I love foraging. It’s something I’ve become mildly obsessed with in recent years. I started, as did most, with the gateway drug of blackberries. They’re everywhere in my local area during that sun-soaked part of the year when summer lazily rolls into autumn, and it’s great fun for me and the kids to walk through the woods (or even just along pavements) and fill whatever receptacles we have to hand (including, on one occasion, my son’s sunhat), stuffing them into our mouths as we go. Once I’d made a few cakes and jams with these free - like, seriously, they’re completely free, no one charges you any money or anything - gifts of nature, I started to think about what else I might be able to utilise without having to pay for it.
Raspberries, obviously. I learned what a sloe looks like before it’s been liquidised. Then we found a few places to acquire apples and plums. There’s a pick-your-own farm just down the road from us, so we go there every year to get strawberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and whatever else takes our fancy - ok, they do charge us, but it’s still a lot of fun, and there’s a tractor that takes you to the different fields which thoroughly delights the children. The tractor is free; I’m still winning.
After a couple of years of this, I started to take it more seriously. I bought books. I looked up what foods were available to forage at different times of year. I downloaded an app to identify different plants and trees. I even took a foraging course. Despite all this, I’m still staying away from wild mushrooms, because I absolutely do not trust them. I will continue to purchase my mushrooms in a packet that, whilst distressing in its negative impact on the planet, guarantees to me that no one in my household is going to become violently ill or dead as a result of my cooking. Everything else, though, I’m totally up for.
In November, we went for a walk in the woods and found a frankly ridiculous abundance of chestnuts. I hadn’t come prepared for foraging (I’m still a newbie, I guess), so we found ourselves filling every available pocket, different compartments of the baby bag and an emptied out water bottle because, to be honest, once I’d got the hang of detaching the nuts from their prickly shells without lacerating my fingers, I just couldn’t stop. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them, I just knew that there were hundreds of nuts lying around and that I was determined to do something with them. Other people were walking around the woods filling huge bags that they’d brought for the purpose (seasoned pros, clearly), so I reasoned that I wasn’t so crazy. When I got them home, I found recipes for chestnut stuffing (which I decided to make for Christmas), chestnut chocolate cake, and chestnut pasta, and I felt thoroughly justified in collecting so many.
But then it came time to extract them. As foraged foodstuffs go, chestnuts are high maintenance. You first have to boil or roast the nut, then peel it to get past the tough outer layers, then scoop out the tiny amount of filling that each one provides. It’s time-consuming, it’s fiddly, and, as I discovered about an hour into hacking open the bounty I’d collected, quite a strain on wrists that are simultaneously weak due to lack of physical labour and over-worked from rolling over a computer keyboard all day every day. I was probably a quarter of the way through my pile of chestnuts when I got cramp in my hand. I looked at the pitiful amount of edible pulp I’d extracted (just about enough for the pasta dinner I should have had on the table half an hour ago) and I wanted to cry. My husband (who’d been dealing with the rest of dinner while I tackled the chestnuts) came over to offer help and I sighed. “I think chestnuts just don’t want to be eaten,” I said ruefully.
Sharing the imperfect
We tend, all of us, to share the positive elements of our lives. We write about the moments of joy, the experiences that light us up, the positivity and opportunities that we want everyone to be able to access. We share on our social media feeds the images that make us smile, the ones in which we are smiling, and the ones in which you can’t see the pile of laundry that hasn’t been done or the toys that need putting away. We curate the lives we show to others to make them look as good as possible. And that makes perfect sense - why would you want to record the messy floor or the tantruming toddler? Why would you want to talk about the time you were tired, or bored or feeling irritable for no reason? That’s not something that you want to focus on, nor that you want anyone else to focus on.
Yet, in our quest to record the best of our lives and to celebrate the things that matter to us, we can sometimes put forward an overly, and inaccurately, perfect version of ourselves. That leads to everyone else thinking that our lives are perfect, and that the lives of all people on the internet - and therefore all people in the world - are perfect, except them. Because they know the truth about their own life - they know about the laundry, the unmade bed, the bad mood, the sparse savings account, those things can’t be cropped out of the frame when you live them. So we know that our own lives are imperfect and chaotic, but we assume we’re the only ones because everyone else’s look so radiant. Then we try to make ours look more perfect so that no one knows the truth… and so the cycle continues.
So whilst I still want to write about connection to the seasons, whilst I really do believe that we can all benefit from a greater understanding of and synchronicity with nature’s rhythms, and whilst I genuinely do love foraging, I also want to be honest about the fact that sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. Sometimes I give up on the chestnuts. Sometimes I kill the herbs growing on my windowsill. Sometimes I just decide to sod it all to hell and buy things from a shop, because, yes, I could make it myself but some days I just don’t want to and I can pay someone else to make it for me.
And that’s ok. I’m comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with finding a balance between enjoying and exploring the cycles of nature, and being a busy working mother who has always known that, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, I’d be among the first to die because I have very few practical skills.
Part of this is a process of knowing and accepting who I am. My identity has changed so much in recent years - becoming a mother completely pulled apart my atoms and rearranged them into a shape I didn’t recognise, and that took me a while to come to terms with. As I’ve grown older, my lifestyle, my priorities, my way of looking at the world has altered radically. My 25-year-old self probably wouldn’t recognise me. And in accepting and embracing that new me, I may have thrown out too much of the old me. I tried to be a perfectly spiritual, dreamy, nature spirit, without accepting that I’m also a deeply sarcastic pragmatist who swears a lot. I can be both, I just have to make space for all of me.
