A life in Love Stories
“Tell me your love story.”
My mother had arrived that afternoon from the states, a few days before my wedding. We were meeting my in laws at a restaurant for dinner in London so they could get to know each other.
She’d barely waited for them to sit down and pleasantries to be exchanged before launching into her idea of an ice breaker. I am pretty sure I crumbled under the table at that precise moment, my internal scaffolding collapsing from embarrassment.
As we rode home in the taxi after dinner, I asked her my voice rising a good octive, “What on earth were you thinking, asking David and Ingrid to ‘tell her their love story’ as an opening question?!” She told me matter of factly that she was done with small talk. “In her old age” she only wanted to hear the things that mattered and who and what you love are the most important.
The first time I fell in love, it was at summer camp. I walked across a room to meet the new camp counsellor, a freckled South African with floppy hair. In its abbreviated form, it was a sweet meet cute- girl meets boy, spends summers toasting marshmallows and canoeing, falls in love over the campfire, boy dyes his hair blonde, girl dumps him, realises actually she is in love with him and writes him drunken letters from the Himalayas and then upends her entire life to live in the UK, has houseful of kids and forbids him from ever dyeing his hair again.
The second time I fell in love, it was in a shopping mall— less the setting of a Netflix romcom and more the background for an early 2000s local radio advert.
🎵 Come visit a shopping mall. The Thistle Centre. 🎵
I turned a corner and between the Debenhams and the Topshop, looked out a two story window on to the Ochil hills and I knew I would never willingly leave this corner of the planet.
I was visiting Stirling for a job interview. Crashing out badly from a job in Public Health, I was looking for any escape. Women's health had been my passion for many years, having worked across a number of community settings around the world, but once I hit the NHS, I could feel my soul leaving my body through my eyeballs as I stared at endless spreadsheets and tried to justify cuts to the most vulnerable.
We'd been living in London, after that first love of mine finished university, and we tried to make a life amidst the hustle bustle of the South East of England. I was miserable. I had problems with staff and a boss who hated me. I took the same bus with the same 6 people every day for the 45 minute, 3 mile bus ride for 18 months and we never acknowledged each other. I needed out.
Scotland was a shot in the dark really. I’d found a masters programme I thought I would like at the University of Strathclyde and could make it work if I could get a job up here. I liked Scotland. We’d visited previously and my first impressions of the country were influenced heavily by the short walk from Queen Street station to the university. In the first 200m of the journey, the 3 people who approached me out of the blue to double check I wasn't lost as I checked and double checked street signs.
I felt like if people were that friendly, I could maybe build a life here and not be the crazy person who made eye contact with other passengers on the tube and smiled at people's babies.
My job search landed me a few interviews with environmental organisations based at Stirling University. I’d never visited the city before, so I travelled up to Stirling on the train with a bit of time to kill before I went to the interview. I wandered around the town centre, bustling and thriving at the time (remember this was 2005).
I found myself in the shopping centre, having realised I’d forgotten an extra pair of tights after I’d torn mine stepping off the train. I turned that corner and wham. It hit me. The craggy outline of Dumyat, the closest hill in what I would learn later were the Ochil hills, lit in greens and an ochre yellow that only really exists in the hills of Scotland. By no means a mountain even by Scottish standards, it's drama based on a straight rise from a fault line in the plain at its base.
True to that first declaration of love, I haven’t left. Not really. We live 14 miles from Stirling and my view includes different, bigger hills that are different but also similar.
And with my first love at my side and fully immersed in my second, I have fallen in love again and again - first with a gaggle of children that are now mostly teenagers.
I fell in love with making things as I struggled with a colicky baby and endless days that felt like I had very little show for myself.
Then I fell in love with a 150 year old farm house and the small community that surrounds it.
One time, I sat at a table for dinner with every ingredient but the salt and the oil grown myself and I fell so helplessly in love with growing food I changed my whole life to make it my work.
Twenty one years on from that meeting of my in-laws and Becky Goldin on Upper Richmond Road in Putney, I am still deeply embarrassed by my mother.
But I can admit that she’s right. It is a series of love stories that tell you almost everything you really need to know about me… we’d skip over the heartache and trauma, as those are at least 3rd date conversations. However, it really is how and what we love that defines us.
Just please don’t tell her that I said she was right.
Why no recipes or how tos the last few newsletters? The truth is that we are barely cooking and making at the moment - just keeping our heads above water with work and kids and life. Some seasons are like that. They will be back. Just not right away.
If you are desperate, there are plenty of Life in the Making Quarterly copies in stock (except issue 2…I might do a reprint, I am not sure).
