Good Things #13
In which I realise it's been 500 days since I had booze, make the best dinner I've ever eaten, find out how to stay forever-young and consider a career-switch to family law
Dear friends,
I’m back! Feels like ages! I was very encouraged by messages I received last Friday to say: ‘Emily, where the hell is the newsletter?’ But I was then less encouraged to remember that I’d said I was having a week off at the very end of the previous one. So, now I know no one reads right to the end, I will put all my jokes and secrets right at the bottom.
I hope you’re at the start of a lovely, long and peaceful Easter weekend off. Here are are some Good Things.
Musings: A bit of show-boating….I’m 500 days booze free
A little showing off first because, well if you can’t show off in your own newsletter, where can you? This week I realised I have reached the milestone of 500 days without alcohol. In November 2020 I decided to stop boozing after what I’d call a fairly committed 20 year sesh. I did it because I was fed up with feeling hungover all the time and I realised I was just wilfully making each new day harder with my nightly red-wine harpoon through the brain.
By the Spring of 2021, feeling motivated (and less drunk) I thought I’d try to change some of my bad eating habits too, so I did. The charming results which hopefully you can see pictured above took just 12 weeks to achieve. I was amazed. And now I’ve maintained better eating habits for over a year and it’s FIVE HUNDRED DAYS of no wine. Yay.
I know it’s very annoying when people make it look like it’s really easy to stop drinking and lose weight. It’s not (well it’s not at first anyway), so I won’t go on about it. But I will say everything in my life is better now. I feel good. I’m not saying I’m never going back to the wine mind you. If you see me with a glass of champagne on the dance floor at a wedding, I’m probably fine. Probably. That is all. Email me if you want and I’ll happily go on about it all. Anyway, cheers to all the things we try to do that actually succeed.
Food: Por Kwan Laksa Paste
Imagine if you will, a dinner that’s quite cheap but takes just 10 minutes to cook. Picture in your mind a meal that creates hardly any washing up, but is also fresh, clean and good for you (fairly…). “Bah”, you’d say. “That food would surely taste of cardboard!”.
“No it wouldn’t,” I’d say, grabbing your arm a little too hard and looking urgently into your eyes. “That dinner would be the best thing you’d ever make and…,” then I’d move closer to your face and whisper hauntingly in your ear, “…there’s a good chance you’ll never want to eat anything else ever again”.
Laksa is a southeast Asian, flaming red, spicy broth. For 2-3 people you’d wok-up about a third of this jar, a can of coconut milk (full fat, come on), a bit of water, crunchy vegetables (bean sprouts, cabbage, carrots) prawns or leftover roast chicken, whatever. Serve over rice noodles and slurp it all up. Thank me later.
My boyfriend’s parents just got back from Australia with this jar of Laksa paste in their suitcase and I am now confident I’ll never eat anything else. You can buy Laksa paste in Waitrose but I like to think this particular one, from the Chinese market in Adelaide, is the best. It’s all chunky and authentic. And the instructions on the back sound like they were written by a person: “Boil until cook”.
|Try your local Asian supermarket and cross your fingers but if not, Por Kwan Laska paste is available online here for £2.85.
Podcast: Lifespan with David Sinclair
Appropriately for Easter weekend, good news! This podcast claims that immortality is also scientifically possible. Well, not quite, but it claims you don’t actually have to wake up every day feeling slowly worse and worse until you die. It claims there’s a way to get old, and still feel good. I heard about this guy (David Sinclair) listening to comedian Russell Kane talking about “bio-hacking”. Russell Kane is 46 years old, but he looks 30 and apparently it’s no accident. The man’s been “bio-hacking” for 16 years on the sly.
David Sinclair is a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Ageing Research at Harvard Medical School. So in other words, he’s a top scientist and knows more than any of us do about science. In this podcast series he sets out, in quite a lot of detail, everything human beings currently know about ageing; the research done and the research ongoing. David claims ageing is less to do with our personal number of trips around the sun and more to do with what we’ve eaten on the way round. Also when we’ve eaten. How much of what we’ve eaten was sugar. And then there’s a whole thing about taking different supplements that cost a lot of money. Lifespan is quite a sciencey listen, but I’ve found it really interesting and it’s given me a few ideas. If any of them actually feel like they’re working I’ll report back, but in the meantime, see you at my 100th birthday roller-disco party?
|As well as the podcast, David is the author of Lifespan: Why We Age And Why We Don’t Have To.
TV: The Split
Don’t worry, no spoilers here. But oh man, this show is brilliant. It’s been ages since I properly binged a TV show, but my family went away this week so I seized my chance, shut the curtains and watched all of series 3 in one fabulous go.
The Split is a TV series (now into its third season) about relationships, basically. But the writer (Abi Morgan) and cast (all brilliant but the fabulous Nicola Walker is the star) somehow manage to distill for television something that conveys exactly (EXACTLY) what it feels like to fall in love, to feel excited to get a little text message from a crush, to go on a first date, get married, have children together, break up, feel duped, suffer bone-crushing rejection, get divorced, co-parent with an ex, accept a new partner, retain a deep love for an old best-friend but be bombarded daily by all memories, and everything else in between. Plus, it made me Google for at least 20 minutes: “How to become a family lawyer” before deciding it’s too hard. The Split, *chef’s kiss*, if you haven’t watched it, watch it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s “Good Things” newsletter. Please “like” it with the tiny little heart down there on the left if you have.
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Wishing you a very happy Easter.
Love, Emily xx
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More stuff by me:
I write a monthly column in my gorgeous local Cambridge magazine, Velvet. This month’s it’s about the war in Ukraine.
Also, in my job as a TV writer, I am continuing to use my family for clicks. I made my daughter watch a little bit of The Labyrinth and she was not impressed: A Kid from 2022 Reacts to Classic Children’s Movies from the 1980s.
Now the only newsletter I always read until the very end. Thank you for dropping this joy into my inbox!
Brilliant again Emily . Thank you x