Notebook

Fragments, essays and field notes

  • Shepherd’s pie

    For reasons I may never go into, I’ve been back and forth to my parents’ house in Greater Manchester for the past year or so, living there for months at a time. Every time I returned to the vicarage, they’d cook my favourite: sheppy.

    I can taste it now. Mum or Dad peeling the potatoes. Baked beans mixed into the mince — unorthodox, but right. The Pyrex dish waiting for the oven to do the Lord’s work. My plate garnished with pickled beetroot and lashings of HP sauce. Two people quietly making room for me again. Me, eating sheppy with the same useless gratitude, unable to say much beyond how good it always is.

  • Tunnels

    Tunnels

    I heard the tunnels knocking after midnight. “The Northern line is the loudest,” I said. I always say that. There were only one or two other people in our carriage; the country was still in lockdown.

    We sat opposite each other, speaking loudly through our masks. When the masks fell we’d fix them back in place. Our eyes did most of the talking when the trembling tracks filled the carriage. Your eyes were like doves.

    You spoke of how you’d check your work again once you got home. If you noticed a mistake, you’d log back in and correct it. Those words gave me comfort, coming from you. Your conversation was sweetness itself.

    I find consolation in how newspapers work, news websites even more so. In print, the second edition provides an opportunity to correct mistakes. Online, a story can be republished with tweaks. Every given moment, we’re given another chance.

    You rose for your stop, said goodnight. Safe travels. You went down into some other draughty corridor, to home, to sleep.

    This post includes references to the Song of Songs 5-6

  • Ghost in the machine

    Ghost in the machine

    I almost forgot to look away as the doctor drew my blood. Then she checked my heart.

    “It’s quite fast,” she said. “But that’s probably because of your journey here, based on what you’ve told me. You took the Tube?”

    The NHS GP on my street had a two-week waiting list — to speak over the phone. The private GP saw me the day I called. She was based in a skyscraper.

    I was desperate for answers. Why did I feel unbalanced on the Tube? And then in crowds? How was this physical sensation a symptom of anxiety? It was surely going to be too much for a blood test to answer.*

    Outside the skyscraper, I realised I hadn’t eaten. I ate a banana by the side of the road and felt better. Then I took the Tube home.

    Days later, I took a guided tour of the west side of Highgate cemetery, built by the Victorians to keep the bodies far away from central London. In the terrace catacombs, those feelings returned. I leaned to my left as the ground swallowed me up. I couldn’t help but see the dark humour in it as the shelves of coffins propped up my body.

    *It was.