My name is

Writing can be addictive, and I know the more frequently I write here the more often I feel inclined to write, but sometimes writing an annotated account of my life and my thoughts upon it has to be pushed aside while I go about living it. Quite a boast for someone who with only a few hours of energy to spend each day.

But addictive it is, spending time on creating sentences that I consider good enough to put out there, and to then know they’re being read, or even enjoyed, helps keep my ego fed and the ticking of my internal clock quiet enough to be ignored.

It’s similar to cooking for others, the act of spending time concentrating on something, carefully guiding it into this world only to share and enjoy it with friends, even, as in the case of writing on the internet, they are friends you never see in person. They both create an intimacy, the act of creating for others is a brave one too, not wholly altruistic, but brave nonetheless. It leaves you vulnerable to criticism, No it’s more than that, it’s pushing yourself into the limelight, singling out yourself to criticism.

So it was a couple weeks ago when I tried to cook a British christmas dinner for friends here in Spain. It took hours of cooking and days of preparation by my girlfriend, but we did it. Cooking a turkey with all the trimmings, buying key ingredients in Britain and bring them back to Spain with me and buying everything else from British food shops.

My girlfriend said an interesting thing as the turkey, its legs akimbo and showing the world an impressive gape, cooked in the oven. She said “It smells like England in here[the flat]”...

I was once asked a strange question by a Spaniard about ‘England’, I use quotes because I don’t think the answer I gave just covers that South-east corner of Britain that’s known as England, and neither did the questioner, not if he really understood what “Ingleterra” really meant. “Why, does English food smell different to Spanish food?”

After a moments hesitation an answer made its way to the front of the queue in my mind: “Fat”.

The biggest difference between a Mediterranean diet and a British one is which fats are used in cooking; animal fats are used far more in Anglo-Saxon cultures than the so common you sweat it, olive oil, in Mediterranean cooking. He didn’t seem happy with the answer, but at the time I wasn’t happy with it either

..So when my girlfriend said that the flat smelt of England she meant animal fat.

My name is Neil Wykes and I smell of animal fats and I’m a writing addict.

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ElGuiri, Spain, British food