Friday Five

Five for Friday

Every Friday I share five things that I’ve done or seen or thought about in the previous week.

Weather: Storm by Nature

Book: Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh.

There was a storm last Saturday night. During the day I’d braved the walk over to the library to return a book and see if they’d found TILLINGHAST yet. The week before I’d reserved TILLINGHAST and, when I’d got the notification it was waiting for me, I’d gone to collect it. But it wasn’t there. The librarian couldn’t find it either; it wasn’t where it was supposed to be but it also wasn’t where it might have been—it hadn’t been reshelved or mis-shelved (in any way that makes sense, meaning we looked in Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy and Novels and couldn’t find it and it wasn’t on any displays. No one else could have taken it because the reservation is locked to my account—if anyone had tried they would have been told it was a reserved item and to Put. It. BACK). Anyway, because of the nature of the story I was amused it had developed its own little mystery and I decided I’d wait to see what happened next. Then came The Heatwave and when I finally summoned the courage to go back outside in daylight (also thematically on brand), it was waiting for me.

And then came the storm. The storm started around 12.15am, I woke up suddenly and completely just before a thunderclap and thought I could hear the sky breathing in. Probably there was a clap before that actually woke me, but in the night I thought I’d woken up because I heard the sky breathing and then the thunder came. Lightning followed because that’s how these things work and I expected the storm would blow either inland or out to the sea and I’d drift off again.

It stormed for three hours. At one am, unable to get back to sleep because every time I did the world’s loudest boom happened and these are not conditions conducive to rest, I got up, made sleepytime tea and decided to read until something else happened. The book I started was Tillinghast.

There is a word for what Stutley Tillinghast is but he doesn’t like to use it. Ostensibly the curate, a position inherited from his father, of a rundown church in a small New England town, he lives a solitary life, only leaving the house to find sustenance – which is to say people whose blood he needs to drink to stay alive. He’s planning to end his miserable existence by burning his home down with him inside, just as soon as he’s finished his account of all the people he’s killed and buried beneath his home so their families might actually get some closure.

And then a girl called Sarah Tillinghast arrives in town, showing the same ‘symptom’s he suffered when his transformation began. Her mother is Lena Browne, a woman he once slept with and who then disappeared but that’s the least mysterious thing about Lena because when Stutley slept with her, she was already dead and buried as far as the town was concerned.

As Sarah’s illness burns through her and begins to change her, Tillinghast writes his life story, revealing how his condition happened and how he has managed it over the years as he reckons with whether he should deserves to stay alive after everything he’s done and what he owes to this girl who might be his daughter.

TILLINGHAST is a character-led novel and readers that prefer propulsive plots and lots of action will not find it satisfying—I don’t need to check Goodreads to feel confident that there will be at least one review saying “Nothing happened, it was just people talking.”. What it IS is a detailed and melancholy exploration of one man taking stock of his life and how he got to where he is and wondering if there is a way for him to continue. I think it also did some interesting, though very subtle things, with vampire mythology and origination and I enjoyed that—my only complaint about the story was how neither character was especially curious about how they came to be the way they were when I was pretzeling myself trying to understand the lore. It was a very good book to read during a storm—my only regret is not reading by candlelight.

I took a little break in the reading to watch the storm and in a flash of lightning I saw a face in the sky. This sounds like bullshit but it isn’t. I started recording in case it happened again, but wouldn’t you know, it didn’t. The storm finally finished around three am and I went back to sleep shortly after. Maybe the face was the hallucination of a sleepy mind, a little pareidolia, a sign from some higher power. It was cool though.

Film: Bait

To bait is to entice something. Or to provoke it. This film does both. The first of Mark Jenkin’s Cornish trilogy, filmed in 16mm monochrome, and the only one I hadn’t seen. I think it might be my favorite.

Bait is about fisherman, Martin, a man barely holding on the that title. His former fishing boat, the Buccaneer, has been repurposed by his brother to take stag parties and amateur anglers out on the sea. Martin fishes by lining the beach with his nets and harvesting what remains when the tide has gone out. He sells most of his catch to bar owner Liz, who now largely caters to the wealthy, ignorant DFLs who’ve bought up as much of the town as they can, serving them sea bass and ‘authentic Cornish fishing village’ vibes, while the locals struggle to survive. But every time he gets a catch, Martin leaves a fish in a bag on the door handles of his neighbours, asking nothing in return.

The conflict in the film comes of course between the rich, obnoxious outsiders who treat the Cornish village like a kind of theme park for them to play in, and the locals—mostly Martin, whose ties to the sea and his heritage drive everything he does. There’s additional conflict between him and his brother and what Martin sees as his brother’s betrayal of who they are, and whose son would rather help Martin pull dead fish from nets at dawn than help his father clean up after tourists.

It’s an incredibly subtle film about gentrification and how it impacts communities, what we owe to the ghosts of those who came before and to the people that lives there now. The biggest obstacle the tourists face is whether it’s ethical to clamp a van that’s parking on “their” street, while the locals are dying slowly, choked out by people who only come for a for weeks each year, bend the village to their whims and leave, returning to the cities where they love their real lives. They don’t understand the damage their cosplaying as Cornish villagers does and they don’t really care.

