R is for Respect
I recently went to a concert in Paris — Jacques. I didn’t know the artist before but a friend, Jean, told me that he was a musical genius. The show was completely wicked, starting with an upturned bicycle being used as an instrument, to a cult-y children’s choir midway through. The type of music that makes you clap off beat and vibrates your whole body so that you can feel it in your nostrils. It reminded me slightly of Ed Sheeran (in a way that isn’t offensive and with cheveux à l’inverse), in the sense of realtime live music, active, charged, and volatile. His total mastery of his art was astounding and impressionable but a moment in the crowd is what I can’t stop thinking about.
Paris is a city that has been harrowed by certain events and there tend to be several points in my daily life here that remind me of this grief. During the concert, there was a dispute in the crowd. One man who was intent on riling people up and causing chaos. In itself, it was an annoyance, but the reaction that I saw on faces in the audience was plaintive. A girl standing in front of us crouched down on the floor blocking her ears whilst the man was bolshing around. To me it was evident that this moment harked back to a memory that haunts Paris and concert venues alike.
A few days later, having a beer with some friends and my sister, lamenting the mid-weekend lull, debating whether a hangover meant that we couldn’t party again. We were aggressively awoken from this drawn out conversation when two large bangs went off on the perpendicular street, the street on which I live. In a flash of panicked faces and unwanted evocation, the whole bar jumped up from their seats and ran inside, sheltering behind the marble bar and jostling into the loos. The panic-mode ensued for a max of 90 seconds before we were reassured that the angry noise was in fact celebratory, a wedding party firing fireworks directly down the hill. The adrenaline was cursed, crying and shaking. For a split second, it felt like a moment of terror and has since been making me question respect.
Respect for others in any circumstance feels like a given but is it ubiquitous? Respect for inhabitants of a city that has been shaken on many an occasion feels unambiguous but yet flashes of unthinkingness still occur. However, the more I’ve thought about respect as a concept the more I wonder if I am demanding it to too high a level. Is self-respect and an ultimatum of respect from others a Gen-Z / Millennial trait? It isn’t a new idea to talk about “therapizing” language working its way into regular parlance but it is one that I find super fascinating. The pervasive popularity of burn-out, trauma, and doing the work means that we are not only asking more of ourselves and our therapists but also of those around us.
Respect in kitchens for other people is not always present but from the small preview that I’ve had so far, the respect for food and produce doesn’t falter. Like people, I’m starting to learn, that each slight variation of produce has its own characteristic. Temperatures in which they cook, conditions in which they like to rest, whether they need to rest before cooking, or after cooking, or before eating. You need to be sensitive to their sensitivities. The jasmin flowers can’t stay in the left hand fridge overnight, you have to move them to the middle vertical fridge.
In a last ditch attempt at over-analysing, respect for yourself when it comes to food is the final one I will pick at. We’ve been force-fed a hundred and one diets and regimes over a short (female) lifetime and forced to consume ideas of fictitious feeding patterns. I, fortunately, have never been one to swallow an idea of a diet nor a diet pill for that matter, my own gluttony has prevented it but I could name all of the freakiest ones, from cabbage soup to keto to 80/20. My metabolism will catch up with me eventually, especially now that I’m 25, but for now, my respect for my body is less monk-like and more first trimester. Capitulate to cravings and eat when you’re hungry. Whether that is my peché mignon Monster Munch or chocolate cake in the middle of the night, it’s moderation in moderation in moderation.
Shopping list for you
New newspaper rec and another humble brag. My new career in voice over started with this Semaine promo video for their fantastic print venture
The Rise of Therapy Speak - New Yorker
A visit to the loo in Folderol
Crying in H Mart - a harrowingly delicious memoir written by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast
Jeremy Lee’s Cooking simply and well, for one or many- add to the collection