Tiramisu

Tiramisu is an acquired taste. A base layer of delicate, coffee soaked sponge artfully smothered with layers of eggs, sugar, creamy mascarpone followed by an elegant dusting of cocoa.

Or it’s a mulchy ‘grown up desert’ which you’re promised you will grow to love but it just makes you feel like you’re eating cold toast that’s had a rough encounter with someone else’s morning coffee before you made it to the breakfast table.

Tiramisu can be loosely translated as ‘lifts you up’. Personally, I can’t stand the dessert. But this charming etymology has me forgive it for its bitter taste and claggy texture and just indulge in the notion that there is something in the world which was made only to lift me up.

Growing up, if you had asked me what I wanted to be you would have received the following response:

Person: What do you want to be when you grow up?

6 year old me: a vet on Animal Hospital

9 year old me: a Spice Girl

12 year old me: an actress on the stage

15 year old me: an actress on the stage

18 year old me: an actress on the stage

21 year old me: leave me alone, I have absolutely no idea.

31 year old me: who said anything about growing up?

Although I am the daughter of a recently retired secondary school drama teacher who could always be relied upon to have in her handbag a tambourine labelled ‘Drama Dept.’ in tippex, a bright red lipstick and a Micky Mouse alarm clock (always mine, never returned, I’m not over it), it may surprise you to learn that I spent a lot of my childhood reaching for an ambition to be on the stage.

In my imaginings, I would tread the boards. Make my audience, laugh, cry and rejoice night after night. I would modestly bow ‘oh, thank you’ when fans flattered me, secretly keeping a tally of all my admirers whose lives my performance had surely changed.

At some point, however, I looked backwards and I looked inwards and I looked forwards and I noticed that the limelight wasn’t calling for me anymore. Something had shifted. Instead, I was seeking joy from crouching down and providing a leg up for someone else to find theirs instead.

I was lifting.

Lifting exists in many forms. There is heavyweight lifting. These are the lifters who courageously expose themselves to provide justice where it is missing. Gloria Steinem, Edna Adan Ismail, Malala Yousafzai, any one of the women bravely stepping out of the shadows of shame to name and hold to account Harvey Weinstein, Noel Clarke and others like them.

Middleweight lifting is found in acts of organised cheerleading; less vulnerable than the heavyweights but greater in volume. These are the campaigners who lobby for equal pay, who seed fund someone else’s innovation and who secure free sanitary products for women who cannot afford them, protecting dignity and normalising a bodily function which half the human population experiences.

Then there is lightweight lifting, which is not to be underestimated. This is the lift that happens almost without us knowing. It’s as subtle as whipped cream as it melts on the tongue. So brief you can scarcely remember it was there but for the secret tightening of the jaw, an ecstasy of the senses. These are the moments in which we briefly catch eyes with one and other, a light nod of the head, ‘you got this’ and move on. But it means so much. To be seen. To be believed in. These moments are small and mighty.

Tiramisu is an acquired taste. It might not be the main event like the salted caramel melt in the middle chocolate bombe with gold leaf on the outside and popping candy on the inside, but it’s always on the dessert trolley. To lift you up. 

For Baba Yaga Boney-Legs

I was recently reminded of my once favourite childhood story. I can still feel my fingers scratching at my Grandmother’s shirt sleeves pleading with her to read me the story of Baba Yaga Boney-Legs again and again. This Russian folk tale has all the familiar characters; a beautiful daughter, a jealous step mother and a cruel, ugly witch who lives in the woods.

As a child I revelled in the imagery painted in this story. The young girl who carefully braids her luscious, thick hair before venturing out to meet the old woman with long, boney legs and a mouth full of iron teeth who lived in a rickety old house perched on two great chicken’s legs.

But with adult eyes all I see is a narrative which tells us that women cannot coexist. It’s hunt or be hunted because there simply isn’t enough room in the world for us all. And my slightly off beat story book isn’t unusual. Join me for a sail down the mainstream where we meet Cinderella, the poor and beautiful orphan who partakes in the ultimate beauty contest in which all women are compelled to vie for the affections of a prince. And Snow White, who poses a dangerous threat to another woman’s mission to be ‘the fairest of them all’. Because not only is there just one acceptable image of beauty, only one of us may fulfil it and the other must have her still beating heart cut out of her chest.

What happens when we nurture girls to compete with each other like this? What are we teaching our boys, the (not always) innocent bystanders to the bloodbath? And who benefits?

As we know, these formative tales are powerful tools in laying down our worldview and values. I grew up in a world where a queen bee was to be identified and overthrown. But this is changing in the most exciting and invigorating way. We are seeing the impact of women in leadership who are leading for and with other women, of sisterhood and of allyship.

What if Cinderella and her sisters rather than competing had joined forces, identified a need and solved a problem? ‘Tinderella’ might have been born and succeeded in matching the prince and his one true love without the need for him to inspect all those shoeless feet (I really hate feet) and the women of the town might all have had a piece of the dating pie. Meanwhile the formerly wicked step mother would be transformed as if by fairy godmother into ‘the Momager’.

