I travel somewhat a lot for work - that isn’t a humble brag, just a statement. Anyone else in the same boat (or aeroplane) can attest to how gruelling and unglamorous* it can be: long gone are the days of business class and fancy, boozy dinners paid for by a corporate AMEX card. I’m not complaining and I’m certainly not ungrateful - I know how lucky I am to do my job - but it’s very far from a holiday (despite, as ever, what it looks like on social media).
As I’ve gotten older, my definition of love has changed. For a long time, as most young people do, I conflated lust with love. Now when I think of love and my (current) understanding of it, I often think of homesickness. My husband and I always say that the best cure for a hard day is hearing the other person say “Welcome home!” at the end of it. So much so that now we both say it, even if we’re the one coming through the door. In fact, when I got to the top of the aisle on our wedding day, it was those two words he whispered in my ear. So, when I say I think of homesickness, at the risk of sounding saccharine: I’m not homesick for our house, I’m homesick for him.
I miss sleeping next to him, curled into each other like speech marks. I miss the transcendental levels of peace I feel reading on the sofa that overlooks our garden while he mows the lawn. I miss competitively doing The New York Times’ mini crossword with him each morning - even though I’ve never, ever beaten him.
I miss attributing moods, pastimes, voices and social lives to our cats. We pretend the urge to anthropomorphise took us by surprise but I suspect we both knew all along. Why else would we have given them extremely human names: Otto and Eliza (or Lizzy, Lily, Lilibet: if she really was a human, she’d almost certainly suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder.) If it sounds like we’re crazy cat people, it’s because we are.
Grief makes previously stable ground feel rocky. To say my husband steadies me would be an understatement: his presence fastens me to the earth, like a tree taking root. I’ve always loved the quote below from The Great Gatsby, but it’s come to mind more than usual in the last six months. My resolute independence had always been both a pride of joy and a sticking point in past relationships. You often hear it said that loss can bring clarity. It’s a sliver of a silver lining to a heavy rain cloud, but I’m grateful I can now see the strength in admitting there are times where I’m reliant on someone else. I’m even more grateful to have a person in my life that’s so inherently reliable.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suppose in the same way that loss is clarifying, so too is distance. When I’m thousands of miles away, I don’t think of the day we got the keys to our first house, the day he proposed or even our wedding day. I think of his muddy hands after an afternoon in the garden, the cup of tea he brought me in bed last Tuesday, or the look on his face - part-concentration, part-adoration - as he spoon feeds Otto his medicine. I think of the tiny, mundane moments that make up the life we’ve built together - the life we call home.
*Whenever people comment on how glamorous my job must be, I like to tell them this story:
When I was in my mid-twenties, I went to Stockholm to produce a campaign for a very well-known beer brand. I had just been broken up with by a long-term boyfriend and I was devastated, especially as we were meant to be going on holiday a week later. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to the work trip - a change of scenery will do me good, I thought.
I landed in Sweden to news that the crates of sample beer we were meant to be shooting had not arrived, and that I’d have to go out and buy stock myself. Not a problem! I’ll just go to an off-licence. Clearly, I was oblivious to Swedish alcohol rules. Alcohol, at least anything over 3.5%, can only be sold by a Government-owned chain of stores affectionately named ‘Systembolaget’ (the System Company). The System (as they’re colloquially known) owned stores have strict operating laws: they can’t stay open later than 8pm on weekdays, 3pm on Saturdays and they must remain closed on Sundays. All of which meant I had just under an hour after I landed to find one and secure close to a hundred bottles of beer (another fun fact I discovered: they are also not allowed to sell multi-packs) or the shoot wouldn’t go ahead.
After much pleading with the woman at check-out about the number of bottles I was buying (another rule at the System), I was told upon payment that my company card had been declined. Try it again, I said, already on the brink of tears, it will definitely work. We tried the card four times (and I got my boss’s voicemail at least that many times), before the shutters on the store started coming down and I was forced to charge my personal card.
Standing outside the store waiting for my Uber, trolley loaded with beer next to me, I grimaced at my bank statement. I was permanently in my overdraft for most of my twenties, but that was now almost all gone too. The statement disappeared as my phone flashed with a call from a Swedish number. I gathered from some broken English but mostly from his tone that my Uber driver couldn’t find me, so I stepped out closer to the curb to see if I could wave him down. A few minutes later, after some shouting on his part and blubbering on mine, he pulled up. I turned back around to my trolley to start loading into the boot, only to find it completely surrounded by homeless people, helping themselves to the beer I’d just bankrupt myself buying. The shrieks that came out of my mouth were neither English nor Swedish but they did the job: the crowd dispersed. I’d lost a fair few bottles but with the System long-shuttered, we would have to make do with what we had.
Needless to say, I could not have been happier to finally get to my hotel room. Upon check-in, I was told that I had been given an ‘accessible’ room which the woman told me was A Great Thing! Bigger Room! And yes, it was a bigger room, but it was also dotted with pull-cords that looked like they should control lights but, in actual fact, controlled alarms. I wish I could say I learnt my lesson the first time but the sound of that alarm still lives in my head rent-free. I was, however, deeply grateful for the plastic stair-lift-esque chair in the shower which I used - more than once - for a little seated cry while the warm water ran over me. Given my disastrous financial situation, I ate a packet of crisps from the hotel vending machine for dinner and comforted myself with thoughts of everything I’d eat at the breakfast buffet.
The photo shoot itself took place across two days. Over those two days, we shot just two (almost identical) images of a frosted pint - the only difference between the two was the height on the head of foam for the different markets. Did you know that Europeans prefer a much larger head on their beers to Americans? No, me neither, and that knowledge has not once proved useful since. For twelve hours straight, two days in a row, I watched a team of humourless men measure the foam to mm precision. Every now and then they would inch the pint glass a tenth of a degree this way or that, only to move it back to its original place shortly after. The only interruption came from the seemingly incessant texts from EasyJet counting down to the holiday I was no longer taking with the boyfriend who no longer loved me.
Once we had wrapped, the client (again, a very well known beer brand) announced they wanted sushi for dinner. I mentally totted up how much a sushi dinner for ten in one of Europe’s most expensive cities might cost me and then promptly stepped outside to ring my bank and extend my overdraft. (At this point, I had stopped trying to get through to my boss.) After dinner, I went back to my hotel where I spent the very last of my money on an eye-wateringly expensive glass of house wine and watched a badly dubbed Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice. I can’t speak Swedish but I wept all the same.
Recommendations
I’m writing this from New York, one of my favourite cities. Some caveats: 1) There are hundreds of incredible restaurants so obviously this list is by no means definitive, rather a few of my recent favourites. 2) I haven’t included any classics (Katz’s deli; Russ & Daughters; Barney Greengrass etc) - they go without saying! 3) I usually stay in Brooklyn so you’ll notice the recs are mostly for there. Enjoy!
FORT GREENE, Brooklyn (one of my favourite neighbourhoods - I stay here if I can)
PARK SLOPE, Brooklyn
BOERUM HILL, Brooklyn
WILLIAMSBURG, Brooklyn
GREENPOINT, Brooklyn
NOLITA, Manhattan
THE VILLAGE, Manhattan (my favourite neighbourhood in Manhattan)
St Jardim (strictly speaking more of a wine bar than a restaurant)
LOWER EAST SIDE, Manhattan