Written between May 2025 and May 2026, in Ericeira. Most recent first.
There is a line that structures my biography, and it is not temporal, it is geographical. Three seas. Three kinds of water, three colours of light, three sounds. The Baltic was childhood. Amber in the sand after a storm, a yellowish light i…
Between seven and nine in the morning, when I'm outside, I wear no shoes. I walk barefoot on the stones in front of our house. Basalt grey, warm in summer, in winter right at the edge of comfortable. There is no mystical reason. There is a…
My grandmother lived in a village on the Polish Baltic coast that no longer exists in the form I knew. She had a cellar with three stoneware crocks. One for sauerkraut, one for pickled cucumbers, and one for something fermented on a beetroo…
There was no moment when I crossed from cosmetics to nutrition. There were fifteen years during which I gave the same answer to the same question, and at some point I realised the answer belonged somewhere else entirely.
I grew up in the nineties. That means I skipped the egg yolk for three decades, never touched liver, and anchovies were the bits left behind on a Pizza Quattro Stagioni. They were my grandmother's foods, and in the magazines of my youth the…
In January 2026, the water along the Ericeira coast averaged seven degrees. That is not arctic. It is Hamburg in April. But it is cold enough that you feel it, every single time. I went in two or three times a week, sometimes before work, o…
It took me a long time to like December quietly. For years I tried to reproduce the atmosphere from the magazines. Strings of lights, five layers of wrapping paper, three Christmas parties, an Advent calendar for every member of the family.…
Some recipes I write down because they matter to me. This one belongs to them. One cup of white beans, soaked the night before. Half a head of savoy cabbage, roughly chopped. Two cloves of garlic. A bay leaf. Olive oil, generously. The peel…
I don't particularly like the word *holistic*. I use it anyway. It is stuck to a generation of promises I do not share, and yet it sits in my professional title.
There is a morning in early September in Ericeira that does not appear in any weather forecast. The temperature does not drop dramatically. The sun rises at the same hour. But the air has turned. The Atlantic has, for the first time since M…
If you spend fifteen years laying women down on a treatment bed, you learn to recognise a sleep problem before the client says a word. She arrives on Thursday evening after work. She is not tired, she is *differently* tired. The skin on the…
It was not a plan. It was an observation. At the end of June, the almonds on the kitchen table were empty, the market was closed for a public holiday, and I had simply nothing in the kitchen between breakfast and lunch.
There are days in Portugal when I want nothing else. Three sardines from the fishmonger down the street, twenty minutes in the pan with coarse salt. Half a lemon. A good loaf, bought the day before, so no bakery queue at midday. The olive o…
In the spring of 2018, on a Wednesday, I gave notice on a flat in Hamburg that I loved. There was no event dramatic enough to explain the decision, and people kindly did not ask. Seven years later, a twelve-year-old child, a different count…