Olim

June 13th

Have you ever eaten a dessert that tasted like loo cleaner?!

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Hi, Reader!

How are you? We do a lot of rabbiting on about me here, but I’d (always) much rather know - how are you? And how is your heart?

I really struggled with finding something “good enough” to write about this week. There were grandiose plans of talking about burnout (it sucks!), boredom (sucks worse), and finding your edges.

Then there was the idea of motivation - how do we do create it, how do we hold onto it, have we bought too much into the lie that it has to fade?

And then I thought I could write about linguistics, marketing, Big And Valuable Business Topics Because I Am Allegedly A Successful Person.

But you know what, Reader? It all felt a bit - fleurgh. Flumfy. Dull.

So I started thinking about something I am weirdly and delightedly obsessed with (and please bear with me on this one)...olive oil.

Now, as a person who has what I call a ‘firework’ brain (bit like Everything Everywhere All At Once, but less soothing), my interests can be both fierce and fleeting.

I get overexcited about lots of things, hurl my tiny body at them with the ferocity of a hurricane made of hammers (remember our first email?!), and rapidly exhaust myself.

When my affection for things is more enduring, it’s typically because they’ve snuck up on me. Let me give you a bit of context.

Six years ago (!!!), I was working for a Food and Drink Agency that had taken on a posh client who bought and sold Moroccan olive oil.

It was a gorgeous business, made of two lovely blokes who actually got away with wearing Panama hats. Initially just sold in Fortnum and Mason, and select delis, they were looking to build brand awareness and grow their business.

The brand manager who was responsible for this company had a huge amount on her plate - she needed to research the olive oil market, and simply didn’t have time, so I reluctantly volunteered as tribute.

Thing is, I hated the idea of olive oil. Despite being a foodie, and reading Nigel Slater’s “go for broke” advice when it came to buying oil and balsamic, it just didn’t taste nice.

If it was in a salad, I’d pick it out at 100 paces. I could tell when it was drizzled on pizza, and Heaven help me, I once suffered through a bowl of bergamot sorbet anointed with olive oil in an experimental restaurant.

We paid through the nose for them wow us with their credentials and then tried very hard not to gag when we ate their fermented turnip entree.

That ‘pudding’ (it doesn’t merit the name) was the closest I have ever come to tasting citrus* bleach toilet cleaner. The very memory now makes me twitch.

*My friend Malene calls loo cleaner smell “shitrus”, and it makes me snort with laughter.

So, olive oil research? I’d do it to help my colleague, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. But here’s the thing about falling in love. It starts with paying attention.

If there’s anything I know about love in this world, it’s that it comes from deliberately looking and seeing the object of your affection. It comes from noticing them, remembering them, seeing them again, in a spiritual sort of sense.

We talk about beauty in the eye of the beholder - the beauty has to be beheld to be present. That’s a lot of ‘be’ words, but you get my drift.

My research took me down a rabbit hole - from Morocco and Tunisia to other African countries that have ancient traditions around producing exquisite olive oil (though rarely discussed because of our somewhat-default Mediterranean settings) to the legacy of Liguria, in Italy, thought to be the most delicious olive oil in the world.

There’s emerald green, grassy oil that comes from the new season (mid-October onwards) in Tuscany, there’s olive oil as soft as butter from Spain, there are varieties in France, and the family heritage wrapped up in each olive grove reads like a fairytale set against silver-leaved trees.

I learned about Croatian olive oil, about trees that live in excess of 1000s of years (the oldest olive tree is thought to be between 2000 and 4000 years old!), of the different cultivars.

I learned of the differences between first cold press, second press, and beyond. Rapt, I binge-read the dramas of European olive oil not always being what it said on the tin (Mafiosi olive-oil fiddling is definitely my version of Love Island) - EVOO* that wasn’t EVOO at all.

*Extra-Virgin Olive Oil. Now you know!

In short - I paid attention, and I fell unexpectedly in love.

Fast forward from those six years, I’m now a bit of an olive oil nerd. I’ve found that I love the taste - the pepperiness of the polyphenols in the oil a mark of its freshness and potency.

I love the changes in colour, depending on varietal. I love using it when I’m cooking, sopped up with bread, rubbed in as handcream in extreme emergencies. It feels like I have magic potions in my cupboard.

(I even like some of the flavoured versions (ginger and basil, most notably), but don’t tell the purists…)

Most of all, I love the care and the attention to detail that olive growers and olive oil producers take with their crop. How can we not be excited by someone else’s delight and dedication, when it’s that deep?

If there’s any takeaway from today’s love letter, maybe that’s it. Pay attention. Let yourself be delighted. And maybe there’s something in someone else’s process and approach that can help you fall in love with what you do (and how you do it!) all over again.

Big love,

Eloise x