linger at the plant stall, my favourite, full of varieties of sage and mint - apple, peppermint, pineapple. Heartsease, its purple flowers shaped like little hearts. House leeks, to ward off bad spirits. Thai basil, which I’m longing to cook with having been watching Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey. All the plants I would buy if we weren’t leaving. But it’s going to pain me to part with the ones I already have. I keep my coins in my purse and move on. 

For weeks now we have lived on salads, veggie burgers, dips and raw vegetables, grains that can be cooked with water from the kettle. I can’t remember the last time I made pasta, soup or a curry. We have a little rain for the first time in nearly four weeks and my thirsty plants gulp it down.

The hard cantaloupe melon we bought yesterday, barely giving off a fragrance, is already ripe and begins to perfume the house. It is beginning to dip into a smell that is less perfume and more compost heap. I suspect we must eat it today.

The smell of over-ripe melon will always make think of that last summer in London.

PS: The reason for the photos with captions on them is because a few days later, on 13 July - bizarrely, coinciding with Trump’s visit to London - my phone died and I hadn’t backed up any photos since May. The only way I could access these pics was through Instagram stories!

one hundred years wasn't enough

My grandmother Daphne as a baby, with her mother Pansy (her real name was Emily but everyone called her Pansy). Taken in London, November 1919.

the light, the season, 

is fading. 

what will be left by winter?

what will be left by tomorrow?

will our family be one person down,

without the one whose heart started

before the guns of the Great War

fell silent,

whose breath spanned two centuries,

whose soul knew many homes.

I wrote the lines above as the sun set last Monday night after hearing the news earlier that day that my beloved grandmother, who I spent three hours laughing and doing crosswords with only a few weeks ago, had had a small stroke and was fading.

I went to say goodbye to her last Wednesday. And on Saturday evening, a week out from her 100th birthday, she passed away. We had been anticipating her 100th as a family with great joy - we even had a letter from the Queen, all ready to go. So it hasn’t been the week we thought it would be, though it has still been a celebration of a long and fruitful life.

But it is also, to use a well-worn phrase, the end of an era.

We were so lucky to have her for so long. But that doesn’t make losing her any easier. She is irreplaceable. It feels strange to now be living in a world without her when, until a week ago, she had always been here.

How lucky I was to have her as a grandmother, and what a shining example she was of how to live well and authentically. I adored her sharp wit, her endless fascinating stories, her cooking, her affinity with plants, her love of nature. She taught me to cook, to sew and to play cards. She indulged every one of my silly childish whims but she always treated me like a grown up. She encouraged my love of writing and storytelling. When my book came out, she was in the front row at the launch and she read the whole thing, with a magnifying glass.

I will always cherish the memories of her indefatigable spirit, her sense of fun, her generosity, her quiet conviction, her pragmatism, and her fierce independence. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I felt so different from the rest of my family, convinced on some occasions I had been swapped with another baby at the hospital. But then I would think about Ma and her mother, and the kinds of women they were and realise ‘ah, that’s where I get that from’. I am proud to think that both their spirits live on in me, somehow.

Without her influence, I know I would have been a very, very different person. I am so grateful.

All of the above I told her while I sat with her quietly last Wednesday, holding her hand and stroking her hair. But I wish I had told her these things more often while I still had the privilege of being in her company.

So let this be a timely reminder for you, dear reader. Tell your loved ones you love them. They really won’t be here forever. Even though, in Ma’s case, it felt like she would be! I’m so glad Tom and I moved back to Australia when we did and that I got to spend lots of time with her these past few months. Those memories are now very precious indeed.

Happy 100th birthday Ma. As far as I’m concerned, you made it.

I will love you always.

***

Daphne Lucie Elizabeth Moore
11 May 1919 - 4 May 2019