Christmas perfection
At no other time of year is the need to strive for perfection more evident than in the run-up to Christmas. People everywhere - mothers, in particular - are pushing themselves way beyond their limits trying to make everything totally magical. And it’s just not possible. Life isn’t magical 24/7, not even during December. Yet we keep piling more and more pressure on ourselves. The most insane example of this is the absolutely bonkers Elf on the Shelf that seems to have sprung up in recent years - it baffles me any time a fellow parent mentions it to me. I’m not going to go into my thoughts on Elf on the Shelf, because Lucy Sweet has already absolutely nailed it here. (Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a Christmas present for me, I would like “Seize the means of production you little tw*t!” on a t-shirt, please.) But this is one tradition that we have, very consciously and purposefully, given a wide berth, and I’m so frickin’ glad of that, because, once you’ve started, you can’t bloody stop.
As I think about who I want to be, what story I’m telling about myself and my life, and therefore what story I’m creating about our family for my children, I want to think very intentionally about what traditions I want to build around times like Yule/Christmas. How much am I doing because I want to, because it’s truly meaningful to me, and how much has been forced on me by society, how much do I feel I have to do because it’s what the wider family expects?
I’m trying, more and more, to strip down the festive season. I want it to be a calm and cosy time for connection. I am not into this festival of capitalism, and I certainly don’t want to be forcing myself to rush around and do more and more at a time when nature is telling me to slow down and rest. Darkness stimulates production of melatonin - the hormone that encourages sleep. Lower temperatures increase your metabolism, which means your body needs more rest time. The shorter, colder days are telling us to take it easy. And, after an intense year, I, for one, am pretty knackered. I’m ready for a break. I’m ready to take stock of what’s happened over the last 12 months and think about where the next 12 are going.
I’m reducing the amount of gifts I buy for the kids, because they already have a tonne of toys they don’t play with and they don’t need more. I want to get a few things that they will really value, rather than overwhelming them with gifts that devalue - with their abundance - the very concept of gifts, and instead focus on meaningful experiences. I am not buying gifts for friends, I’m making everything instead. Yes, it’s more work, but it’s work I enjoy (knitting, crafting, baking, all hobbies I’d be up to anyway), and it’s work I can pour love and attention into. I’m trying to keep decorations to a minimum, and not put up the 10 million jazzy Santas we’ve got stashed in a box just because my Christmas-obsessed mum gave them to us. I’m slowly unpicking what really matters to me, and how I can integrate that with what matters to my husband and my children. I understand that that’s a task that will take years, and I’m ok with that.
Writing the whole story
This need to integrate all the pieces into a whole, I realise, also relates to how I position myself as a writer. There’s been a lot of discourse lately about “success” on Substack, and debates about whether it’s ok to go about building a platform with a goal of making money. I don’t want to wade into the discourse - one thing I definitely want to let go of from the old me is the need to argue with people who disagree with me, because that is just exhausting and no good for anyone - but I will say that I would love to make money on this platform. I would love to be able to make a living purely from my creative work. I don’t see any problem with that whatsoever, and I think way more people should be making decent livings from creativity, and that society as a whole should put a LOT more value on creative work. But. When you want to make a financial success of something, it can lead you to follow the money rather than the joy. You start to try to write what you think will sell, rather than what you think is important. You position yourself as a marketable commodity rather than as your authentic, messy, imperfect self.
So, in integrating the different parts of myself in life, I also need to integrate the different parts of my writing. The theory is that, if you write authentically about the topics that matter to you, then the audience that will truly value you will find you. But that’s a scary prospect when you embrace the true complexity of yourself as a person. Because the tribe that love one part of you might not love the rest. If someone shows up here because of my meditative, spiritual writing about nature, they might be less impressed by the sweary cynical bits. The urge to self-censor, to second-guess what your audience want and edit yourself accordingly, becomes huge.
There are also, inevitably, on any platform and within any publishing ecosystem big writers/creators and smaller writers/creators. When you are smaller and still working on trying to build your community, to reach an audience, it’s hard to resist the temptation to copy the big players. What they’re doing is working, so should you do that too? The saccharine quote of Instagram memes goes, “Be yourself - everyone else is taken”, and it’s true. If that writer is already successful doing that thing, you’re unlikely to be successful as a pale imitation. If you have something new to say on the subject then, by all means, there’s space for plenty of people to write about the same topics. But we can’t all be the same writers. No one would want to read the same piece three times, anyway.
So I’ll be myself. I’ll show up in all my messy, chaotic glory, and hope that you’ll come along with me for the ride. Sometimes I’ll knit jumpers and handcraft notebooks, and sometimes I’ll sit in front of the TV eating chocolate biscuits and muttering expletives about politicians. Sometimes I’ll walk along the beach dreaming up fairy tales about magical creatures, and sometimes I’ll take a deeply guilt-ridden drive five minutes down the road to pick my daughter up from school because I was running late and I didn’t want to go out in the cold. Sometimes I’ll make jams from foraged berries, and sometimes (like this time) I will just buy the damn stuffing from a supermarket.
That’s just me.
Perfectly said. Just be yourself. Like your writing.
Those pesky chestnuts! It's very cool you're a new forager. I'm always looking around when I'm in the forest but I don't tend to take much other than what I eat in the moment. I agree with you about the mushrooms!