To stack, or not to stack? That was the question...

Why, oh why?

We don’t, dear reader, need to answer the question of why one “should” begin a substack. Frankly, the notion that anyone in their right mind would wish to read the oft unedited musings of any Tom, Dick, or indeed, Harry is better left unanswered. Instead, as to the question of why I personally started one, the answer is simple enough and as reasonable a place as any to start.

I am absurdly lucky to have found a job I love. As the chef editor for a well respected national online chef and recipe platform, I’m able to wax lyrical on chefs, food, restaurants and more. I spend my days interviewing chefs and my evenings being spoiled into gluttony and an early grave, all in the hope to put the right food-led content in front of an audience that gives a damn.

Yet as a writer, someone who has previously considered the cultural, the social, the musical and plenty more besides, I’m missing something. There’s an itch that can’t quite be scratched by my 9-5 alone, no matter how pleasurable that is.

So why this substack, why now? A great impulse, an urge pushes me to speak from the heart on matters of the heart: love, art, romance, depression, dating, poetry, books, music, death and more and more and more*.

It’s an itch I’ll not scratch anytime soon as a journalist or editor and so, with great dread and the words of Dan Gardener in my head (I write what I can, people pay what they wish, and the words are always front and centre) here goes.

This isn’t the place for a biography, so let’s begin by explaining the name, a little.

Nineties children will, or at least should, remember Black Jacks and Fruit Salads as weird little hard candies. The aniseed-ey Black Jacks and the citric Fruit Salad were suckers that would last a good five minutes apiece, penny sweets from the late seventies which cost about 5p a go from the tuck shop by the time I was growing up.

No one under 25 years old knows what a tuck shop is so that’s the end of this shoehorned nostalgia, but when choosing a name for this space, it stuck with me.

Not least from the Mighty Boosh episode ‘Nanageddon’ where Vince becomes a goth, but because of what the contrast of vibrant colour and solemn black could represent.

But, thanks to a careful nod and a discreetly raised eyebrow from a watchful protector, perhaps it’s better to swerve naming my substack after sweets, which in the seventies (20 years my prior), depicted what we’d now rightly consider a racial slur.

So, to the new name: Chiaroscuro. It meets the criteria, it sounds arty and and cultural and foreign and important. It references with Italian flair the light and the dark, the duality of life, the hopeful and the hidden. Yes, this’ll do nicely.

Ultimately, my hope is thus: this substack will cover the aforementioned topics — perhaps occasionally vaulting into the food world when something noteworthy lands on my plate — and scratch my particular writer's itch.

Through the lens of the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the light and the dark, this will be a home for an unadulterated, critical eye. Just me and you, dear reader.

*and maybe the occasional tarot reading…I love those.

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