Month of Joy: Music by Mike Brooks
There are, actually, many things that give me joy, despite the rather unfortunate state the world is in at the moment. My wife, my friends, my cats, reading and writing science fiction and fantasy… the list just goes on and on. However, another of the most prominent and important ones is music. As a child, I learned to play the recorder (because that was what one did in primary school), the piano (briefly, badly) and the cornet (allowing me to claim with technical accuracy that I am a “classically-trained musician”, which is mildly hilarious). However, I never had much time for music on the radio. It wasn’t until I was about thirteen and heard The Offspring’s “Self Esteem” when Jamie Dreher snuck a battery-operated tape player along to Scouts summer camp that I realised that songs could actually have a point to them. I didn’t look back.
Month of Joy: The Holiday Party by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Every year, we have a colonial Christmas tea, where I cook a combination of Sri Lankan traditional party food (rolls, chicken patties, mackerel cutlets, ribbon sandwiches, milk toffee, marshmallows, love cake, and arrack sours) with British traditional tea party / Christmas food (cucumber sandwiches, roast beef and horseradish sandwiches, mushroom sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, berry trifle, fruitcake, mulled mead and mulled cider). Plus some extra sweets. I feel that I should get something good out of colonialism, after all, and traditional British holiday fare is delicious. Cooking a feast is an opportunity to put my day job as a professor aside, and even the SF novel I’m writing, and sink deep into food and domesticity, some of my own enduring sources of joy. Especially when I get to share the cooking (and then the eating) with my partner, children, and friends!
