I was making tea for a visiting friend this week. Despite the fact that I grew up in culture where the first offer of tea is final and she’s from the west of Ireland, between us we have made a happy script that allows us each to give the other her preferred beverage, with biscuits if she fancies them and not if she doesn’t.
I put my friend’s tea in my favourite new mug, because I knew she’d share my pleasure in its hand-thrown heft, concave curve and dappled glaze. I left the pretty bone china mug with the mimsy two-finger handle at the back of the cupboard, waiting for a different friend.
I was less generous when offering porridge to the Leaving Certificate child in our house this week. No problem with the bowl, he likes a straight-sided industrially made affair which I do not covet. But there were two spoons left in the drawer, a flattish one with a textured handle and a pointy one with a thin, nicely weighted handle, which I kept back for myself.
Why am I expecting the nation to take an interest in my cutlery drawer? Because I have been thinking, this week, about pleasures that seem slight. It is a mistake – visible to any competent novelist – to assume that what is intimate is trivial. The way we live in hours reveals more truths and brings more happiness than moments of grandstanding, and there are few objects more intimate than the ones we put in our mouths.
Choosing a nice mug, bowl or spoon is not a trivial matter
Irish and English funerals are very different – it would be strange to go to a colleague’s family funeral in England
To normalise invective against cyclists is to miss the point spectacularly
Ripeness by Sarah Moss: A captivating novel about the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction
A better day can start with favourite soap, a fresh towel of your preferred texture (wind-dried and crisp, please). I know very few people who, when offered a choice of mugs, truly have no preference. I usually set the table before serving food to guests, which means they don’t get to choose cutlery, but the fact that so many designs exist shows that we each find pleasure in some more than others.
I used to think I should have sets of matching crockery and cutlery, of the sort that my grandparents were delighted to achieve and my parents took for granted, but lately I think my more eclectic instincts are happy. I like choosing a particular glass for every drink of water, a knife for every piece of fruit.
I hear the ancestral voices starting up: you should think yourself lucky you have food to put in your bowls, what kind of late capitalist nonsense is this, going on about the shapes of spoons when there are folk dying in the world? Why don’t you pick up your fruit and bite it like a normal person?
There are folk dying, and we remember them, but there are also folk designing and making objects that bring care and play to necessity. Design and making are as much part of being human as war and scolding.
And this isn’t about wealth: handmade ceramics of course cost more than industrially produced ones, as they should, and these days I can often afford them, but many of my old favourites come from charity shops and flea markets. Bowls from the best Irish craft potters cost less than many of the bottles of wine reviewed in this paper.
For sure there’s an expenditure of time in slicing and fanning food you could bite, but I continue to resist a model of humanity in which it’s normal and correct that everyone is always barely surviving and certainly too busy to think about bowls. We’ve been making and, importantly, embellishing bowls for millenniums.
I was teaching a few weeks ago with a colleague who said that her practice – in textile design – was conceived in resistance to toxic productivity narratives. I’m generally averse to the metaphorical (over)use of “toxic”. Suddenly convenient words often encode assumptions that would benefit from the cold light of day. But this time I felt the relief of recognition. When striving for “productivity”, what exactly are we producing, and for whose benefit? Who would lose what if you took the time to slice your fruit with a knife whose handle pleases you? It doesn’t take any longer to use a spoon whose shape is good in your mouth, it just makes your breakfast happier.
I have been reading recently about “pleasure activism”. Watch this space, but the headline is that pleasure can be resistance. Maybe try it.
It might be revealing to see who is annoyed.
Sarah Moss’s novel Ripeness is out now
