change the pear vol. 21 7 Feb 2024

hello. january felt particularly long and brutal this year, so absolutely good riddance to that, although the grey dreariness of february isn’t much comfort. as we head into the end of the lunar year, i’m feeling sad to let the year of the rabbit go. i wrote last year: it’s a year of escaping demons, of running fast and free, of being swift and full of tricks, of becoming ungovernable, and i think the year reflected that in many different ways. but it’s time to look ahead to the year of the dragon: a year of burning bridges, of flying on the winds of morning, of myth and magic, of building a big hoard and keeping it safe.

on repeat

in honour of ms chapman’s transcendent performance of fast car at the grammys, some of my favourite music live performances:

• adele singing someone like you at glastonbury 2016 and the crowd echoing the chorus after she leaves

• SHINee’s rendition of replay from their fourth live album

• LUCY performing flare in concert

• jeremy jordan’s cover of it’s all coming back to me now

• BTS performing mikrokosmos on the jimmy fallon show

• the crowd singing robyn’s dancing on my own in the nyc subway

• tracy chapman again, stunning wembley stadium to silence with fast car in 1988

last seen

hana and i went to see life unrehearsed, a documentary about two old korean lesbians (kim insun and lee soohyun) and their life together in berlin. i literally cried through the entire film, right from the opening scene which shows a photograph of the two of them holding hands in a park. it’s a beautiful, tender, moving depiction of the joy and tenderness in their relationship. the film doesn’t shy away from the difficulties they’ve gone through, but it’s principally concerned with showing how much they love each other and how happy and secure their life together is. there are so many beautiful touches of domesticity, mixed with scenes showing the two of them at various protests: insun speaks at a demonstration for nurses of colour, and soohyun goes along to a renters protest to bang her drum and chant enough is enough. it was so incredibly moving to me to see how their life contains both struggle and joy, how much strength they give to each other, and how honest and tender their love is. god! i love lesbians! i love old asian women! i love love!

one of my favourite sequences was watching soohyun make/mend a rainbow shawl for insun (look at her wearing it. oh my god) when it’s finished, insun wraps herself in it and dances around the room. fondly, soohyun says, “how old are you?!” and insun retorts, beaming, “love has no age!” we next see insun packing for a trip to korea. when she gets to seoul, she constructs a cross out of wood (both insun and soohyun are christian) and wraps it in the shawl. she writes a sign that says, god loves all of us — kim insun and takes the cross to seoul pride. on her way there she cheekily says, “everyone’s looking at me!” to the cameraperson. she walks past police officers, homophobic religious protestors, and joins the celebration, dancing with young people, waving a light-up star wand and doing interviews. back in berlin, soohyun goes to berlin pride alone. she takes a photo with drag queens, gets emotional seeing the front of the protest being reserved for those with disabilities. the documentary maker asks her, “why don’t you and insun show much affection in public?” and soohyun responds that she gets anxious about people showing them hate or disrespect because of it; so they don’t often hold hands in public. the next day, insun comes along to the parade with soohyun, and we see them holding hands in the midst of it all. what an absolute privilege to be let into their lives for a brief moment. feel very grateful to have seen this documentary.

currently watching

after weeks of everyone in my life telling me i needed to watch the traitors, i finally sat down and watched all of season one in about the space of a week. what a fantastic show full of the most absurd characters. truly a perfect distillation of the british public at large: bigoted, easily deceived, bland, mediocre at best and actively evil at worst. with notable exceptions, of course—love you andrea, love you faye, love you amos. starting season 2 was a very funny contrast—these people are a whole different kettle of fish. we’ve still got our bigots and our bland kings and queens, but we also have people who are absolutely out for blood. their eyes are giving evil. i can’t wait! currently praying for paul’s downfall.

reading

i hit a reading slump towards the end of january, partly because i’m actually forcing myself to stop buying physical copies of books (on that note, if anyone has any books i can borrow, let me know) and partly because i desperately just want to read A Good Book and i kept reading contemporary literary fiction books that were, tbqh, deeply mid. i’m making a pivot now to go through the pulitzer prize winners from the 90s and see how they treat me. currently i’m on the stone diaries by carol shields, which chronicles the life of daisy stone goodwill, growing up first in manitoba and then in indiana in the early 20th century, and the various characters that populate her existence as she gets older, marries, has children. the latent potential of books like this lies in whether they can take the particular and open it up to the general; if they manage to make us see something of ourselves in a story that is so deeply focused on the minutiae of someone else’s life. if the author gets it right, it’s genius. if they get it wrong, it can be very, very boring. we’ll see how it goes!!

miscellaneous

making wontons with martha and hana. trying to explain to hana why we find shaun evans (endeavour morse) so sexy. nandini’s chicken fesejan, eaten with jun and arenike in her beautiful rent-free holborn flat. talking about growth and how long we’ve known each other. the finsbury park wine bar man telling me and hana, “i know” when we said we’d been there before. finally framing my prints and putting them up on my wall. reading rob macfarlane’s the old ways with zoë. swimming in the olympic pool with alfie. bumping into my mum at the palestine march. lola’s birthday dinner in south london gallery. cooking ixta belfrage’s aubergine with lime yoghurt and cinnamon tomato chilli oil. sri lankan food with arenike. my dad’s 60th birthday meal. small plates at forza wine bar (plus a free limoncello shot). seeing grieg’s piano concerto live with hana. the hilariously pretentious german men sat behind us. being a hater in waterstones with arenike. msc writing group and hanging out with plume, the world’s silliest cat. sitting in the pub for hours with alex, lydia, saskia and dorothy. henry cooking delicious food for me and claire. claire saying, “we should have a friendship wedding”. walking in hyde park with shahla. reading micha’s beautiful brilliant book. meeting tamsyn muir and gesticulating wildly as i tried to articulate how harrow the ninth is a work of genius. watching the full moon rise on the sea in margate. smoked prawns. scorched mackerel. cured trout. sourdough. orange wine. a long walk on the beach. filling our lungs with fresh sea air.

that’s all from me. take care out there. spring is on the way!