Sour plums

And other sensual adventures

It looks like a precious rock displayed on my bookcase.

When I was very small and lived in Hong Kong, I once ate something that has lived in my sense memory. I remember it being a striking, strange taste, both bitter and sweet, soft and hard, like nothing I had ever tasted before. It lived in the far reaches of my memory but I didn’t have a clue what it was.

Flash forward a few decades and I was in the English dept staff room in my former school in Singapore. Someone was passing around a few snacks. What are these? I asked. Those are sour plums, I was told. Oh, I will try, I said.

And then it happened. The portal to the past opened up the minute I bit into the shrivelled and sad little plum, an erstwhile plum really, nothing of its former glory remaining. As the sour and sweet juice hit my tongue, I explained. This is it! This is the strange thing I ate when I was 5! This pucker inducing flavour that hits like a punch!

My tongue absorbed the strange flavours and took me right back. The memory was there all along and taste brought me back. Like a kiss.

It happened one day when I walked past the Dior perfume counter and leaned in to sniff Miss Dior, the scent my Granny always wore. There she was. Smell took me back and I was hugging her again.

There were these very strange plants I remember touching when I was small, also in Hong Kong. I distinctly remember the soft, feathery, delicate sensation of their tiny leaves. When I touched them, they closed. Magic! I did it again and again, feeling the power of my touch, over and over, I brushed my palm against the green, and they closed. I even tickled them with my toes, and they closed. What were they? These mysterious plants, shy, that responded to my touch.¹

Years later, I saw them again. Touched them and felt the same thrill. It all came back, through the power of touch. Like holding someone’s hand and remembering the way their fingers closed, just so.

There is a bird that lives here, a Hill Myna bird. We hear it every day; I even feel like he is talking to me. It is a loud, angry shriek, but I have grown fond of it. During lockdown, we were listening to BBC radio during a drive, and people were calling in with sounds from all over the world since sounds seemed so much louder with no human interference. Someone played the Hill Myna bird, and I looked up, stunned. Hearing that bird coming out of the car stereo was an odd feeling. I was being carried to a place I already lived, but hearing it out of a radio shuffled my senses. I could imagine a day when I no longer lived here and knew that sound would bring me back.

Our senses bring us back to ourselves and our memories, affording us time travel. When we dull the senses we miss out on these enchantments.

Appletiser is a drink that takes me back to a university ski trip, mini Nutella pots to that same trip, Orangina to when I lived in France, the smell of a cigarette to when I loved a cheeky late-night smoke. Horlicks to my childhood, Cadbury Chocolate Buttons places me in my Granny’s kitchen where she always kept buttons in a crystal glass jug, in a dark cupboard. I sometimes write with a fountain pen, and the purple ink (always purple ink) that stains my fingers takes me back to writing essays. These are things we cannot hold, they live in the abstract, in the neocortex, in the mysterious folds of our brain.

Not all sensual memories are positive. My first experience with Marmite destroyed any chance of that strange sticky spread becoming a favourite. I was at boarding school and seen as the foreign girl. Despite being English, I hadn’t lived there and therefore had never experienced the delights of some quintessentially British food. Such as Marmite. One evening, at high tea, I confessed I had never tried this dark brown spread in the cool jar. Oh, but you must! And they promptly showed me how the natives did it. You take a slice of toast -we had one of these toast conveyor belts at one end of the dining hall. You stood at one end, put the white sliced bread onto the moving rack and patiently waited for it to come out the other side where you would be waiting with a butter pat, ready to press onto it, ensuring the hot toast melted the butter. This time, I was instructed to take my warm buttered toast and spread some marmite on thickly. Thicker, Samantha, you need lots. Once my bread was sufficiently adorned with a thick paste of brown ick, I took a bite. The taste still haunts me today. If you know, you know. Marmite is never spread like jam; it is something delicate, an acquired taste you work towards. My ‘friends’ laughed so much a teacher had to come and see what all the fuss was about. Don’t worry, Sir! Samantha just learned what Marmite is.

The sound of crunching leaves takes me back to the first time I noticed Autumn. It must have been my first year in England when I was 4 or 5 years old. I remember golden light and a mound of leaves that I was permitted to crush. I remember the joy as I threw the leaves in the air and rushed to crush them with my little feet.

Montreal and the one and only autumn I had in 18 years

The sour plum is a strange but apt metaphor. They are plums that have been preserved through a pickling process, typically involving brining with salt and sometimes other ingredients like red shiso leaves for colour and flavour, sometimes liquorice, cloves or citrus. They defy our taste buds, both tangy and salted, but still sweet, a complex flavour that lingers on the tongue, confusing, and hard to categorise. Like memory, they have to be steeped, patiently pickled, mixed with other flavours, dried in the sun, and aged, not for the faint-hearted. Many things have to happen; many things recalled, a melange of images and sensations. That return like a flood.

It is also inherently Asia. I have spent more years in Asia than anywhere else in my life, yet it is not home. Perhaps home is where my memories live.

In the land of memories, here I am pulling a boat, a sister and a dog

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Some things that have delighted me:

I loved this long column by NYT writer David Brooks about the surprising route to the best achieving the best life. (NYT gift link.) He asks why people strive to build, create, and strive, even when it is arduous and hard. His interest lies in the origin of the spark and he investigates how and why people heed to call the write, to paint, to run, to create. He says that an endeavour starts with a quiet passion inflamed, with having the capacity to be seized. He writes of people who are receptive to this moment of rapture:

“They are sensitive, impressionable, enthusiastic, absorbent, hospitable. They are open to being surprised, and when that constructive disorientation happens, they stop and contemplate: What am I being called upon to do here? Most of our great journeys begin with a surprise. Wonder, Descartes observed, “is a sudden surprise of the soul.”

He also quotes the Austrian poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal who asked:

“Where is your Self to be found?” Always in the deepest enchantment you have experienced.”

He muses that the process towards fervent commitment is a mystery, somewhat like falling in love, “it happens in the wildness of the heart.”

Manifesting this moment:

Woman Reading Newspaper in Bed by John Gannam, 1950s

In a similar vein, these quotes by Hemingway:

Be prepared to work always without applause.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

And finally:

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Hope explained by John Green.

npr

A post shared by @npr

Other delights: Rediscovering the joys of Haiku, collaborating with like-minded people, and my birthday!

Thank you, as always for reading and supporting Notes from the Middle. Writing this is such a joy and I would love it if you would share, like, subscribe and spread the word. Sam x

Here is an old post you might like or enjoy revisiting. It was much loved when I first wrote it.

1. Mimosa Pudica