Rare and special Monday update
Breakfast: Granola and oats with warm milk. Rooibos tea.
Lunch: Falafel sandwich. Cashew nuts. Earl Grey tea.
Supper: Reheated trimmings from a roast forerib of beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy.
Music: Footie on Radio Five
Narrative: Should anyone still be reading: I am back. What, then, has occurred in the life of the Exile since last I posted here? Well, shortly after my last post I got caught up in the usual round of pre-Christmas drinking and shopping that I have come to resent so heartily and resist so feebly. Then I went on holiday to Tunisia for a couple of weeks. Camel trek, Carthaginian ruins, you know the kind of thing. My photos are on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/medwayexiles/sets/72157612159208539/. Apologies for the clumsy link but Squarespace crashes every time I try and do a proper one. When I came back from Tunisia I had enormous amounts of work to catch up on. Then I fell in love. Then there were blizzards and flooding. Then my computer broke.
So with one thing and another, circumstances have not been conducive to creativity. Believe me this is as frustrating to me as it is for you, because I have a great deal I wish to say. When I am not writing, I am not happy. I am now backed up to here [indicates large metaphorical pile] with half written notes and posts and that makes Jack a very dull boy indeed.
Tonight however, I'm a tad busy so I'm going to settle for pointing you to an article in The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13139619
Those of you that know me in person will know that food is important to me. Indeed I am a veritable, and verifiable fascist in the kitchen, to my quotidian embarrassment. Still, the article makes a strong case for why food should be important to everyone. Cooking, and cooking meat, it seems, could be one of the things that makes us what we are; a defining feature of what it is to be human. As much a part of us as sex or language.
It's a viewpoint I am naturally sympathetic to, because it correlates with my belief that the individual human being does not exist. It's been my amateurish conjecture for a great many years that the 'individual' is merely a language concept; utterly lacking a historical physical basis. Cooking, like sex and language, are fundamental to our understanding of what it is to be human; they are part of who we are. No human society has existed without them. However they have meaning only in the context of the whole, of the community, of society. The human being is a node, in a web, and only as a node can any meaning be derived from his existence. And only by studying the web can we really begin to know our place in the cold, dark empty blackness of our universe.
I'm too tired tonight to make my arguments clear, sadly, but I will return to this theme in the future and hopefully develop the ideas more coherently and cogently. In the mean time I leave them here as a jumping off point.