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I planned to start the year with a piece of writing that would set the tone for the months ahead. Something, perhaps, that was blisteringly optimistic and a blueprint of what’s to come. I think that’s many peoples’ ambition in whatever they do.

But optimism has never been a currency I’ve traded well in, as most of the people around me can attest to. My idea of happy music is miserable to most, notably my dad (“what is this dirge?!” and “god I’m depressed listening to this” some of his most recent analyses over Christmas). And as we’ve established, it’s the cooler, fallow seasons I find most respite in.

So sadness and the sentimental is territory familiar to me and to all of you, who have been reading and suffering along with me these past months. And while a new year might beckon a change, such a drastic overhaul in mood remains a step too far. Beginning the year with a piece that sets up some of the writing I want to share and explore more with you, however, is not.

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. I wrote about this a while ago in a small piece for a magazine (Potluck, lovely for food essays) and some of you may have even read it. For those of you that haven’t, which I imagine is most of you, I thought I’d bring some writing back from the archives at this dawn of a new year.

It might seem counterintuitive to some. After all, people often encourage you to not look back, but that’s all I really do on here. I find there’s a lot of power and comfort to be taken from things that have happened, when you can look at them from a distance but not linger.

So it seemed fitting on these days of all days, that a little retrospection was in order, just over a decade since my grandmother passed.

I’ve always felt strange about writing about peoples passing, like you’re trying to squeeze one last bit of life out of them for your own worth. But that wasn’t what this piece was.

I never spent as much time as I would’ve liked with my grandparents, who both died in the space of months – one from age, one from realising they were going to have to age without the other.

So when they both passed, and my grandmother in particular, it took my a while to consider how I could memorialise them when I felt like I didn’t know them as well I should have.

Around a decade after their deaths, I was commissioned to write an article centred around snacks. I found myself thinking of all the snacks I loved. Having come back from the UK recently, I began remembering all the ones I used to look forward to when I visited as a kid. The first ones that came to mind were Flakes: a kind of crumbly chocolate I learned to love and ones my grandmother (and grandfather) used to give to me.

The story, which I’ve included below in its fully unabridged version, meant a lot to me. It’s a tribute to both of them and something that felt like closure. Not in the sense that I was saying goodbye, but more like I was saying hello again; a reminder of what lingered when I looked back.

In some ways, we’re always waiting for grief to happen. It is after all, a certainty. When you’re at the beginning of experiencing grief, the idea that it continues is hard to bear. But we find ways to tender to that grief, reshape it into memories, stories, words.

This piece is a testament to that. When both my grandparents died, I wasn’t there. I grieved both them leaving and my absence in saying goodbye. But years later, I’ve come to reconcile that. Because memorialising someone isn’t really about being there at the end. It’s about finding the spaces they still live on in. Or in this case, the things we revisit years later, that take us back to where it all started.

small hands

I slipped my hand into the jar—a glass-blown oblong shaped like a pig—to reach for the stacks of biscuits my grandmother had put in there. For a nine-year old, few things in my life were as satisfying as visiting my grandparents and reaching into the snack jar. Penguin bars, Wagon Wheels, tiny packets of crisps that fit perfectly into equally tiny lunchboxes, and the most prized find as far as my sister and I were concerned: Flakes.

We had lived outside of the UK for most of our lives, so visiting my grandparents wasn’t just a reunion of family, but a portal into a food culture we’d never really known. When we arrived, we’d rush to hug our grandparents, before rushing even faster towards the pig jar.

Contrary to what anyone might interpret as a pointed realisation of greed, the snack-filled pig jar actually alluded to something much simpler: my grandmother just loved pigs. In fact, there was barely a surface or wall that didn’t have some form of pig motif on it. Her home was kitsch in the truest sense, and while I think now I might struggle with the sheer amount of pink that greeted you from room-to-room, when I was younger I loved it because it reflected back to me who my grandmother was.

a model of my grandparents cottage that my aunts keep as a reminder of them

She’d lead us into the house and unscrew the corked mouth of the pig. The opening was tiny, fit only for the small hands that were so often the ones wanting to squeeze through it. Pulling one of the chocolate bars out felt like a surprise every time, even though my sister and I were intentional in everything we did that was snack-related. I remember the biscuity and slightly creamy Penguin bar being my go-to, while the Wagon Wheel with its marshmallow texture, was what I’d pick when I was feeling adventurous.

We coveted the Flake most though; not because it was the superior chocolate, but because it was the one we often only had with our grandparents when they took us to the beach. We’d walk down to the stony shoreline, my grandmother’s walking stick on one side of her, while one of us tugged at her hands on the other.

By the water, the ice cream van was waiting and within it, the pinnacle of English seaside sweets: the 99 Flake. A soft-serve ice cream in a cone, with a crumbly, melty Flake stuck through it. For most children and people in the UK this wasn’t much of a novelty, but for us it was a highlight.

I’d never had a Flake until my grandmother bought me one. It was just an ordinary chocolate, but then it’s always the little things that make up a memory.

As the years went on, those trips became more infrequent. We visited yearly but not as much as we used to. We were getting older and busier, and they were just getting older. Flakes by the beach became Flakes in the jar when walking down the promenade became too much for them. These soon became Flakes we couldn’t reach as our hands got too big for the jar, which eventually became ones we never saw when they had to move out of the house as my grandmother fell ill.

I was 19 when she died. I’d said goodbye in the days before, and I found out as I boarded a one-way flight to Canada. I still remember seeing her in the home where she was cared for. There was a glassy expression in her eyes, the kind that appears when something in you starts to fade. She was such a proud woman my mum would tell me, and she wouldn’t want me to remember her there. It’s not a memory that leaves me, but it’s also not the one of her that lingers the most. That I saved for the snacks and the chocolates; the ones I hope are sitting in the home of whoever ended up with the jar she loved so much.

When you’ve never really known someone the way you wanted to, you spend your time finding the words to bring them into definition and back to life. I can’t always do that on paper, not in the way reaching into the pig-shaped jar and finding a Penguin bar can, or reminiscing about sitting on a bench by the sea, my little legs hanging over the edge, waiting for my 99 Flake to arrive.

We celebrate food as meals and dishes, but the in-betweens are the things that keep us going. Snacks, the ones I’ve known here, have always been celebrations of the few times I got to spend with my grandparents. We were abroad and they didn’t have much, but come every visit, the pig jar would be full of bite-sized treats and we’d leave with little goody bags; filled up with treats and handwritten notes to remember our time by.

To this day, when the inevitable conversation about what the best chocolate is comes up, I still say a Flake. Nobody agrees and rarely understands, but that only serves to reinforce my feelings. Somewhere in that crumbling sweetness, I’m still trying to hold onto a memory. Not of eating, but of times by the beach with her, when we’d go up to the ice-cream van; my small hand in hers, the other holding a swirl of vanilla and a Flake.

You don’t realise the things that stay with you until they’re gone. Flakes, for all their qualities, don’t bring people back. But like the other snacks I used to share with my grandmother, they are a quiet reminder that even as I eat them now, we never really say goodbye.

small hands

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