I’m grateful for.. (🍝 Italian food edition)

Some thoughts & recommendations to start your weekend

🤤

I’m grateful that a piece I wrote about Italian food was published this week. I’m grateful to have had the chance to write about my love of the cuisine, and how it is changing due to migration patterns, demographic trends and climate change.

I’m grateful that the sadness which accompanied my birthday has (mostly) passed. The day I was born is obviously special to me, but it was even more momentous for my mother who birthed her first child just as an IRA bomb exploded in Enniskillen, killing 11 people.

I’m grateful not to have been swallowed whole by grief, though it lingers enough that when the cafe where I had my birthday breakfast played this song, I started to cry. I’m grateful that it unlocked a memory of my mother singing it, decades before maybe in the kitchen or the car or the supermarket. I’m grateful for all the small memories I have of her, memories which are unhooked from any big occasion but which pounce on me as I go about daily life. 

I’m grateful for the love I felt this week, alongside the sadness and for the ways that sorrow deepens your experience of the world even if that is very annoying to admit. (Maybe I should read this book.) I am grateful for the kind messages I received, and to the people who decided to pay for this newsletter which made me tear up all over again. 

I’m grateful to have more peace on the horizon both inside myself and on my calendar. I’m grateful that my body survived another year, and for the bodies of my mother and grandmother who, in so many ways, made my life possible. 

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Recommendations

🎁 Happy Substack birthday to

Aisling Walsh

who writes a great newsletter about neurodivergence in cinema & so much more.

🎧 I’m not a ‘depleted mother’ but I got a lot from this.

🫙 Was ‘influneced’ to buy this and no regrets! Excellent on pancakes.

📚“A good story moves. It glides and slithers like an octopus in a way that is unexpected yet inevitable.” A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future.

📺 We’re getting into peak TV season and I’m looking forward to so many things, including this, this and this.