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Chapter 1. 
In which Tessa starts a newsletter and learns to cook

Hello and welcome, thank you so much for coming.

So this is my newsletter. I'll be honest, I am 100% procrastinating from writing my Edinburgh show. And what I'm doing now, by making you read this, is making you complicit in that. I'm making you the Jack to my Rose. I jump, you jump. So now we can all share the blame. What a RELIEF.
I am, of course, making these with Mail...Kimp? and they will be arriving with alarming irregularity. Useful intel will be up top, gig lists and things you might be interested in, and then we'll narrow down, tapering off into the wildly niche. Also these might be quite long. So perhaps something to save for a long bus journey?

Hot Business Number 1#

I'm incredibly excited to be doing my show 'Primates' at the Soho Theatre in April. If you fancy I'd love you to come. Obviously say you're an OAP or a student to get cheaper tickets, plus you can use the discount code DEBRIEF10 

Book Tickets

Hot Business Number 2#

If you fancy your comedy less polished and more wildly raw, I’m doing a work-in-progress show on Tuesday February 20th at the Pleasance in Islington with Steen Raskopoulos. He is genuinely excellent and I will also be there.

In other business, the podcast this week is about #selfcare, which I thought was mostly about lying on your back and chanting 'I am loved', but turns out to be infinitely more interesting and useful.  
*
We've had to issue a formal apology for telling podcast listeners to search for our playlist on Spotify. Apparently you can't make a collaborative playlist public, and when I searched the FAQ section to find out why, it turns out there was a spate of people searching things like 'Karen's 60th!' and 'Michael and Sue's Chilled Out Thanksgiving' and adding songs like Mystikal's ever popular 'Pussy Crook'.

We on the other hand welcome all songs so if you want to get involved, or just enjoy the frankly excellent collection, the links are: Let's Go Running and Let's Get Up
And finally, in the spirit of the centenary of all men over 21 and all women (over 30 who owned property, were married to a member of the government register or a graduate voting in a university constituency) getting the vote, I thought you might like something me and my friend Ellie made a while ago.

It's called Badass Women from History and this episode is about a (totally real) secret group of suffragettes who taught themselves martial arts and called themselves The Bodyguard.   


Right. That's all the business. If you need to leave now, I absolutely understand. Please take this video of a dog taking himself on a slide on your way out. Everyone else, let me tell you about circus school.
...in which Tessa goes to Circus School

It has long been a dream of mine to be more flexible. For years I have been writing 'learn to do the splits' on my New Year's resolutions list, and for years I have been 'doing the splits' at parties - to a mix of applause and concern - and then being escorted off the dance floor to lay in a dark room for the rest of the evening, curled in a small regretful ball with some ice in a party cup between my thighs. 

When I was very small, my dad would 'fly' me on his feet and say that we should join the circus, and this praise would be enough to see me through the next twenty-something years, unwaveringly confident in my belief that, with the right training, I was only one step away from joining Cirque du Soleil. 

Until this year, that training has only ever consisted of me bi-anually putting down some cushions in the living room and looking up 'How to Do a Backward Walkover' on Wikihow. My long-suffering housemate has spent hours offering her emotional, but mostly physical, support as I attempted a series of increasingly daring gymnastic moves with what a friend once described as 'violent confidence' and no natural ability.

And then this year, one dark January night, I walked into the
National Centre for Circus Arts and announced I wanted to learn the most impressive party trick in the shortest amount of time. They suggested I join the beginner arial course and I said they'd missed the crucial part of the instruction, which was that I have to be able to show off. No one has ever cleared the dance floor to show everyone what they can do on a static trappezee. (This is the same reason by the way that people learn guitar; while infinitely more beautiful and complicated instruments exist, you cannot whip out, say, a cello to impress teenage boys with your rendition of Wonderwall).

Which is how I find myself every Wednesday evening from 6.30 til 9 in Introduction to Acrobatics. And I am having, let me tell you, the time of my life. We're rolling, we're bouncing, we're jumping on the trampoline, we're having a great time. I discovered that not only am I absolutely terrified of being upside down, I also have the core strength and muscle definition of Keanu Reeves when he comes out of that pod in the Matrix. 'Your muscles don't work' Morpheus whispers as I attempt another ill-fated forward roll, 'you've never used them before'. 

I'm writing a feature about the experience in March, in which I have to be nice, and while I genuinely am having a wonderful time and will be whole-heartedly positive, I will just whisper to you here that everyone is quite weird. I rang my mum to tell her that after I left my first class. 'Everyone's quite weird' I whispered down the phone. 'Everyone's quite weird at circus school!?' she retorted, and then with alarming sass for Debbie Coates 'no shit mate!'. If it's any help in visualising the group, I've seen more than one small top hat with a peacock feather in it, and I get the impression that quite a few people might live on a barge. 

