food and writing

Food and writing


I have a love/hate relationship with writing. And food. I love writing but it’s always really frustrating, because I can never quite convey what’s in my noggin. Some people think in words, they are writers. Others think in pictures, they are artists. I think in like concepts, if that makes any sense. I think in a really general sense, random colours and feelings and smells. It’s so hard to get it into English. The majority is lost in translation.


Its like when I have an idea, my head fills with this purple goo. It’s just like the stuff in a lava lamp, just like that! (Where did all the lava lamps go?) So its there in my noggin, and I try to let it out. When I pick up a pen, or go to type or draw its like a little grid opens behind my eyes in my brain, so the purple goo can drip down behind my eyes, down my neck, across my shoulder and down my arm through the veins. This is a slow process because of the viscous nature of the metaphoric goo. So it’s slowly making its way down my arm, creeping along like lava down a slight slope, or custard down the side of a bowl.
The thing is though, the tunnels it’s travelling down get thinner and thinner. They branch off and go nowhere, curl back around, stop in random bulges. By the time it gets to my fingertips only a smallest tiny drips come out.

I guess the only bodily function I can compare it to, without threading on some very dodgy ground, would be needing to sneeze and being interrupted. You still have the tingle in your nose with none of the satisfaction of the sneeze. (I do enjoy a good sneeze)

So every time I go to write I seem to get more and more back clog of purple goo. The pressure builds, my arms swells and one day it will explode purple stuff everywhere.

Yeah, anyway I couldn’t even convey that idea with the same vividness that is in my head. Very frustrating.

In a lot of ways food and writing are similar. They are both sources of extreme pleasure in our lives. They are both ways we have attempted to reach out to other individuals in our lives and try to connect with them. We break bread, we write love letters, we buy boxes of chocolates for our sweet hearts, and we write away our broken hearts.

If writing and food are comparable then blogging, or prose is definitely a big plate of beans, chips and sausages from a cafeteria; satisfying, fulfilling, and never needs a lot of preparation.

On the other end of the spectrum I guess would be the type of writing with loads of rules. Haikus are definitely sushi. Not just as a general Asian theme but the whole thing, the presentation, preparation, pretention?

I think sushi is just a very expensive way to have very little food. But maybe my tastes aren’t refined enough.

"The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then..."
- Roger Mc Gough

Unruly poetry were you throw rhyming schemes to the wind and just write, that is definitely chocolate covered strawberries.

They say less is more, but less isn’t more that’s why they are different words with opposite meanings. You can have too much of one good thing, but you can’t have too much of good things, and with the variety writing and food leaves you; you could never really get bored!

(Food critics must be the happiest people on earth..eating and then writing about it!)

When it comes to food and writing I’d rather be a big woman than a little girl any day, so I shant be stopping with either!