logodædalus

I recently had the old riah zhooshed and idly inquired whether the cape around my shoulders had been shaken out since the last customer, as there appeared to be more than a few grey hairs down my front. Johann, the surly mitteleuropäisch barber, assured me that no, it was in fact all my own hair, and proceeded to point out exactly what bits of my scalp they came from. I may have made a rather undignified noise. It's now undeniable: I'm going grey at the temples. Now this by itself might not exactly be cause for concern, as I'm relatively certain that the sudden appearance of grey hair is not unconnected to stress. Nevertheless, there are other signa et portenta.

Nasal hair has become an Issue. Hangovers are becoming worse, and lasting a good day or so. My hairline is receding. Oddly, this only appears to be a problem on one side of my head (similarly, the aforementioned nasal hair problem affects only the left nostril. I am ageing lopsidedly.), although this could just be down to how I tend to part my hair. A chance remark by He Whom I Call Beloved, followed by much contortionism and a pair of mirrors, reveals that my hair is beginning to thin on the crown. The hair on my back and shoulders has become pelt-like, and I am forced to either shave my upper arms or refrain from wearing t-shirts. I desperately need to have my prescription updated, as my glasses are no longer helping me to see in the distance, and I suspect that my eyesight is now too poor to drive legally.

I shall refrain from listing the non-physical signs of ageing that I've noticed. Quite frankly, a raging intolerance for youth slang, fashion and music is just a part of the grumpy misanthropy that I have cultivated since I was twenty or so. I do feel old, though, when walking through the centre of town on Friday and Saturday nights. Clubbers are so young these days. And I swear that some bus drivers have obtained employment under false pretences: some of them don't look old enough to be in charge of a tricycle, let alone a sodding double-decker.

I am aware that this post is not without an element of chutzpah. Many (most?) of you dear and loyal readers are richer in years than I. Indeed, my husband, who is six years older than me, as bald as a billiard ball and sports a beard so streaked with grey that he appears to be speaking through a baby badger, has told me to stop being such a bloody drama queen. While tucking a nice tartan blanket around me and passing me my pipe and slippers.

I’ll confess: I dislike the summer.

In this, my twenty-eighth, I can finally say that I fail to see the point. Possibly, this is because for me the summer does not mean long, lazy days of inactivity on the beach, nor pleasant sojourns in shade-dappled forest glades. Summer is not when I jet off to foreign parts, to stroll along the quais of Saint-Tropez or to wander contentedly through the sun-warmed cobbled streets of picturesque Tuscan villages.

No. I live and work in a tourist town. Summer, to me, means endless days sweating in a sauna-like kitchen. Summer is when my working day begins before nine in the morning and doesn’t end until eleven in the evening. Summer is when I need a machete to clear my way through the hordes of babbling foreign students at the bus stop. Summer, to me, is not a time of growth, beauty and wonder; but rather of hard work and hardship, the time of scarcity before the harvest. I’ve often wondered if I have some kind of perversely inverted seasonal affective disorder, as most of my major bouts of depression have tended to occur during July and August.

Strangely, as well, during the summer I become less religious. I find it difficult to maintain the motivation for much more than my semi-regular dawn devotionals. At the same time, I find myself drawn more to esoterica: I think about myths and mythic structures, I find myself meditating more frequently. Recently, I’ve even started taking an interest in astrology, to the point of mapping out my own natal chart and attempting to interpret it. (I have a Sagittarius ascendant, with Jupiter in Sagittarius. Apparently this gives me a natural interest in religion. Who knew?) Perhaps this is because I find myself with little energy in my spare time, what with it all being expended at work, and so the “active” portions of my life tend to go on the back burner.

I much prefer spring and autumn. Autumn is when the harvest has been gathered in, both literally and metaphorically: it’s a time of plenty, when one can look back with satisfaction on a time of back-breaking work and think “thank fuck that’s all over,” and get on with the serious business of enjoying the fruits of one’s labours. Paradoxically, autumn to me also means the beginning of something new: perhaps this is a relic of my academic past, but I’ve always been comfortable with autumn being considered the start of the new year. So, while autumn marks an ending, it also shines with potential: for me, the “feel” of autumn is a combination of hope and melancholy which I’ve always felt to be my native emotional state. Spring, on the other hand, is a wonderful time, full of beauty and promise. As I have remarked before, it’s the time of year before everything goes to shit.

Nevertheless, we’ve passed the solstice, and the fire-wheel is now rolling downhill. It’ll all soon be over and September with its cool breezes will soon be upon us. Happy summer holidays everyone!

I fear, dear reader, that I have an alcohol problem. That I am, in fact, an alcoholic.

After twelve years working with and around the Devil’s Urine, coupled with what is termed “an addictive personality”, this is not a particular surprise. I’ve often reasoned with myself that I am not an alcoholic: I’m a drunk, alcoholics go to meetings, I don’t pour cornflakes on my vodka, I can stop any time I like, et cætera ad nauseam. However, the plain truth is that I have an abusive relationship with alcohol.

