I thought it'd be a good idea to explain a bit about why I've decided to spend my Sundays cooking for strangers.
For a while now, I’ve been waking up with this small pocket of heavy feelings in my chest. Sort of a conglomeration of anger and dread and despair. You see, the thing is, I wake up every morning to the news report on the radio.
I lie there listening to the headlines; the news stories that are the symptom of our broken world order and it feels like the beginning of the end of days. It makes me feel hopeless and voiceless and beaten down.
I don’t remember it always being like this. I remember feeling like if I shouted loud enough then maybe I could change the fucked up bits about the world I live in. But now, I don’t feel like that. I feel like I’m on my own in a little bubble of powerless isolation.
These days, when I listen to the news, all I hear is a narrative of division – I’m told the world around me is full of threats and peopled with enemies. The bankers have stolen my future, the chavs are going to mug me in the street, the hoodies are waiting to riot, the undeserving poor are using my tax pennies to buy their fags, the yummy mummys are judging me, the socialists are bankrupting my country, the liberals are useless, the Tories are selling me out for profit, the immigrants are stealing my job, the middleclasses are self important and self interested and the rich are exploitative cunts. On top of that, my food is full of poisonous chemicals, cycling is a death sentence and every adult is a paedophile poised to steal my (as yet unborn) children.
In fact, me and my immediate family are the only people who can be trusted. And we can stay safe by staying away from everyone else and, basically engaging in the world as little as possible.
And that really pisses me off. Because I’m not that person.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered who profits from making us scared of 'other people'? And who profits by making us scared of the simplest parts of living life? Who benefits from making our society so divided and paranoid that it's almost impossible for us to unite to find a better way to exist?
And for a while I tied myself in knots trying to decide where to direct my fury. And instead of lying in bed listening to the radio and feeling hopeless, I started shouting at it instead.
And then I realised that no one could hear me. Except possibly the people in the flat upstairs.
So I decided to claim back my power to change the world, however incrementally, into a place more like what I want my kids to inherit.
And the Sunday Lunch Project was born.
The premise is simple: I want to meet and bring together as many people from different walks of life as I can. I want to talk with them about what our lives are like; to find shared experiences and glaring differences. I want to sit and break bread with people whose understanding of the world is different from mine and after an hour, or two, I want us all to leave a little bit changed by the experience.
I’m not an evangelist. I don’t have enough answers to be on a political crusade. I absolutely do not want to talk about what I think for hours.
But I do want to stop us all being so distrustful of other people. And it seems to me that the easiest way to make that happen is to get us all talking to each other a bit more. Talking about the real stuff. And trying to figure out a way that it could be better for all of us.
So this is where I begin.