To the surprise of no one, I haven't made any friends. Which is entirely a poor reflection on me, and my assumption that people are going to want to talk to me about poi, and in no way a reflection on the group.

We do a lot of pair work, which sounds horrifying, but is quite freeing in a 'oh get over yourself and grip Ken's ankle for him' sort of way. And there seems to be a genuine lack of interest in health and safety. I'm astonished at almost everything we're asked to do, and then equally astonished that I can do it and all my limbs are still intact. In a world where I was once made to attend a seminar on how to walk down stairs, there is something joyously refreshing in the casual way we're told to just run and flip over that bench and onto the trampoline, or 'stand on Paul's back'. 


I'm on the course for four more weeks, after which I sincerely hope there isn't a display showcase or something. (But if there is you're all invited). 
...in which Tessa learns to cook
                                                 Remember when Mrs Padmore went blind?
 
I am learning to cook. 

It's not so much, I don't think, that I was a bad cook, in the same way that I wasn't a bad open heart surgeon, I just never did it. I love eating, I love being in the kitchen talking to people while they cook, but actually cooking never rang any bells for me. Following a recipe and measuring things looked a lot like GCSE Chemistry, a subject in which I was spectacularly poor, and as result I always just threw things in, ignored the instructions, thought things like 'pre-heating the oven' was for sissys, and as a result, everything was always ruined. Plus toast existed so what was the point. 

For someone with such apathy for the cooking process however, I do have a great enthusiasm for the paraphernalia that goes with it. I have in my time been the proprietor of several restaurants. One in the garden that sold exclusively mud pies, and one in the first year of Sixth Form, when we were allowed out of school for lunch. My friend Carmel's house was a literal stone throw from the back of the school field and we set up a restaurant in her kitchen called Le Bistro. We charged people a pound to come in and served at our soft launch undercooked potato waffles and some shards of burnt flapjack. It was a triumph. We lasted exactly four days before we were accused of racketeering and with a coup on our hands, we were forced to close.  

I have also long laboured under a genuine desire to write a cookbook. It's called 'Oh good, it's on fire again'. I want it (in hardback obviously, cotton spine) to have a glossy picture of me on the front in my marble top kitchen, looking radiant, holding an off-cream mixing bowl and behind me I want everything to be completely on fire. For that is my genuine experience of cooking. The sequel is called Fuck the Oven.

My Instagram handle is the particularly confusing @wheatpraylove, created during a brief conviction that I should start a gluten-free blog. Rejected titles included: Gluten Morgen, Vladamir Gluten, Gluten things I hate about you, Wheat WHEY Love when it was also going to be dairy-free, and inexplicably, Wheat Whey Clove.

My experience of cooking blogs is they tend to be called things like 'Faith and Raisins' and they're written by a 'mommy to five boys, wife to a Jersey Patriot, homeschooling in the tundra! xx' and there's a lot of going to Walmart involved. 


But apart from telling people which gluten-free bread is the only good one (this one), I didn't actually have anything to write on my fictional blog. So I'm learning. Slowly, slowly. I've been having 'low-jeopardy dinners' where I start at one friend coming round for dinner and increase the number when I feel confident to go up a level. We're at two friends. 

I long to be a wonderful hostess. I long for people to just drop in, and me to whip something magical up in a shallow cast iron casserole dish (turquoise on the outside, cream on the inside) while serving them champagne and wearing a kaftan. Instead, the thought of guests send me into a hot white panic. But I'm working on it.
 

Next time one of these comes out, my sincere goal is to include a recipe. I promise to include a large pre-amble about Smallest Boy and DH's experience at pee-wee hockey so you know you're in safe blogging hands. xx

Things I have enjoyed 
I'm loathe to recommend you anything because I'm often so behind the times that I find myself saying things like - has anyone seen The Mad Men? HOWEVER, I have truly enjoyed The End of the F**king World on Netflix.

(And I'm on Season One, Episode Seven of Mad Men)

You were going to see Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri anyway, but ho shit it's excellent. (At my very core my heart beats for Country Music, so I'm now balls deep in the soundtrack)

There's no book recommendation here because it's been a while since I genuinely loved a book. Last summer I read The Bees on holiday and I was so furious with it that when I finished it I threw it in the pool. If you've got a good trashy thriller on your shelf, or something you've really loved - let me know? 



That's it! That's the end. Thanks for sticking around til the last. Book recommendations, podcast suggestions, gluten-free recipes, praise, worrying thoughts you've had late at night all lovingly received at any of the below. x






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Tessa Coates Enterprises · 34B Newick Road · London, E5 0RR · United Kingdom

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