Writing on Effort

I struggle with effort. I am not very good at putting the right amount of effort in. I have been asked a few times recently what my signature dish is. I don’t like this question. My answer would be an apple or quite a big bit of cheese broken off with my hands that makes the rest of the block hard to grate or dry cereal continuously shoveled into my mouth until it starts to taste like paste. I am not very good at putting effort into my meals. I rush my food a lot of the time and put my effort into other things like sitting or lying down. If I am making food for other people I will put effort in. I have a few things that look impressive but aren’t that hard and I have one recipe book which I can get something from at a pinch. You have to do something that looks nice and is maybe a bit interesting and has lots of different parts because what you give others will have a judgement back to you. The lots of different parts is really important because it is important to be multi dimensional and considered because people don’t like easy things but they do usually like being thought about. You have to have different types of bowls and you have to have different sizes of spoons. Little and metal for liquids, medium and metal for bowls with lots of the same small thing over and over, big and wooden for dishes with many constituent parts, hands for one-eachers. Maybe I would get one of those deli deals like 3 for £8 which people say are loss leaders but I don’t understand that really because it's a few olives and then a lot of oil with floating bits. I can’t imagine it’s expensive to make. I am a loss leader too. I lose things all the time. It is far worse though because my losing is not even getting people in through the door. Some of the things I lose I won’t mind too much about usually because I have another one and it’s a lot easier to get that than put the effort in to find the first one. And they slowly scatter and then one day you realise you don’t have that many of the thing left like pens or needles and you go and get more which is frustrating but not even really a thinking process. It just happens. Some of the things I lose I get very worked up about and search and search for them in all sorts of places. I might imagine them in places they weren’t because I never would have it in the shower but there is a moment where that is definitely the answer and not checking is a complete dereliction of duty. I can become convinced of this and I won’t let go because being without a thing allows you to picture it however you would like. Sometimes I am looking for the thing and I am building towers of it and making them really big and every view is that thing. The towers make a cave and I sit in it and rest my head against the wall. Other times I am just waving my arms around breathless and trying to get the thing back. I will stand on my toes and stretch my mouth big and move my arms more and moreandmore and it will get so quick that it will all blur. Loss is a blurry thing. A thing that is clearly there but without edges. It is like staring into the sun for too long and then for sometime after there is a big white circle in all of your views. It shimmers and you don’t know how long it’ll stay. You know it is there and you know it’ll change but for now it is there. You can keep pointing at it and shouting but it stays for a while. You can’t look at anything else when that happens. Everything has a hole in it. It isn’t even the sun anymore, it has less colour. It is a reminder only. The sun could have looked like anything before but that doesn’t really matter. The sun is not the focus. The focus is the constant blotch. A blotch like a spilled liquid. On a plate. If my dinner is on a messy plate I won’t clean it up because I am going to clean it with my mouth and then again with a sponge afterwards. But here someone is coming. So I will clean it up because they are coming and the table must look nice. I’ll make sure everything is set out nicely and only the little light is on.

This is an essay from This is What It’s Like.Click here for more information