When I first tried out Other Women’s Kitchens as a title for my debut poetry pamphlet, I was surprised to find how many of the poems in it are set in kitchens, or makeshift kitchens. I continue to draw on kitchens for inspiration in my writing, particularly in some of the recent poems that have arisen from the experience of sorting and clearing my parents’ house.

Some of my favourite poems by other poets are set in or around kitchens. I think of Seamus Heaney’s sonnet about peeling potatoes with his mother, for example, Mary Jean Chan’s They Would Have All That, and Alison Brackenbury’s collection Aunt Margaret’s Pudding, inspired by her grandmother’s recipes.

For me, kitchens, more than anywhere else, are the spaces where important things happen. Eating is both a primal need, and something that can be sophisticated and elaborate, such as cooking for a date or a dinner party. Cooking and eating are ritualistic acts, both in the everyday repetitions of making cups of tea or bowls of porridge, and also in the less frequent but perhaps more highly-charged rituals of Christmas, Thanksgiving, Shabbat, Iftar. Food is nourishment, treat, discipline, spectacle, connection, tradition, symbol, sacrament. And kitchens are places where we gather to eat and to cook intergenerationally, with all of that passing-on, both implicit and explicit, that takes place when we do those things with others.

So it was strange to give a talk entitled ‘A Kitchen of One’s Own’ at Hearth 2024, while staying in the wonderfully congenial environment of Gladstone’s Library, where three delicious meals a day were cooked for me in the Food for Thought cafe. There, not only did I not need to cook – a sign saying ‘Strictly Staff Only’ kept me banned from the kitchen for three days.

As lovely as it is to be cooked for, it’s fascinating what that does to the rhythm of life. Days feel much longer when you don’t need to shop, plan meals, cook or wash up. But it also makes me feel somehow wrong-footed when that rhythm is suddenly removed.

That observation proved a helpful starting-point for my talk at Hearth, the annual mini-festival at Gladstone’s Library, which was a lovely event to speak at, with the talks taking place in the intimate setting of a lounge filled with comfy leather sofas. After my talk, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the other speakers – Eleanor Wasserberg, Frederick Bricknell and Louise Gray. Although on paper it was hard to anticipate how our four talks might work together, it was fascinating to see common themes emerging and developing throughout the day: the challenge of listening to undocumented voices; the sharing of family history; the dilemmas around sourcing and eating particular foods. The audience – warm, receptive, astute – played a huge part in helping those threads to emerge, and in enabling the conversations to continue over lunch and dinner.

I’m so grateful to the team at Gladstone’s Library for the privilege of speaking at Hearth, and for the wonderful hospitality, organisation and welcome. I will definitely be back, and I’m looking forward to it already.