This week, your long read isn’t as morbid as the title may suggest. I lean into my thoughts on mortality and how the person your loved ones remember confronts the person you really are… As ever, I’ve pulled together a playlist built on what sonically steered my July, and your voicenote-meets-mini-pod- Overdub, comes courtesy of my morning cup of mint tea, and my couch.
Calling all lurkers and free subscribers, you’re only getting a snippet of the Sunday magazine if you don’t upgrade to paid… so hit the button and join the full fat gang. With that, happy Sunday and enjoy the essay.
WHEN I DIE, PLAY WU-TANG AT THE WAKE
ON MORTALITY AND OWNING YOUR REAL YOU. EVEN IN DEATH.
I wrote a will.
Sort of.
Okay, fine…
I wrote half a will… in my email drafts.
It’s unfinished. I’ll get to it. It’s on a to-do list, right after “delete everyone from your phonebook who says things like ‘let’s circle back’”
When I was five or six, I was handed a dead goldfish and told to “bin it” by my uncle. A story for another ramble. An experience that started an ongoing relationship with mortality and not in a weird Pornhub way. Promise.
Fear and my occasional bursts of fuck it energy, seem to be in an ongoing beef.
Too much to do.
Not enough time.
Fuck knows if it’ll ever get done.
A few years back, I was worried I was turning into a man baby. Not because I couldn’t use the grown-up cutlery, largely because I hadn’t done enough grown-up shit. I shave regularly, keep good hygiene, pay taxes (insert snarky resent here) but as for the adult stuff?
Pro creation?
Write a will?
Soon come.
For extended context, I’m on my favourite park bench (yes, I have one of those) typing this on my phone, while an actual man baby vies for attention only meters away.
A man baby pissing with everyone’s park time… He’s playing football just that little bit too hard with five-year-olds. Doing kick ups with a giant inflatable football, convinced he’s that guy. The ‘Could’ve gone pro but the man held me back’ guy.
Mums watch in disgust, one of which is his wife. Poor woman. She’s the one chewing slowly. Watching silently, with eyes planning his violent “accidental” death. His kid must be the one with the whistle. A fucking whistle on a Sunday. Wanker. Both of them. Apple falling from tree and that.
Even with the whistle, I can hear the mums from here.
Thin lips slapping loudly.
But this is my corner of the park.
My place of quiet peace. Supposedly.
I can hear their polite, painfully unfunny pleasantries, while they scoop mayonnaise slop from plastic M&S tubs. There’s no Tupperware. No sir. No plastic, Ikea-coloured-lid shit, they’re mason jar people. Kilner or Quattro Stagioni people.
We, on the other hand are not.
Royal we.
Mum, Gran, the endless aunties I’m apparently related to…
I come from cupboards littered with mismatched Tupperware, borrowed and never to be returned. I say Tupperware, what I mean is margarine and ice cream tubs...
Endless piles of the stuff. White plastic, repurposed as vessels for Ginger beef stew, kontomire or jollof. Plastic stained a deep red by palm oil.
#Africans.
I was raised in an environment where food was a love language. A fire pit to gather around for stories. Plates were piled high with small orange mountains of Jollof, tiny peaks promising sustenance and a direct line to culture. The past. The people behind the recipe. The mums. The aunties… So, when I die, there better be Jollof at the wake.