A memoir through kitchen utensils? It's extraordinary
At last I hit on the only possible explanation: it must be my husband's roasting tin, inherited from his late mother. Battered and tarnished from years of roast dinners, bent so out of shape that I almost always spill hot fat when taking it out of the oven, and imbued with the memory of a thousand Sunday lunches, it's always the default for our roast potatoes. My neighbour nodded, perfectly happy with this explanation.
In her latest book, The Heart-Shaped Tin, Bee Wilson argues that this understanding is a form of sympathetic magic universal to humans: inanimate objects take on meaning, and maybe even power, simply because of the place they hold in our homes and our hearts. This power is not always welcome – the heart-shaped tin of the title was that in which she baked her wedding cake, and which fell out of a cupboard shortly after her husband left her – but it holds sway even over the most rational of people.
And it stands that if we impart something of ourselves into our kitchenware, our kitchenware can tell us about ourselves. Bee Wilson tells human stories in this book, of herself and others, through a close reading of their kitchen utensils: the refugee experience through a pair of vegetable corers, the cruel diagnosis of dementia through a silver toast-rack. The most moving object (and story) in the book is a spoon – now in the Montreal Holocaust Museum – made by a Jewish tailor forced to work in the Dora-Mittelbau labour camp. The Nazi guards deliberately never provided inmates with cutlery: this spoon, made from a scrap of tin stolen from the production lines, was the tailor's way of showing and preserving his humanity.
But mostly, Bee Wilson tells the story of her own life – her relationship with her parents and her children, her marriage and her divorce. Telling it through kitchen objects feels even more intimate than a tell-all memoir, because, as we appreciate by the end, these objects are a part of us, and sometimes the only part that is left. She doesn't even mention her new partner's name, but I feel I know more about their relationship from a glazed pottery oil dispenser than I would from a more conventional love story.
This is a wonderful and original book, which has made me look at 'stuff' in a different way. I didn't think I would love it as much as I did: I don't spend much time in the kitchen, not any more than my mother did or does – when asked what she can make, she will always say 'reservations' – and the idea of having such a close connection to kitchen utensils used to baffle me.
My husband is different: I once took him to Dabbous, where he spent the starter wondering how the top of the egg was cut so neatly, and the next three courses – after an understanding waiter had brought the device (a German invention resembling an instrument of torture called an Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher, or eggshell breaking-point creator) – happily playing with it at the table. When we got married, he came with a collection of sacred objects to the marriage – the roasting tin, the dinner service for best, the little glass boat that is only ever used for mint sauce – and I brought a salad-spinner.
But though I never had a Sunday lunch with his parents – they died before we were married – using their items every week makes me feel a part of his family that I never had time to be. Our son has a connection to the grandparents that he never met. And the roasting tin does make the best roast potatoes.
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This is a power elite who have been fawned and told that they are unique and that their every desire should be indulged, with their private fantasies projected onto a version of the future which aligns with their capitalist interests. The absence of futures thinking and literacy in present-day Scotland can be seen in political debate and independence. In office, the SNP have said implicitly don't worry about the future; this is intertwined with independence and any other major choices can be decided the other side of statehood. This is another example of a closed future saying this subject is not up for discussion. This is a major missing dimension of Scottish political debate and a subject I will explore in a follow-up essay. One issue which needs addressing is agency. The hollowing out and exhaustion of mainstream politics and political parties across the West aids the crisis of the future. This can be seen in the collusion of the traditional Westminster parties in clinging to the broken UK economic and social model and in an inability to map out an alternative terrain on political economy, capitalism and repairing the social contract between government and people. The geo-political global environment raises major questions not just for politics but the idea of the future. In the immediate post-war era, in the 1950s and 1960s, America represented the future with its open expansiveness, its growing economy, cultural clout and military power – all offering an intoxicating mix of 'the American dream' of freedom and opportunity. Trumpian America has dealt a deathblow to that version of the US. There can be no going back to how things were before, America is no longer watching the back of Europe and is no longer the shining idea and future. America has become another 'lost future'. Related to this is the prevalent feeling that we are living in 'end times' – whether that is imminent environmental collapse or the march of technology and AI. This contributes to a diminishing of timescales and temporal space with numerous elections presented as 'the last chance' to save democracy or something else precious. That raises the stakes in numerous contests and the benefit and loss between winning and not winning as seen in the recent American and Brazilian Presidential elections. The same dynamic can be identified in COP summits and the protests of Extinction Rebellion and from a very different perspective American survivalists. COP summits regularly present humanity as close to 'the midnight hour' to try to motivate the delegations to come to global agreement. But the cumulative effect is an arms race of language. The Closed Future has to be defeated THE future cannot be closed. It cannot be left to experts, governments or corporates. The crisis of the future is a major phenomenon in an age of change, disruption and shocks, and cannot go unexplored and unchallenged. If it were, major and negative consequences flow for politics, humanity and the planet. The open future is the opposite of the closed future. It is a rejection of 'the end of history.' It is not some Blair-Clinton 'third way' narrative and hangover from the era of peak globalisation. Rather it is about prising open the debate on our collective future. Rejecting the end of the future. Debate across the West cannot be reduced to a choice between a failed neoliberalism and bust economics; a watered-down social democracy which has many historic achievements but is now exhausted and hollowed out and a populism presenting itself as the main challengers to the status quo. In such circumstances the forces of the populist right will have many advantages pretending to be insurgents. All the above share common ground on economics, the broken social contract, and the way they regard most people as incapable of creating and deciding their collective future with others. They believe the future has been determined. Mainstream politics are part of a single problematic story which stresses that there is no alternative. Breaking out of that single story that limits, diminishes and depowers us would be a kind of freedom and liberation. But it will require developing visions of different futures, not accepting that the future is over and closed, and finding new forms of political expression beyond the current inadequate forms of party and democracy. Those different versions of the future and different ideas of society, the world and our planet, are already here. They can be found in fiction, arts and culture, and innovators and imagineers working beyond the mainstream. But 'the official story' wants to hold on, despite its failures, and tell us the lie that there is only one single story – that 'There is No Alternative' to the present state. That deception and the dehumanising, diminishing, reactionary values it represents must be defeated by a vision of the future which tells a very different, more hopeful story of, for – and by – all of us. We can see all around us dissatisfaction, anger and rage at the status quo and 'the official future' from our communities, across Scotland and the UK, to globally. People know the existing domestic and global order is rotten and indefensible. That feeling and resistance has to be used to create the resources and ideas for that alternative future.
