Happy Friday!
I’m Cassie Werber, and I write about friendship, love, sex, and death for Quartz. I’m guest-writing Quartzy from London this week, where we’ve had the sultriest of summers.
Heat has clutched the city, clinging particularly in the ancient Underground network, and that has coincided with the last months of my first pregnancy. My usual invigorating bike commute proved too long, so I’m on the Victoria Line, crowded by overheated bodies, breathing lungfuls of thick, shared air, and dreaming of a dive into the cold waters of a mighty lake.
Getting on a packed Tube at rush hour is never pleasant. But the past year has been marked in Europe by a series of terror attacks—London, Manchester, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, Nice—and so, right now, it comes with a measure more of fear. Following each attack, a wave of defiance, expressed with declarations such as #WeAreNotAfraid.
I was grateful, though, when my fellow Londoner Eva Wiseman acknowledged that a too-rigid determination to “keep calm and carry on” can mean denial of real emotion: “In order for life to go on as normal, the thinking is, we all need to be as one,” she writes. “One jolly, amorphous, hashtag-enjoying, stiff-upper-lipped nation, laughing in the face of terrorism as only Brits can. Which leaves very little room for being an individual, with all the fear and pain that implies.”
But despite that prickle of anxiety before stepping into a packed train to lurch down a dark tunnel, we do it anyway. That, in itself, is a kind of strength.
As a soon-to-be mother, I’m beginning to realize that feeling afraid and doing it anyway is a familiar sensation for parents.
Over just a couple of years, the writer Sarah Treem married and had two children, saw the TV show she’d created—The Affair—win a Golden Globe, and found herself getting divorced. Facing, just sitting with, all the resultant pain and fear “forces us to figure out what we actually need to live,” she writes in a stunning essay, “The Truth About Being A Working Mother,” for Red. What you actually need, she concludes, “is not that much. Just a few things that you love.”
“So now, when I have those terrible days, I eat some cheese and put myself to sleep early and when I wake up the next morning, my daughter is standing in her crib singing and she’s absolutely thrilled to see me,” she writes. “And my son wants to pretend he’s the brother dragon and I’m the mummy dragon and his sister is the baby dragon and we’re all in a canoe in space.”
After that, she goes to work, writing stories that talented colleagues will help bring to life on the screen. And amid all the fear, she offers a piece of brilliant advice: Never be afraid of your own story.
I haven’t given up alcohol altogether during pregnancy, but I’m drinking a lot less than usual. I miss it. I miss the deliciousness of alcoholic drinks—the bitter edge, the grown-up tang—which you can rarely replicate in sugary non-alcoholic alternatives. (After dropping £7 last Valentine’s Day on a “mocktail” that was essentially a glass of pineapple juice, I swore not to be beguiled again.) After nine months of sobriety, I’ve become an advocate for the specialness of an alcoholic drink at the end of a long week, and the license sometimes to slip into an altered state.
There’s one exception. The Virgin Mary not only has a clever name, it’s a seriously lovely drink. I like Felicity Cloake’s “perfect” Bloody Mary, which is still delicious without the vodka: Drink one when you’re making a person at the same time as making brunch, or any sunny weekend morning.
Since my virgin version doesn’t have the horseradish-infused vodka, I added a dash from a jar of horseradish. I also departed from Cloake by leaving the ice in. I like the way the melting cubes keep the glass cold and delicately dilute the drink.
Pour good quality tomato juice over ice and stir in generous amounts of Tabasco sauce and Worcestershire sauce, and a dash of horseradish. Lightly squeeze a wedge of lemon, leaving most of the juice still in, and drop it into the glass. Season with black pepper and celery salt, and stir with a stick of celery.
For the horseradish-infused vodka in the alcoholic version, peel and cut a large piece of fresh horseradish into chunks and add them to about 300 ml (10 fl oz) of vodka. Seal and leave to infuse for a day, then strain and discard the horseradish. That’s enough to spike a liter (34 fl oz) of tomato juice. Add two tablespoons of sherry for extra silkiness.
Speaking of mighty lakes, London is a special place for outdoor swimming, with its ponds and plant-filled pop-up pools. My favorite, the lido at Parliament Hill, has a long, cold changing room, and paint is peeling off the ceilings in the communal showers. It’s ugly, it’s beautiful, and I hope it never changes.
On a recent scorching Sunday I watched young men teaching their small girl relatives a dance routine. A heavily-tattooed man dive-bombed with his girlfriend as both grinned into a Go-Pro. Willowy teenagers, elderly Tai Chi enthusiasts, and babies smeared with ice cream shared the concrete banks. As Icelanders know, communal swimming is a great leveler.
For me, there’s always a moment on the edge: An unwillingness to change state, to move from warm to cold, dry to wet. And then, there’s diving in anyway.
Have a great weekend!
A morning commute by train has one advantage over the bike: It carves out a little space every day for reading.
This summer I’ve been appreciating small books. As I finish writing a draft of a novel, I still crave the written word but find myself unable or unwilling to get fully immersed in another author’s voice. Pregnancy back-pain, meanwhile, means I want to carry as little as possible. A slim book brings the joy of reading in print without the weight.
A number of publishers are experimenting with beautifully produced short works, bound individually, reminiscent of the pamphlets that characterized the early days of publishing. I recommend Jung from Oxford University Press’s brilliant Very Short Introduction list; Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex from the School of Life’s Guides; and, from the Vintage Mini series launched in June, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard on Fatherhood—a meditation on the minutiae of emotion, on having mixed feelings, and on doing it anyway.