True, I don’t drink every day. I don’t wake up and reach for the whiskey, nor do I hide bottles of booze around the flat for surreptitious tippling. And I won’t drink while working: after all, I do have some instinct for self-preservation and impaired motor control while dealing with naked flames and incredibly sharp objects is something of a liability. I burn and cut myself enough by accident when I’m sober, and I dread to think what I would be like after a few pints. So I don’t fit the profile of your classic alcoholic.

My problem is a lack of control around alcohol. As an example, I generally have “a drink after work”. Now, given that the kitchen at The Bear closes at nine, one would expect me to have had one pint and then be on the bus home by ten. Instead, I generally have three or four pints and only leave when the pub closes. When I was at O’Murphy’s, it was not unusual for me to go for a drink after work and not get home until five the following morning. Even further back, when I was working at the chippy, a “swift half” after work ended up with me on a park bench in the snow at six in the morning, swigging rum straight from the bottle and spending the following day in hospital on a morphine drip for alcohol poisoning.

Of course, I could be blowing things out of all proportion, as normal. As I’ve learnt to deal with being bipolar, the tendency to self-medicate and the irresponsibility associated with periods of mania have become less severe. I no longer habitually pick up a bottle of wine to consume on my way home from work, for example, and I am (slowly) beginning to recognise when I’ve had too much and it’s time to go home. This concern, this sudden epiphany that I am an alcoholic could just be yet another tool my psyche has found that I can beat myself up with.

Something that my psychiatrist once noted is that there’s a somewhat fundamental tension in my personality, an opposition between hedonism and ascetism. Don’t get me wrong, I like booze. A good wine, ale or whiskey is a pleasure, in much the same way as a good meal is, or ogling an attractive man. However, at the same time there is this revulsion for all of the above, this gnawing, flesh-hating guilt which inevitably follows indulgence in any of the above. I tend not to suffer from hangovers, simply a sense of torpor conmingled with a really miserable guilt.

So, perhaps I’m “an alcoholic”, or perhaps just fucked up. Not sure what to do with that, however. I think that twelve-stepping, support groups and abstinence might be precipitate at the moment, treating the symptoms rather than the causes. I’m going to go read about Breton soundchanges in order to distract myself, I think.

Sorry.

It’s work’s fault, of course. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying it, but I’ve really had to hit the ground running. All these bank holidays, the recent nice weather and the slow build-up of the summer season have all conspired to make me rather work-focused, to the detriment of the rest of my life.

However, as I don’t want this blog to degenerate into a sequence of bitter rants about the life of a chef, I’ve decided not to post about what’s happening to me at the moment in my everyday life. You don’t want to read about my irritating commis or our ongoing quest for a reliable KP. Nor, I suspect, do you want to read self-pitying whining about my mental health and my husband’s seemingly interminable bankruptcy proceedings. It’d be like a really depressing “real lives” section from Closer! magazine.

In lieu of actually writing substantial posts, what I’ve been doing is jotting down ideas for future blogposts, to be written when I regain some energy and motivation (i.e. September). Aside from things I’ve already set up and need to continue (like the conception of Lugus thing), I’m plotting a few posts about some of my favourite languages, both real and invented: Dalmatian, Romansh and Romani on the one hand, Tailancan and Dravean on the other. A post about oaths and oathbreaking in the context of ritual purity (were it an article for publication, I’d title it something grand like “Towards a Celtic reconstruction of miasma”). Something about Romance philology and why I find it quite so fascinating. Maybe a few recipes. Some anecdotes about my time as a drunken, drug-addled bacchant. I’m not sure yet. I wouldn’t expect anything soon, however, as I really don’t know when I’m going to wake up on a day off with sufficient energy to get dressed before three, let alone actually write anything.

We are the passengers of the last bus.

You’ll recognise us, if you’ve ever been out for a night on the town and then caught the final bus home. We’re not the loud, lairy drunks. We’re not the neat boys on stag dos, all dressed the same in striped long-sleeve shirts, jeans and polished slip-on shoes, nor are we their sluttily-dressed hen party counterparts.

We’re the tired-looking, blank-faced ones. We don’t smell of too much aftershave, but more likely of sweat. Half of us will be dressed in black shirts and trousers: as frigid and bitter as the last of Mussolini’s fascists.

We’re the ones that have poured your drinks, cooked your food and waited on your tables all night. For you it’s the week-end, for us the start of the working week. We look down on all of you, sneering the sneer of the sober in face of the inebriated.

