miserabilia

I like that you asked for ‘important’ rather than ‘favourite’- for an anonymous question, you’re really rather interesting.

• Tea. Breakfast tea, Yorkshire tea, tea with two sugars when you’re hungover and lonely, tea when you’re watching the news. We’ll drink tea as a nation when the Queen dies, we’ll drink tea when we’ve been dumped, when we’re unhappy, when we’re sitting down with our Nan for a scone. There’s something in the cup of tea that means things aren’t so bad. You’re connected with every last miserable fucker that’s ever sat down with a brew. You’re part of something.
• MacDonalds. MacDonalds for hangovers. It’s trashy and it’s wonderful. It means lying in bed banging on the wall as means of communication between yourself and your housemate before you can finally drag your carcass up into town to buy some chips. It means “Oh god, why did I throw up on my shoes?” and “Why did I run into that tree?” and “Why did I demand the band play Lynyrd Skynyrd songs all night?” -It means you had a good night, or a bad one. It’s part of the healing process.
• Soup. Soup is a lonely thing, but it’s warm and the steam makes patterns in the air. It’s what you eat when you’re looking out of the window feeling artistic and tortured, when you’re reading old books and being cold. Soup is for heartbreak and the bildungsroman, for drizzle and miserable Christmases. Soup is important.
• Chinese food. Because dragging your housemate up through town for Egg Fried Rice and chicken goo is symbolic. It means you’re hurting enough to hike up past the biker pub and the Catholic school and brave the subways at night. It means that things can’t get much worse. And you plank about town feeling lonely and brave, stuffing prawn crackers down your face as fast as you can, and realise: this is fucking ok, actually. It feels shit, but I’m surviving.
• Apples. Apples when you’re walking in the woods, and sitting in trees, and thinking and reading and going off the path. Apples are for exploring.
• Jim Beam. Jim Beam for the nights when nothing else is going to work. Jim Beam for with menthol and Elsie and Darkness on the Edge of Town when the whole world condenses to just you and a record player and only the man on the other end of the turntable understands. It slows life down, back to 33rpm- and like Mr. Fallon himself said, life’s not so bad at that speed.