This is an appetiser:
Tony bought some cheese a couple
of weeks ago, two white stiltons, one with chopped mango the other with
blueberries. I couldn’t eat the first one: it tasted like tomcats to me. ‘I
know what you mean,’ his daughter said. Not that either of us, please believe
me, have tasted any part of a tom cat but there was something about the
acidity, the sourness, that automatically conjured the image in my head. Or in
my mouth.
There’s a poem by Kate Clanchy
called, 'Poem for a man with no sense of smell’ that closes with:
the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck…..
hold a scent so frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.
I can try and articulate why that
makes sense to me, but it feels right before I even begin to think about
it. Intimacy and fragility: there’s a connection there.
I can’t imagine anyone without a
sense of taste wanting to try the stilton with mango after I tell them it
tastes like tomcats! But maybe they would want to try the easiest Thai green chicken
curry in the world if I told them it tasted like mini lightning bolts trapped
in a silk scarf, or like the heat that makes your foot tingle when you first
step into a bubble bath, the sparkle of foam.
1 tbsp oil
¼ jar of paste
400 ml of coconut milk (there’s a
half-fat version out now)
2 chicken breasts, thinly sliced
1 pepper thinly sliced (or mix up
different colours as I did)
Heat the oil in a pan and fry the
paste for 2 minutes. Then add the coconut milk and mix in well. When it’s hot
add the chicken and pepper and simmer until the chicken is cooked through.
Coriander is pretty on the side and you can always have rice with it if you’re
not into cabbage. The sound of the word isn’t great, I have to admit. Cabbage?
What does it sound like?
Shredded cabbage and carrot ribbons steamed with crushed cumin and fennel seeds |
Hungry Writing Prompts
- Write about the smell of summer.
- Write about a smell that reminds you of sadness.
- Write about a sound that makes you feel happy.
- Write about something fragile.
- Write about taking a bath.
4 comments:
Just joined a creative writing class for 10 weeks in the Taibach Community Centre...maybe there's hope for me yet ;) TC Jones
Great! Hope it goes well. I'd really like to organise some one-off writing days next spring and summer in and around Port Talbot. I'll let you know!
Some years ago, I worked in mental health services, one of my cients was a young man with quite severe Asperger's, he couldn't 'feel' emotion, he knew he felt something, and would, when someone cried, make a crying sound, because that is what he thought was expected. He did, however, have an almost obsession with colour, so I devised a sort of plan to help him to understand feeling.
Yellow being happiness, red anger, all hot and noisy, green was calm etc he helped to devise the list obviously. I also used a similar technique to describe colour to people who had been born blind using smells and taste. I remember the taste of honey was yellow, which is apt, cold was blue etc. It was an uplifting experience when someone 'got it'.
I had a lad with Asperger's in a creative writing class at Uni of Kent and while it was a challenge to teach the whole group without discriminating against him or the other students it was also really rewarding. Your colour plan makes sense too: this lad didn't empathise with other people in the group either.
We rely on our sense of sight so much - maybe even more these days as we're bombarded with visual imagery - so exploring the other senses, and synaesthesia, to communicate ideas can be a really deep experience. Especially with people who have never seen, I imagine.
Thanks for sharing this, Brenda.
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