Sick Day Banquet — An Introduction by Bella Milroy

When I was first asked to curate a day that celebrates the sanctuary nature of the library here at Bootle, I was immediately drawn to a central focus of what this particular sanctuary setting does so well; food. I first came to Bootle Library back in February of this year, where after a wonderful workshop morning filled with plants, propagation and winter fragrances, I was greeted with a bowl of dahl made by the library's core volunteer group. It was served to me in a handmade pinch-pot ceramic with a saffron coloured glaze that matched the aromatic tea that accompanied the meal. I felt instantly at home; cared for and looked after in a way that put me at ease and made me relax into a savory slumber. 

This experience is what lies at the heart of the Sick-Day Banquet. As someone with chronic illness, food is an essential source of happiness for me. When pleasure is in such short demand living amongst pain, discomfort, uncertainty and stress, the food we eat and the way we experience it can be profoundly transformative in supporting our mental wellbeing. This experience is particularly significant for those of us living under such demands, a practice that goes far beyond comfort food. There is ritual to be found here; those boiled sweets we reach for stored plentifully in dressing-gown pockets when our mouths turn to syrup and nausea sets in; the kindness that is distilled into cups of tea and fermented in cheese on toast, cut into soldiers with dollops of Branston pickle, made by those who care for us. Nostalgia plays its part in these moments too, spotlighting tastes and textures that tap into such tender memories of pleasure, transporting us through time to softer, gentler places in every mouthful. And those of us who are lucky enough to have that care filtered through love, these acts of support become such expansive moments of joy that cannot be quantified like the hourly doses of pain management, and clinical, medicated maintenance. To have food prepared for you undoubtedly changes the experience of it, but to place that experience within the disabled and chronic illness context illuminates it, making it shine in ways that brighten up our darkest days. 

There is an unfortunate privilege to these experiences in how we encounter them both in frequency and quality. Not all of us are so fortunate to have this very basic need fulfilled, and the ever-politicized nature of food and who gets to eat it, only further perpetuates this tragic lack of support. Lets face it, you don’t have to be sick to know the power of what a cooked meal can provide in more than just sustenance alone. The Sick-Day Banquet is a chance to highlight the importance of what these meals do for us and why they are so essential to our wellbeing. Designed by disabled artists, this series of free lunchtime meals will represent their ideal sick-day foods. The meals will focus on comforting, simple, accessible and soul-warming foods that celebrate and prioritise joy. Cooked and prepared by the real stars of the show, the Bootle Library Volunteer Group, the banquet will be an opportunity to create meals that bring pleasure when we need it most, and offer library-goers an experience of foods that acts as important components of day-to-day mental health nourishment. 

I began writing about this second iteration of the Sick Day banquet as I began to heal from a hugely turbulent period of health. Much of life lived with illness can feel like a constant state of survival mode, and 2020, like for most of us, was a particularly heightened and painful state of this. It felt like I was witnessing this mass lowering of standards, not just on a personal level, but across the wider world too where standards of care, compassion and a basic respect for humanity seemed so woefully depleted. I felt completely exhausted, becoming so overwhelmed that my most basic bodily motions felt like a chore. Sometimes I would long to be free of the trials of existing in a body that requires maintenance; imagining a life free of the burdens of trimming toenails, eating breakfast or brushing my teeth. I found so much of the minuteries of life not only impossible amongst the realities of living with chronic illness, but almost uncalled for. There was a rudeness to a body that so frequently interrupts my days with pain and fatigue, and asking me to also brush my hair was like an insult! Very quickly I found myself on a rapid decline, placing the demands of my most basic needs under an umbrella of no-time-no-energy. When deadlines, emails and invoices compete with whether or not I have washed this week, it doesn't take much to understand how little value gets placed on these most basic needs for living. I felt like I had nothing left in the tank. All. Gone. And when this personal-system-wide depletion occurred, I felt like a lot of me just forgot how to do all this. How do I do this being ill thing again? What is it I need to do to feel alright? I can't quite remember? Everything just felt dark and lonely and scary; it all felt like a body incompatible with life. 

I don't think this painful tension is ever going to be something that is completely absent from my life. It's something that defines the cramped nature in which illness squashes and severs. And when you live in a world that shouts loudly and repeatedly about how little it values a body like yours living in it, it takes huge, dedicated effort to avoid becoming consumed by this earthly rejection. 

So how does this relate to this new iteration of the Sick Day Banquet? The first section of this writing was written back in October 2019 when Soft Sanctuary originally came about…back when we could be in each other's company, back when we could be around one another without the presence of a deadly threat hanging in the air. I refer in that piece to the transformative power of food being one that has always been a cornerstone of my disabled experience in how I find pleasure and resilience in my day to day life. With my reserves non-existent, there still remained the transformative wonder of food. I needed to bring a consciousness of joy back into my relationship with it. I needed to both declare food a crucial part of my existence, and remember how to celebrate it too. This is the essence of what the Sick-Day Banquet is about. It is the very epitome of why such celebrations not only need to exist, but be practiced too. In that original text, I also refer to the politicized nature of food. It is something that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, a reality I'm sure many of you reading this know first hand. It’s a tragedy compounded by a government whose chronic neglect of those most vulnerable has further revealed its inadequate systems of care and support. Joy and pleasure are so finite right now, both in the practical sense of there being such a scarcity of resources and outlets for it, but in the spaces we hold for ourselves too; the pains of poverty and hardship taking up all the room, all the time.

And so we begin the year, with sustenance, comfort and resilience at an all time low for most of us as we wade our way through this current lockdown; quite a dark and dismal way to kick-start 2021. Amongst the gloom that this text finds itself shrouded in, we have pulled together a collection of Sick Day Banquet recipes that attempts to offer some brightness, cheer and relief. This collection is an embodiment of the Chopping Club, endeavouring to sooth, soften and spin some gold into the world over a bowl of something hot. Here joy can be read, joy can be witnessed, joy can be cooked. This collection of written works and beautiful recipes from some of my favourite disabled artists hopes to celebrate these moments of nourishment, wherever that may be found. I hope it is something you find with frequency, and in plenty. I hope that it fills you up.

The Sick Day Banquet recipes can be accessed here.