Anyways, I frontloaded this year’s celebrations by making the pie before the movie, and eating it for dessert after we got home. This time, I made impossible pie, courtesy of B. Dylan Hollis’ first cookbook Baking Yesteryear.

The thing with impossible pie is that you don’t need to painstakingly crumble butter into flour to make crust, or roll anything out, or even cut anything. You just blitz the whole list of ingredients in one go, pour it into the pie pan, and it sorts itself out into layers inside the oven. It needs time to cool and set before serving — perfect for an afternoon jaunt where you feel unexpectedly emotional while trying to recapture your recently-vanished youth.

I took some liberties with the recipe by adding vanilla and almond extract to the mix, because I figured that no good self-respecting custard should go vanilla-less. I added almond just because I have it in my fridge. (Oddly enough, I bought the almond extract in the first place because I needed it for a different recipe from Baking Yesteryear.)

The end result was sweet, creamy, custardy, jiggly, and far too rich and delightful for something so impossibly lazy. Happy Pi Day!

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Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the meaning he finds in his work and the comfort of AI companionship, his relationships with the living leave him longing for deeper connection.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years, its passengers reduced to dust and bone. A relic of Earth’s dying past, its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship….But the plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival.

The store was standing room only as Sui detailed the genesis behind The Iron Garden Sutra. Sonia Uraldo, host of the Murmurstation podcast for Augur Magazine recorded the entire interview for a future episode, so you’ll get to hear the full discussion eventually. In the meantime, here’s a rapid-fire summary of my notes regarding the concepts that Sui explored while writing:

• Setting up a simple terrarium with moss is so difficult that setting up a generation ship is the ultimate example of hubris. Our view of space travel is too optimistic; we don’t have the slightest clue what it would take to make a self-sustaining ecosystem last hundreds of years.
• Fungi are strange and awesome, and you should watch the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi.
• “Who do you become when the situation is completely hopeless?”
• If you want to understand all the ways in which organic matter can break down, corpse farms are where it’s at.
• Watching a dead rat decompose over time at the side of a hiking trail is a surprisingly moving form of meditation.
• You don’t realize how precious privacy is — and how expensive it would be to ensure on a space station — until you’ve lived through lockdown.

The Iron Garden Sutra promises to be a deep, moving look at the impermanence of life, all wrapped up with a locked-room mystery element. It’s going on the TBR pile.

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It’s been eight years. Holy crap. In the intervening period, I did rather mundane things like buy my first home, switch jobs, live through a pandemic. You know. The usual. By the time I stopped in 2018, I had figured out what kind of teas I liked, what kind of teas I didn’t like, and where I wanted to buy the first kind from. So the festival’s purpose for me — the joy of discovery — waned over time.

Being back today felt like coming home. Looking over posts from years past, it’s amazing how much larger the crowds felt, even if their size hasn’t changed. Maybe that’s just pandemic brain talking. And while some vendors have stayed the same, like Tao Tea Leaf, Capital Tea, Momo Tea, and Secret Teatime, a lot of new and unfamiliar faces have joined their ranks. One vendor I was particularly interested in was Foggy River Farm, an independent farm in Sunderland that grows all of the herbs for their teas on-site.

It took me a little over an hour to do a circuit of the entire floor, taste samples, and decide on what I wanted to purchase. I went in with an idea of what I wanted to buy, and after sampling everything, I stayed true to my original shopping list.

I got a pretty good haul in the end: peach sencha and grape sencha from Momo Tea; genmaicha, houjicha and an oolong flavoured with grapefruit and orange blossom from Genuine Tea; and three varieties of herbal teas from Foggy River, all of which contain mint.

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Ever since we got back from Reykjavik last year, I was mooning over how beautiful the city was, how much I missed it. I regretted not seeing the mountains and the volcanoes when I had the chance. I even daydreamed about packing up and moving there.

And now I’m doing the same goddamned thing all over again: four weeks ago I was in Glasgow doing this, three weeks ago I was in Edinburgh doing that – all this nostalgia for something from barely a month ago!

Having that new knowledge is simultaneously reassuring and disappointing. Reassuring because it means that it’s somewhat predictable. Disappointing because it means that what I actually really miss is the feeling of being at leisure and catered to. I don’t miss the cities I visit so much as the act of visiting – of being who I am when I’m not home, of finally getting to let loose and spend all that money I’ve been carefully saving, of seeing and doing and eating new things.

The disappointment and longing hits particularly hard at this moment because, as I write this, I am commuting to work on a standing-room-only Go Train. I am trying desperately to maintain balance by hooking my arm around a metal pole, feeling my feet ache, and dreading the fact that there are still four more stops to go and there isn’t any room for more people to get on.

The weather is very Glaswegian today – rainy, cloudy, high teens to low twenties – so here’s a random list of stuff that I miss about being there:

• Weathered-looking stone buildings
• Soor ploom candies
• City streets meant for walking, not driving
• Buskers being everywhere
• Not needing air conditioning to feel comfortable
• Listed prices on items where the tax is already built in so you don’t have to do mental math when you get to the register
• The feeling of finding neat, unexpected little shops cheek-by-jowl next to each other

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