Maya Angelou said ‘when you know better, you do better’. There is no sense in back tracking a childhood of poorly directed rhetoric. The task now, is to rewrite the future and to showcase what could be.  As women, it’s important that we show ourselves and each other that we can not only coexist, but we can elevate one and other. Lighting another woman’s candle does not diminish our own. It just makes the world a little brighter.

I wonder if Baba Yaga was lonely out in the woods on her own. Maybe she wanted a friend to tell her she was beautiful. Or just to keep her company and tell her that she was enough. Maybe I could be her friend. 

Zoom is a four letter word

 In 2012, whilst I was studying for my university finals, my Grandmother who lived in Australia had a devastating stroke. The knowledge came in painfully slow drips from afar. The truth was there wasn’t a lot of information yet and what we did know came to me 4^th hand from the other side of the world.

You know that scene in the Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom is hit in the face with a frying pan and is suddenly stunned out of his chase? It was that. I was Tom. I had that sarcastic orbit of stars haloing my head. On the inside it was like looking at the world through 16 layers if cling film. I could sort of see everything. I could touch nothing. Everything was just a little bit out of grasp.

The feeling of disconnection was acute. My whole life I’d been the kid with the exotic family in all parts of the world. And it was fun. Always somewhere to travel, someone to see, someone to stay. Sunday mornings were reserved for long distance phone calls to Australia. They were hurried and there was a distracting echo of my own voice down the line.

Months after the stroke I moved to Yorkshire. Even in her post stroke fuzz, Grandma was straight on it with ‘do we know any boys for her?’ Grandpa D abruptly reminded her, ‘they’ll all be too old or dead for her, dear’.

The Sunday morning calls became more important than ever. I wanted to know everything. What was she eating? How far could she walk? Have you learnt any new tricks this week, Grandma?

But the conversations were strained, expensive and I came to feel more disconnected than before.

Then came FaceTime. Some genius in the family decided to buy my grandparents an iPad, or as Grandpa D called it ‘The Machine’. He also insisted that all dogs were called Fido or Rover and all cats were called Moggy. We weren’t going to win this one.

And from then on, on Friday evening my time and Saturday morning their time, our weekly FaceTime calls began. Always between Grandpa D’s first and second pieces of toast and always drinking Yorkshire Tea, which he liked to tell unwitting and over-trusting Australians was ‘brewed on the Yorkshire Moors, don’t you know?’

It was like someone plugged us all back into the mains supply again. The cling film between me and them was gone. I had the gift of time, no expensive phone bills, and space, I could see her. I could see my Grandma surfing the living room furniture to speak to me. I could see the new tricks. I could even see the family cat.

For a period of time, video calls changed the relationship I had with my family. We could feel a part of each other’s lives in the most wonderful way.

In a pandemic world we have seen the epoch making impact of Zoom/Teams/Face Time/House Party. It is how we have worked, lived, loved, died and grieved together. There is no doubt that this technology has made the world bearable when it might not have been.

But. It’s just not the same.

As our socially distanced lives become a little more social and a little less distant we are all musing ‘will we keep doing it this way?’ And whilst there are some unique benefits to the online world of work, I would like to expose a discreet and pernicious drawback which we are downplaying enormously.

Zoom is shoulders-up contact. There’s no heart and there are no gut reactions. We simply can’t see them. We are missing the pinball energy of a team literally reverberating with ideas which grow and evolve as they bounce off the arms in the room until spectacularly hitting the jackpot as everyone erupts with ‘Eureka’, lights flicker and flash and the DJ at the cognitive disco in every extravert’s mind has just earned themselves another rave review.

In the online version of this scenario Phil left himself on mute, Rebecca still can’t get her camera to work and the ball comes crashing down. For now, this DJ remains on Furlough.

In our virtual meeting spaces (note, these aren’t always Zoom) we are missing the detail which doesn’t appear in the minutes or action logs. There is something else. There is energy. And that’s the bit I’m good at, that’s the bit I crave and feed off. And when it’s gone something else fills the void; my imposter.

Imposter syndrome is something I have grappled with in the last years with varying success. Recently I’ve noticed a link between online communication and my feeling of disengagement, not good enough, not thriving. It’s counterfeit communication which is making me feel like a counterfeit contributor.

So how do we reconcile the gift of time and space which allowed me to reconnect with my family and the magic of IRL (in real life) alchemy? Maybe the answer is less about adoption of new things and more about the abandonment of old ideas. We used to imagine all sorts of barriers to digital communication and ‘all’ it took was a global health pandemic for us to do away with those quite simply. We are better than we know at adapting and this is what we must keep doing. Adapting. Banana bread came and went, I suspect zoom is here to stay for now, the rest is TBC.