28 October 2023 | Vol 2 Issue 31
I've been having radiotherapy. If I were a radio, I would be depressed too, what with all the love podcasts get. Sorry. Couldn't resist.
I've been having radiotherapy. As a little treat to myself, after being toasted, I took myself out for a late breakfast. Specifically, I took myself out for a helping of pan con tomate. To a different cafe each day. There are many ways to get this dish wrong.
Like its perfect cousin hummus, the Spanish breakfast — or merienda, an afternoon snack between lunch and dinner — pan con tomate consists of only a few ingredients. For it to "work" they have to combine in perfect harmony. It is the taste of summer. Think Thirteen by Big Star made flavour. (I was tempted to go with Jonathon Richman's That Summer Feeling but that would have been a tad too obvious, and it has an air of nostalgia backwards looking, not forwards looking anticipation. Or The Underdog Project’s Summer Jam, but pan con tomate is such an innocent dish and the video to this is a little… ripe).
The thing about radiotherapy is it gets you thinking. Rather, it donates time, allowing much thought. I got to thinking about pan con tomate, and how you could utilise it as a metaphor for life. You can of course play this game with any dish made of sparse ingredients. Hummus, pizza, aioli, French onion soup (ignoring making the stock of course, just as we're ignoring making the bread).
But pan con tomate is the mother. Pretty sure they were spreading tomato on their toast long before someone said "hey, why don’t we render a shit load of onions down over the course of three hours in a copper pan, so we can make a soup". I am happy to accept hummus in any head-of-the-family type of role, but it's not on the list of readily available vegan breakfast dishes in the cafes on my island, whereas pan con tomate is. In fact it's the only thing on the menu meeting that criteria. Once you've removed the ham that often comes with it, obviously.
White bread. A tomato, grated. Olive oil. Salt.
Garlic*.
Before starting a culture war the dish is really pa amb tomàquet, in Catalan. It's toasted (no more toast puns from here on in) as the region's signature dish, and not the Chupa Chups as often proclaimed. Although, I bet you didn't know that Salvador Dalí designed the lolly's logo.
3% olive oil
2% salt
15% tomato
80% bread
Toast the bread, ideally white, which should be sliced thinly. The toasting is essential for two reasons. To act as a Maillard reaction induced barrier, stopping the bread from becoming soggy too quickly, and to give the crumb a hard, coarse texture, as if a grater. Allowing the extremely controversial move of rubbing a clove of garlic over the toast.
Grate the tomato, skin on, and serve in a little bowl, along with the olive oil and salt.
Combine. That's it.
Here's what I got to thinking. The layers are pretty much like life.
Bread. This is the stuff we have to do. Work. Laundry. Eating sandwiches at your desk. An obvious metaphor would be money. As in, you know, bread. I'm resisting that. I'm thinking of our old friend Søren Kierkegaard, and his Ethical stage of life. Shit you have to do if you don't want to end up broke, or in prison, in hospital, or living in a cave with a really long scraggly beard. Have you noticed how women don't tend to end up as hermits? Eighty percent of our time is spent on making sure we don't smell, the rent of the grotto is paid up, no wearing of tatters, and having cereal in the cupboard. Social obligation and self maintenance.
Tomato. The fun stuff. Getting wasted. Watching Netflix. Hobbies, chilling, chasing whores, fishing. Whatever. Kierkegaard's the Aesthetic, if you will. Please note Søren was a humourless killjoy (see on heartbreak) and I doubt he would agree with me.
Olive oil. Money. Yes I know I could have used salt, given the word salary derives from the Latin sal meaning salt, and then salarium, a Roman soldier's allowance of the rationed salt he could purchase. But I'm going for the greasing-the-wheels type simile. Three percent money? I can't survive on that! When I say money I really mean prophylactic. Savings. Piggybank. Plan B.
We spend a small percentage of our time making allowances for when things go Pete Tong. This is neither the dealing with the day-to-day, or the kicking back. It's stuff that hasn't happened yet, and may never will. But it still figures in our plans. The fiver in our shoe on a night out.
A side note that the bread and tomato have their own self contained budgets. Most of us have a wage, we know how much money we're due, and what our running costs are. It's allocated and spent before the wage packet hits our accounts. Almost all of what's left we squander most meaningfully on having fun, and buying unnecessary shirts/shoes, depending on your gender.
So this is money in its pure sense, money that remains money, unconverted. There for the unseen.
