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.