We’re the unfortunates of the hospitality industry, and god help the lot of us.

~~~~

That particularly bleak image came to me a few nights ago as I was coming home from work. The last bus, the bus I’ve been catching for the past eleven years, always evokes a curious mixture of pride and melancholy in me. It’s always a somewhat soulless journey, as those going home from work try desperately to maintain their dignity and personal space in face of the final cargo of pissheads. Generally, we really don’t want to talk to anybody, particularly not customers who might recognise us. Sometimes, however, the façade slips and humanity reaches out to humanity in joint commiseration and triumph.

In this area of the country, people are not prone at the best of times to strike up conversation with random strangers on the bus. I remember shortly after moving down here as a kid and my mother, used to the slightly more garrulous passengers of Wales and the Midlands, tried to make polite conversation with people on the bus. Invariably, people would shift uncomfortably and change seats. Conversely, I recall how uncomfortable I was when I moved back to Wales at the age of nineteen and people tried to talk to me on the bus. A few nights ago, however, I broke from my customary reserve.

A guy in a t-shirt, roughly the same age as me, sat down heavily on the seat next to me. To put it gently, he smelt rather “ripe”, and I tried to breathe more shallowly. Then I looked down at his arms. Like mine, they were covered in scalds, burns and cuts. Gently, dear reader, I murmured “So, chef, had a busy night?”

And so we struck up a conversation. The normal kind that chefs tend to have among themselves: we spoke of places we’ve worked, compared notes on chefs who we’ve worked with, established common ground. We swapped horror stories of difficult tables and impossible waiters, moaned about the pay and hours of our profession. Then we talked about how we got into the trade in the first place. In both our cases, the answer was “by accident”. Turns out that my new-found friend on the bus had an MA in Computer Animation.

This is more common than you might think. My own sorrowful story of an academic manqué is hardly unique. Very few people choose the trade as their first option: most of us have an escape plan, dreams of what we’d rather be doing. Indeed, the waiter who’s actually a “resting” actor is a well-established trope of popular culture. We all tell ourselves that one day our ship will come in, that we’ll finally get out of the trade for good and finally be who we “really” are.

So why do people actually get into the trade in the first place, and why don’t more leave? As to the second: they do. The hospitality industry has an incredibly high staff turnover. Bar staff in particular are largely transient employees. Nevertheless, there’s always a core of lifers: those who have been in the industry for decades and, in spite of their grand plans and fervent self-delusion, will be in the industry decades hence. I live in perpetual fear of becoming one of them.

The answer to the first is more difficult. For many of us, it was simply an accident of fate. In my own case, it all stems from taking a “summer job” as a dishwasher when I was fifteen or so. I often wonder what might have happened had I learnt to ride a bike and gotten a paper round instead. Some of us just fall into it by default. We drop out of school, or fail our GCSEs, or get told to by our probation officer, and end up doing a GNVQ in catering thinking it’ll be a soft option (indoor work, not much heavy lifting, etc.) A lot of us are running from something. Of course, many of us tell ourselves that it’s only for the interim. We might even try getting a “proper job” outside the trade and discover that we’re far too maladjusted to cope in the real world (ahem.)

The more puzzling cases are those who have “re-skilled”, coming from occupations outside the trade. Those journalists and investment analysts one reads about in the Sunday papers who have decided to retrain as chefs, or to run quaint country pubs. They’re frequently foodies, or real ale enthusiasts. They rarely last more than a few years: they realise that it’s a hell of a lot more work than managing the accounts of Dunkington, Blithely and Smithwick.

When I got home that evening, I finished off editing one of the essays I’m going to submit to Oxford and began to think about what I’m going to write for my “statement of purpose”. That’s my exit plan, and I intend on giving it my best shot. Hedging my bets, though, I still did a cost analysis of the weekend’s specials...

In retrospect, it is lucky that I did not throw away my whites when I got the job at the Bakery, as I was counselled to by my relatives.

On Friday, I went in for a trial shift at a pub just down the road from where I worked at the Bakery. It became rapidly apparent to me that I am badly out of shape. The last time I’d worked in a professional kitchen was exactly six months and one week previously, and I’ve lost my edge: my feet were in agony by the end of the shift, I was having trouble coping with the heat, the callus on my right forefinger where the spine of a knife rests has completely worn away, making repetitive chopping somewhat painful.

Nevertheless, they offered me the job at the end of the shift, on excellent terms. Both the money and the hours are better than I had at the Bakery- something I shall point out with not a little glee to those who expressed disappointment that I had left a “proper job” in order to get back into the hospitality industry. The shift patterns are somewhat more in line with my taste and constitution as well. No longer will I have to be up at sparrow-fart, nor do I now have to stick to a bedtime that a five year old would balk at. The food is good, too. Virtually everything prepared from fresh on the premises, which is a delight after O’Murphy’s. About 60% of the menu there came out of microwavable pouch, which becomes dispiriting after a while- “a while” being approximately half an hour.

So I was offered the job, took it eagerly and went back the following day for twelve hours of intensive induction. Now, when one’s most strenuous activities over the past couple of months have been deciding what novel to read today, a sudden twelve-hour jag on the busiest day of the week is something like a bullet to the back of the head. Sunday saw me utterly exhausted. I met my father on Sunday evening for a celebratory drink and he asked me in all seriousness if I’d been in a fight, the dark circles under my eyes were so bad.

Still, it was a tiring week anyway, without being suddenly plunged back into the fiery inferno of professional chefdom. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Cambridge visiting Bo, and had a fantastic time. We did discourse learnedly upon dyuers matters most recondite (read: we got smashed over an excellent dinner with his friend Melanie and Christina Harrington of Treadwells, both of whom are utterly lovely). However, coach travel is utterly odious, and much of Thursday was spent sleeping the previous two days off.

So that’s that. I’m back in the trade. Once more I am a chef, knowing full well that it’s not what I want to be in the long term. Ach, the things we must do to survive...