Which leaves salt itself. The actual unseen.
Change.
Unpredictability.
We try to avoid change, thinking life should be stable. A stable system is an inert system. One incapable of growing. The standard model in dealing with change is to try and return to the previous situation. "I just wish things would go back to how they were". We aren't being honest here, are we? When it's a change we want, getting married, moving to a bigger apartment, we don't see it as change, we think improvement.
But change is change. It's how we adapt to it, how we grow, that determines our judgement on it. I'll be the first to admit that when promoting change, radiotherapy isn't a number one recommendation. Some things you can wish without. But life isn't like that. It doesn't care. A mountain isn't good or bad, change isn't either. It simply is, like a mountain. Tying together mountains and radiotherapy is the sort of thinking having too much time brings you.
Unpredictability is essential, the two percent salt is a requirement for maintenance, let alone growth. Without it, we don't flex to our full range, max out our capabilities, air our dusty corners, boot our stand-by modes, strengthen our back-up systems.
Mind you this is all very ironic. I haven't been eating salt for months. I look longing at that little white packet, sitting coyly on the edge of the plate. Rack me a line. No. Bad for me. Given it up, etc. I've been forgoing one-of-the-four every breakfast. Until yesterday.
Recently, my morning has started with having my blood pressure taken, as part of entry requirements for Hyperbaric treatment, no less. When suddenly, yesterday, it turned out I don't suffer from isolated diastolic hypertension at all. I am just extremely bad at reading a blood pressure monitor. So sprinkling unpredictable salt across my pan con tomate is back on the menu. Take that isolated diastolic hypertension.
To help accept change as necessary, let's do some reframing, and make us welcome it for the ally it is. If we view it like we do being ill... stasis, change, getting back to normal, we're locked in a false cycle.
This is change as intervention and looks like this:
equilibrium, disorder, re-equilibrium.
A backwards looking cycle.
Thinking of events like leaving the parental nest, or marrying, we cast these as acceptingly moving forward into a new reality. This is better, but still false. Treat unpredictability as a conversation. An ongoing conversation.
While thinking this post through (yes, I do think them through, thank you), slash eating pan con tomate, I reached this point and floundered a little. Then remembered an excellent post on Instagram from Brad Stulberg, where he coins the phrase: order, disorder, re-order.
He's right. But I want to push a little further. This implies a starting line. Starting lines imply a finishing line. Not a conversation.
We start life as a baby, become a toddler, a child, a teen. We are constantly changing. We don't stop changing, although our perception of it does. Somehow equating no more growth upwards in height — and lots of ignoring growing outwards in girth — with stability.
Becoming "an adult" is just another step from birth. There is no original order at the get go (shall we make a New Order joke?). Everything is already morphing. So I would like to rephrase Stulberg's excellent maxim as:
re-order, disorder, re-order.
We are thrown into chaos, we navigate, onto seas of more chaos. Today is not static. Tomorrow won't be. Unless you're in an artificial environment such as hospital or prison. At the moment you are already re-ordering what yesterday brought you.
Re-order, disorder, re-order.
Embrace change as your friend, keep growing. Inertia is death.
Master of Change by Brad Stulberg | Buy here
I haven't read it yet, but being bold, I'm going to recommend it. I've just popped a copy on the Kobo. Also being honest, I most likely won't read it all the way through. Simply because I'm already a convert. But given I've just pinched his key phrase I owe him a purchase. Thank you Brad.
His Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/bradstulberg/. Go follow. His website, www.bradstulberg.com
Let's end with a poetic quote from Albert Camus's The Fall. I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
🥖🍅
This week featured
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa_amb_tom%C3%A0quet
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I write for me predominantly, but it is nice knowing it’s read by more people than just my mum.
shill
A person engaged in covert advertising. The shill attempts to spread buzz by personally endorsing the product in public forums with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he is being paid for his services.
Who are you shilling for?
by strangedaze April 28, 2005 1
Could I ask, in a self shillin’ sorta way, that you forward this edition, or visit consumeandenjoy.substack.com and share a suitable post with a friend, an ex, a colleague, or even a frenemy — sending it to an actual enemy, is I think giving wrong vibes — who you think might consume, and indeed, enjoy it.
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References
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shill
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
Catalans claim this as their own but I think everyone knows it was God, who actually invented it
excellent ... and The Mount Erica Hotel does a pretty good panzanella too!