"If marrow were a geological formation, it would be magma roiling under the earth's mantle. If it were a plant, it would be a delicate moss that grows only on the highest crags of Mount Everest, blooming with tiny white flowers for three days in the Nepalese spring. If it were a memory, it would be your first one, your most painful and repressed one, the one that has made you who you are." - Julie Powell
Are you ever caught up all at once in several different and seemingly unattached things, only to sit back and realise where they all tie in together? This happens to me constantly.
I have recently been considering blood and bone marrow donation. Discussion about the
discrimination many of my friends face in regards to donating blood reminded me; gay and bisexual men, and women who sexually engage with either are prevented from joining the National Registry as they are at risk from HIV and AIDs. This is an understandable risk, but all those I know falling into this category are scrupulous about their sexual health. These lost donations are desperately required by our health service and yet the policy remains unchanged. I can't understand.
I came home from my grandmother's house, rested and relaxed, and armed with Julie Powell's book, 'Julie & Julia: My year of cooking dangerously'. I've wanted to read it - and watch the film (which looks doused with a healthy dollop of Hollywood sickly sweetness to combat the original wonderfully offensive acidity, but whatever) - for a while. The novel is already so much more satisfying than I had anticipated. It's full of all the good things in life, written with a multitude of my favourite words and expressed as if by your very closest, dark humoured friend, the one who knows you inside out. She has a way of writing that strikes me hard somewhere, the same way I imagine Julia Child's cooking struck her. If bone marrow was a kind of woman, it would be women like Julia Child and Julie Powell.
I also finally watched
The Way We Were and Barbra Streisand blew me away. K-K-K-Katie might have been more complex than the inner most interior of our bones but what Hubbell could never learn is that in life, as in Potage Parmentier, simple is not easy. And what is exciting about easy, anyway? For the most part and the meantime, I'd rather times were tough and exciting - there are enough good books, feisty heroines and pots of potato soup to see me through.
