As much as, over the way, we’re re-living my fun-packed, vomit-drenched ayahuasca experiences, there’s still a lot of ground to cover in the ongoing saga of ALL MY PAIN. I get no relief from this, so why should you? Hmmm?
However, there is to be some respite for you, Patient Reader, largely because my memory of the few days after I start medication is proper fucked. I’ll give you a minute to look up that complex medical jargon.
In the interests of completeness, however, this is what I remember, or have been able to piece together:
Thursday
Takes on nightmarish qualities. In everyone’s haste to make sure I’m not on my own for a single minute, people lose sight of the fact that it’s probably not *that* good an idea for me to have FIVE consecutive people ‘on duty’ in a single day. It’s totally overwhelming and my already-strained brain started to collapse in on itself. I had expressed my sudden, unprecedented loneliness to all and sundry. This has been interpreted as “I cannot be alone”. And I understand how it happened, but all of a sudden I was the archetype of “lonely in a crowded room”. And it’s a room where people keep fucking moving my stuff around, unasked.
So, on and on they come. These well-meaning friends. In 3-hour shifts or so. Some seeing me for the first time and pouring their grief out onto me. I’m already overflowing with my own; I have nowhere to put theirs. I suspect this is why my mind is so full of holes over this period – it had the space for their outpourings, just not the capacity – so only blanks remain.
There’s a sense that I should be grateful, that much manoeuvring is being done behind the scenes to enable this. The WhatsApp group that I’d set up to match my disparate friends up – so they had a single source of information – has become bloated, unwieldy. I expect everyone walking through the door to know the minutiae of the previous 48 hours. Instead, I find myself having to explain basic things over and over again. “Sorry, there’s so much noise in the chat, I must have missed that” is their constant refrain. I’m so frustrated, so fucking tired, but feel so ungracious. The phone rings and vibrates on and on, with EMPs, with friends, with so many words.
I see my boss. She is amazing; horrorstruck. We meet in a cafe across the road from me and I watch her face fall into shapes that are now familiar: the initial pleasure of seeing me, to concern, to beseeching, bargaining, to shocked, to horrified, to lost, despairing.
This is the trajectory that everyone goes along as they’re confronted with the stark way in which I can rationalise my decision to kill myself. I can (but don’t, unless pushed) list every method on the Certainty/Agony Suicide Matrix and give a detailed, clear-eyed evaluation of each and why it’s not an option, for now. But that my time here is no longer a certainty. And my preference is to go, I just can’t work out how. Yet. People never stop looking scared when I do it. So I really try not to. I’m nothing if not a people pleaser; I hate to see the look in their eyes as they become disappointed in me and in themselves as they realise the lady’s not for turning.
This is, apparently, the night that Angharad and I eat the kebabs. Again, I remember a wrapper, but little else.
Friday
Literally nothing remains. Thursday took everything I had. I’m sure there was a further flurry of people. Whoever you were: I love you, but I have forgotten you, along with everything else that day.
Saturday
I remember fragments of this. The most surprising part of that is that I cooked for and ate dinner with 4 other people. I’d expect more of that to touch the sides, but it hasn’t, really.
Tonight is one of the more surreal evenings since the start of The Crisis. For many years, I have hosted an event called Eat Til You Puke (ETYP). I’ve lost count of how many there have been – it’s either 11 or 12 – if anyone can remind me if there was one in 2015, I’d be grateful.
ETYP originated waaaaaaaay back in 2007. There was a Nigella Lawson recipe for Greek lamb stew, with quantities for 10 people, that I wanted to make.
In fact, here’s Nigella herself, a little sweetener for you all who’ve committed this far.
Rather than halve the quantities and feed a more manageable fivesome, I invited 9 of my friends (well, 8 plus my boyfriend at the time – the reason for this blog’s existence – Voldemontfort). It only occurred to me about 4 years ago, when explaining the origin of ETYP to someone, that reducing the quantities would have been an option. To be honest, I never regard reducing the quantities as an option when it comes to food. The similarities end there but, just like Nigella, I’m Never Knowingly Undercatered.
So it’s 2007 and, with 9 people on their way round, I make enough food for at least 15. It’s everywhere. There’s basically an entire buffet as a starter (if you can eat it, it’s probably there), then the stew, then sticky toffee apple crumble. With a Gu chocolate pudding for Voldemontfort, that unutterably fussy eater. Wanker.
And we fill our faces. And I fill my face the most. After everyone has left, I feel utterly bilious. There’s no other word for it. I might as well be an Edwardian gentleman, so portly and stuffed am I. Voldemontfort suggests a walk, but I cannot move. Not a muscle. I lie down for 20 minutes and then realise I have consumed more food than I can contain.
And I puke my guts up.
Voldemontfort is (probably justifiably) revolted. I remain convinced, even as I write, that this was a contributing factor in his dispatching me to singledom mere months later.
And every year since then, I have the same group of people round for Eat Til You Puke (minus Voldemontfort, obviously. There are limits). We’ve swollen in number over the years, as people have coupled-up and where other friends have entered the rotation by happy accident. We’ve been 16 more than once and I love the logistical challenge of feeding that many people from a 4-ring hob and a single oven. So far, so good. Distressingly, I think there have only been 3 pukers in all that time. I’d say I’d try harder, but ETYP 2021 is no foregone conclusion. Carry it on in my honour, kids. Go puke on my grave, with my blessing.
