Spring awakening
Notes on London enchantment, Food in Print fair, and an FFF workshop
Hello and welcome back to shelf offering, a Tuesday newsletter by Apoorva Sripathi. Writing this newsletter is a crucial, rigorous, and joyful part of my work, so if you’d like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.
I have nothing to say anymore (!) and this worries me immensely. If I fed this particular anxiety to friends or my partner, they’d try and soothe me into thinking otherwise. And they’d be right I suppose. Maybe I simply cannot be bothered anymore, by all this upkeep.
I spent the last two weeks of March, working around the visit of my best (dear? close?) friend, who stayed with us for the entirety of her trip. I have a massive fondness for London — after all, it is where I came to pursue my masters and ended up pursuing something equally significant as well. And so I took my friend around parts of London, by foot and public transport. We walked, around parts of London old and new to me, along the Thames Embankment on a sunny winter day, to the National Theatre (where we had orange sodas and stunningly crisp cauliflower fritti at the building’s rooftop overlooking the Waterloo bridge), then made our way to the Southbank, and then towards Borough Market, an art deco building that has fallen out of favour because of intense crowds. It has its charm but it can get suffocating pretty quickly.
We had an early start everyday, up at 7 making coffee and eating breakfast, before showering and setting off. To the British Library, another modernist red brick structure where I spent some time trying not to write my dissertation, which is time I divided between here and the art deco plumes of the Senate House Library. Which then led us to the miniature university campus, the reason that brought me to London in the first place, and then we wandered to the small Turkish cafe (where I’d buy a börek or gözleme with salad and hummus for lunch along with classmates and housemates, which we’d carry to Russell Square garden to eat and have a nap in the summer). If I had no money left, I’d bring lunch from home or buy a cheese sandwich at the Russell Square cabmen’s shelter.
After a lunch of spinach börek and lamb gözleme, my friend and I ended up at the South Asian section of the British Museum, studying statues, iron silver and brass betel nut cutters, and this cunty Garuda statue that made us laugh so much. A St. John doughnut overlayed in crystal sugar is unforgettable so we stopped by the London Review Bookshop (whose cafe has been taken over by St. John) and then browsed through their selection of books. My friend heaped so much praise on Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water that I was compelled to buy a copy at LRB and when we both stepped out we realised we bought a copy each (to gift me) so we ended up exchanging them between us, like a scene out of a romantic comedy film. What’s more romantic than showing your friend around the city that’s given you enough memories and sentiments to fill a book!
Later, we journeyed to Baker Street by tube so my friend could take pictures outside 221b Baker Street, which is the The Sherlock Holmes Museum, and ended up impromptu picnicking at Regent’s Park, which was oscillating between London’s reluctant but firm turn to spring and its colder vestige of winter. It was still light at 5:33 pm, a single mesmerising moment that made me think of Walt Whitman’s ‘Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling’.; the kind that makes it feel like anything is possible at this present moment.
Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,
Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time refusing to give me
up,
Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul, you give me
forever faces;
(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)
Art deco architecture is sprinkled throughout the city of Westminster (the London borough where Baker Street is located) and while my friend made her pilgrimage to Sherlock Holmes, mine were to these curved marvels and embellished buildings. Abbey House is one such building, designed by John James Joass in 1932 and funnily enough occupies the actual address of Sherlock Holmes (221b Baker Street). Between these buildings and hidden corners of lanes where red bricks, green shrubs, and steel railings entwined, alongside lazy long aimless walks, I felt on holiday in my {surrogate} home.
There is so much more I want to say (!) here, from walking through London at night, drinking beers every time we went out, greasy breakfasts to soak up all the booze, emerging spring flowers, Berthe Morisot’s wonderfully relaxed ‘Girl on a Divan’ (my preferred position after our many long walks), the Design 1900-Now exhibit and Rodin sculptures at the V&A, a walk through Chinatown ‘In Search of Rice’ as part of Chinatown Collective’s community-led walking tour (with Anna Sulan Masing who alerted me to it!), two farewell dinners for my friend at The Camberwell Arms (featuring a sublime Todoli citrus and brown meringue eton mess) and Nandine, to spring which set upon us like a sharp intake of breath, I cannot help but feel moved into soft set jelly bereft of a mould. The city’s imprint on my current adult life has never been more luxurious, more generous — and as I’m making my way through Morag Rose’s The Feminist Art of Walking, I believe that this enchantment is real.
Come see us @ the Food in Print Magazine Fair in London on 11 April
By us, I mean Cheese! Both Anna Sulan Masing and I will be there, flogging our wares of prev issues (1, 2, and 3), so if you’re a subscriber and reader of this newsletter, bring a pal and come say hi! There will be over 50 independent publications from the world of food and drink so you’re spoilt for choice (altho I hope we’re one of your favs). It’s at the Barbican and more deets here.
Come and ‘Play! With your food’ on 12 April
The next day, join our FFF event hosted by Steph from food/play/food on exploring play as a tool to explore the complexity of food. Steph is an intellectual powerhouse and a wonderful person who is a designer and greengrocer whose work uses food as a starting point to explore the complexity of food. She’s printed with squid and dared a bunch of academics to throw their food at a wall with the encouragement of Autodineur, a random automated poetry bot.
The event will include the opportunity to make a rhubarb or other fruit fool dessert. Ingredients will be shared with participants three days prior to the event for those who would like to join in. Please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place. The workshop is suitable for participants aged 16 and above. No writing or creative experience is necessary for this event.
Due to the intimate nature of this event, places for this workshop are limited. This event is free for paid subscribers to my newsletter and to any FFF publication, code will be paywalled at the end of this newsletter. It starts at $10 for everyone else!
This event is part of the Feminist Food Friends programme; a collective of food writers who formed to make the experience writing about food more communal and collaborative. In case you missed it, FFF is a new collective led by Isabela Bonnevera (Feminist Food Journal), Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering), Clare Michaud (Beurrage), Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly), Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers), Sarah Duignan (anthrodish), and Steph Marsden (Amuse). We hosted our first meet-up back in September and our second in December; we were delighted to see so many of you there.