My favourite scene(s) is a layered triptych that constrasts menace and guilty complicity with peace and how it could be, underscoring all of the tensions and problems in the community. In one strand Martin confronts Hugo, the son of the DFL who bought his childhood home, and who has stolen lobsters from one of his pots (earlier we see the little brat asking to “borrow” and then rent a pot, outraged when Martin refuses). Martin tracks him down to the pub, violence all over his face… Only to hand the boy twine and a twine needle and force him on his knees to repair the pot he cut open to steal Martin’s lobsters. At the same time we see the boy’s sister, Katie, and Martin’s nephew, Neil, making pasta together—the two have started dating—in a scene of quiet, gentle domesticity. While the DFLs who bought Skipper’s Cottage—and the parents of Hugo and Katie—are eating the lobster their son gave them, silently knowing full well he couldn’t have caught it (earned it) himself, getting fat on something that was never meant for them. It’s so powerful I didn’t breathe through the whole thing.

The film ends in tragedy, as the conflict comes to a head. Starkly beautiful and surreal, it holds the now-traditional Jenkin tropes of time not being linear, of ghosts, of past clashing with present, of gentrification and the impacts. It’s a stunning beginning to a stunning trilogy.

Hobby: Journalling

I’m going through a patch of not sleeping great (the classic 3am dark teatime of the soul thing) and something that’s been helpful—not with staying asleep, but with understanding why I can’t right now—has been journalling. As I mentioned last week, I journal with violet scented ink, which might turn out to be a mistake because violet is one of my favourite scents and now I’m worried using it to deal with my nighttime trauma might cause some kind of Pavlovian nightmare later. But at the moment, it’s quite soothing and it’s adding a little glamour to the whole thing. What’s really interesting is seeing what keeps coming up when I’m writing, seeing the topics and areas I keep returning to in terms of wanting to understand or exorcise or just put a name to. It turns out I have a pretty consistent list of ten or so things that get under my skin and now I’m writing them down I can see how they bleed into my day life too. I’ve started recognising the anxiety dreams that signal a resurgence of something and while that’s not enough to head the insomnia off, it does mean I can at least prepare for it.

I think it’s useful to put names to things. To be able to pinpoint feelings and unpick them and map them and—crucially—know they don’t last and journalling is very good for that. There’s something about seeing things written down in your own handwriting that means you have to face up to it and decide whether or not to do something about it. I don’t like to keep my journals after the fact because it makes me sick to read them back—So whiny! So self-indulgent! All Me-Me-Me!—but maybe I should keep these ones and it will help build a bigger picture of what’s happening in my head?

Food: Mr Freeze Freezepops: Party Pops

Look, there was a heatwave so I didn’t do very much. I’m sorry if you came here expecting a riot of happenings but we’re working in real time here and it’s not always a hoot—the highlight reel is just that. I’m doing the best I can.

So you’re getting my ranking of Mr Freeze Freezepops: Party Pops. The Party Pops are a limited edition selection, shunning the usual lime, blue raspberry, strawberry and getting a little funky instead. In the Party Pop selection we have Banana Custard, Cherry Cola, Marshmallow, Chocolate Strawberry and Raspberry Ripple. For those unfamiliar with ice pop culture, you buy them on the shelf, unfrozen, and freeze them at home at your leisure. They come in long plastic tubes and the idea is you squeeze the frozen pop out a little at the time, suck the flavour out until the pop is just ice and then you crunch the ice, repeating the process until all that’s left is a bunch of concentrated juice at the end that is so potent with chemicals it will make you see God*. So I froze one of each flavour and waited for them to freeze.

I expected my order of my preference to be as follows:

1. Marshmallow

2. Chocolate Strawberry

3. Raspberry Ripple

4. Cherry Cola

5. Banana Custard.

Pretty self explanatory, but for context I despise banana flavoured things (though I love bananas) and I don’t like Cola either, unless I’m very ill and it’s had all the fizz taken out of it—I don’t like fizzy drinks at all (with exceptions for Secco, Prosecco, Champagne and sparkling water—so chic!). The order felt like a no brainer and my approach was to do the ones I didn’t like first, to get it done and have the nice things to look forward to.

IN A SHOCKING TWIST it turns out I liked the banana one best! Here is the actual order of preference.

1. Banana Custard

2. Chocolate Strawberry

3. Marshmallow

4. Raspberry Ripple

5. Cherry Cola

All right, so it’s not really a huge upset. It’s not the Knicks winning the baseball or whatever they do (I know it’s basketball, I saw Mamdani in the jersey, thank you). And I know we’re scraping the barrel here but this is what’s going to happen if unfettered climate change is allowed to continue running rampant. It’s going to be Freezepops all the way down.

Pray next week is cooler so I’m cooler.

_{*actually the nutrition on these isn’t so bad. I could pronounce every ingredient and the flavour largely came from things that exist in nature.}