However, Lockdown has left us sorely diminished this year. I do intend to carry on the tradition though. Cooking should, at least, shake my mind from its regular rotation of The Guy and Suicide vs Agony. We meet: Dominique, Flick, Nadiya, Hash and I. Nadiya and Hash are new ETYP attendees; it felt too much of a strain to leave just Flick and Dominique to keep the conversational ball rolling, so I bring in reinforcements.
And I can’t remember a thing about it. I know there was food, because there was half a chicken wrapped in foil in my fridge the following day. (There were 2 chickens. Only a madwoman would serve 1 chicken to 5 people. And I may well be a madwoman, but I am also a feeder.) But it’s another blank otherwise. It took me a good 5 minutes of concentration to remember what pudding was, but, if you ever want to repeat this strange, sad, forgettable night, we ate:
An array of cooked meats, some parmesan, some olives, probably some other stuff. This seems scant to me, but is all I can remember.
This legendary Diana Henry recipe.for Chicken with Orzo
Skip this part if you have no interest in the most delicious chicken you’ll ever eat in your life
Although, permit me to change the way you roast a chicken forever. Take your chicken (and I have a perverse love of taking a sad, supermarket chicken and giving it a sendoff way beyond the expectations of its brief, unhappy life, but you may feel differently and have a glorious organic bird in front of you. Either is good and both will shortly become magnificent).
Do everything you would normally do a chicken before you put it in the oven (and do the same if you’re following the above recipe). Turn your oven to its highest setting (but no higher than 250 degrees centigrade, just in case you happen to have a blast furnace in your kitchen). Put your chicken in a roasting tin, on a rack. DO NOT FORGET THE RACK. Otherwise you’ll have to lift a very hot chicken out of a very hot pan in a little while. Burning and swearing will undoubtedly ensue. And that’s no way to start cooking a chicken.
So, put your chicken on its rack, in the roasting tin and into the oven at no more than 250 degrees centigrade for 20 minutes. SET A TIMER. DO NOT FORGET ABOUT YOUR CHICKEN. (These won’t be the last bossy caps, I’m doing this for your own good, believe me.)
After 20 mins, take the chicken out and reduce the oven temperature to 120 degrees centigrade. Whilst your oven cools, pour 500ml of stock (chicken or veg) and some wine (if you feel like it) in the bottom of the roasting tin. You can use water if you’re not planning to make gravy, you just need the liquid in there to make sure your chicken doesn’t dry out. Chuck anything else you might want to in there.
Now tent the whole thing in foil. Tightly. So no air can get in. I AM NOT FUCKING AROUND HERE, PEOPLE. TIGHT. The roasting tin will likely still be hot. Don’t burn yourself. Use oven gloves. These are the best ones, buy 2 and thank me later. BE CAREFUL. BUT NOT SO CAREFUL THAT YOU LET AIR IN.
Stick the chicken back in at 120 degrees centigrade for 3 hours. You can watch 3/4 of Gone With The Wind whilst you wait. Or The Lost Boys twice. Whichever.
You can actually leave it in longer if you need. I’ve had it in 4 1/2 hours, so I can’t vouch for any longer than that, but why on earth would you possibly need to cook a chicken 5 hours or more? Take a look at yourself, ffs.
Once you’re half an hour from eating, take the chicken out. Untent it. Breathe in its chickeny deliciousness. Whack your oven back to full heat (again, no more than 250 degrees centigrade, you renegades) and put it back in for 10 minutes, uncovered. SET A TIMER. DO NOT FORGET ABOUT YOUR CHICKEN. Check it. Decide if you want to give it another 10 minutes for further skin-crispening. If so, SET A TIMER. DO NOT FORGET ABOUT YOUR CHICKEN. Then take it out, use the foil to tent it again as you let it rest.
ALWAYS LET ROASTED MEAT REST FOR AT LEAST 10 MINUTES BEFORE SERVING. I can’t believe I have to tell you people this, but these are the times we are living in.
Oh and learn to carve. No-one can carve nowadays. And, at time of writing, no-one is exactly time-poor. Do it. It’ll make you a better person.
OK, Chicken chat over for now
And pudding was this white chocolate cheesecake, the one from Blacklock
I actively avoid white chocolate, and cheesecake probably falls outside my top 10 puddings, although, for the record, no-one makes better cheesecake than my friend Ffion. Anyway, in spite of this, I would crawl over hot coals sprinkled with broken glass to eat the white chocolate cheesecake from Blacklock.
And that’s all I have to say about Saturday. Not much of which had much to do with Saturday 24th October 2020, but it’s probably a day best forgotten, all told.
Sunday
My friends Ben and Mark (my London Gay BFFs. I’d like to say they’re in a blood feud against my NY BFFs, but it’s all quite civilised) come round. I don’t remember this, but Mark cleaned the bathroom, for something to do, so I know they were definitely here. We probably ate leftover cheesecake. And I almost certainly cried all day. Thanks, lads.
Monday
Ben comes with me to register for a GP. I very, very dimly remember this, but only because I read that he was there in a WhatsApp message and have a faint recollection of him in a face mask beside me in reception. As I recall, we were there just after the surgery opened. That’s an early start for our chap Bendo. Full marks, that man. This time, my +1 is challenged, but as soon as I mention that I’m suicidal, all rules are suspended and he’s allowed to stay.
I’m registered immediately, I have a phone consultation with a GP within a couple of hours – at which time I pour out ALL MY PAIN, once more – and her referral letter is awaiting my collection by noon. In this time, AXA PPP will have achieved the square root of fuck all, despite having over a week’s head start. God bless the NHS and all that sail in her.
And that seems as good a place as any to stop. Fear not, I start to remember WAY MORE soon. Buckle up…
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