Showcase: Coffee, Whisky And Tea + From The Indigenous Village To The British Pavement: The Journey Of Flower-Woman + Marsha Malcolm Howard Johnson’s

Edited By Molly Ovenden

Welcome to Week Four of July’s Showcase: Nostalgia!

At 39, I’m not old, but I’m old enough to laugh at my younger self, to realise many problems of my youth were smaller than they felt. I’m old enough to look back with compassion on those I encountered in my first decades, not ignorant of the unexpected sorrows of life that can taint someone’s life, nor of the surprise joys that sustain my fellow humans.

It can be easy to look back at ourselves with a critical eye, on decisions made in our youth, by others we observe and argue we all should have known better. But the more people I speak to, the more stories I read, the more poems I experience, the more I realise nostalgia offers us a generous opportunity. There’s beauty and hospitality in holding memories with care, as we do when we are nostalgic.

Our first piece invites us through a poem to hold in consideration our vices and our affections toward certain beverages. Let’s pour a mug, a glass, a cup of our favourite and join poet, Arthur Neong, as we look back on our lives through the sips we have taken.

Coffee, Whisky And Tea

Coffee tightens
and whisky loosens
my mind
There’s tea, yerba mate
and others I have not tried
Tea is like coffee
and yerba mate
makes me almost
calm and happy
It makes my thinking
taut and tight
No room for nasty little things
but room for everything
I feel as if my mind is squeezed
and out flows my creative juice
Is this a lesser form of
what they call speed,
and the major psychotropics?
This is beyond me
yet I understand why
people would try
It’s a traveller going on a trip
without moving, online purchase
Doorstep delivery
fast and convenient
Boundless horizon
It’s the internet, and video game
Virtual reality, sleeping and dreaming
by another name
It’s brain on brain resonate
and diffusion
To spy at the star through the lens of convergence
To drift and calmly merge with the ocean waves
All it takes is the hood on the head
or the icy plunge
Coffee, tea and whisky
is my drug

© Arthur Neong, 2026

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I wonder what memories of sharing a moment of reflection over a drink come to mind as you read this poem. I remember visiting a coffee shop that roasted its own beans – teaching me to love the process of coffee from bean to cup. I remember learning about yerba mate as a teenager in Spanish class. I enjoyed its smokey flavour and the way its caffeine cleared my mind for studying. I also remember eventually deciding my mind was clear enough and took a break from that drink! I remember the red drip of wax on the whisky bottles (on the inconveniently high, hard-to-reach ‘special shelf’ in my childhood kitchen) that never piqued my interest beyond the label’s aesthetics.

I remember my first cup of tea, too: Celestial Seasonings Raspberry Zinger. My elementary school hands boiled water in the tea kettle over a gas flame, waited for the whistle and poured water into my white teacup, mesmerised by the raspberry red infusion inking its way as it steeped. I remember my first ‘proper’ cup of tea, too, when I followed my heart and made my way to find a home in England.

 

In our next piece, Andrea Cunha reflects on relating to the world through a sense of becoming when Brazil became home, but not without a winding path of experience.

From The Indigenous Village To The British Pavement: The Journey Of Flower-Woman

They say reading enhances creativity and broadens horizons but, for me, it awakened a curiosity to explore the world. I wanted to meet people, see places and experience cultures touched by few. That was how I began moulding my life, driven by an adventurous spirit and the fear that time would pass by without me truly living it.

At 19, I ended up in an indigenous village. As we say in Brazil, I went “with just my face and my courage”— with no prospects or safety nets. I simply let life take me and, from then on, followed wherever the wind blew.

In 1996, I had a date with destiny. I was a journalism student with a passion for anthropology; I used to completely daydream during those lectures. I proposed a project about indigenous populations to my professor, and my group decided to visit the Museu Do Índio (Museum of the Indigenous Person). Because of an English class, I couldn’t go on the agreed day. The following day, my friends brought me a postcard showing an indigenous family and joked, “Look, it’s you, your husband and your child!”

Coincidence or destiny, that would become my future. Shortly after, I attended an event at the museum to finish my research and met the man who would become my husband. He gave guided tours and taught basket weaving. I became his student, we became friends and started visiting villages together. When we fell in love, we ran into prejudice: he was the chief’s nephew, from a lineage that did not accept marriages with non-indigenous people, and my family would never accept my involvement with him.

He was willing to leave the village for me, but when he told his uncle about the girl he fancied, he heard: “We like her. Bring her here.” I gathered my courage and spoke to my parents. My father was furious at the idea of me wanting to marry an indigenous man and live a simple life in a village. But my spirit was already free. One day, I woke up early and told my mother I was leaving. I dropped out of university, only returning years later. I understood that my life was just beginning. I paid a high price, but I learnt even more.

At that moment, I understood why I’d always felt a void in my chest, an uncomfortable sense of not belonging to the urban rush. When I fell in love with a Guarani man, I felt as though I was coming home. In that simplicity, I was reborn with a new name: Kunhã Poty, the Flower-Woman.

The daughter of a journalist and a lover of books, I swapped city comforts for a routine without furniture, bathrooms, or electricity. I immersed myself in a world where nature is life itself. I learnt that, in the village, time is an ally. I learnt that you don’t live to work; you work to live. Many call this idleness; I call it life.

Living in the village for 14 years was a grand gift; it gave me a wonderful new family and an unprecedented sense of maturity. From that period, I’m left with three marvellous children who still live in the community and a very dear stepson who is now the village chief.

For personal reasons, I left the village in 2014,  deciding to follow a different path. It was painful to abandon my home and my world, and even more painful to leave my children, as they refused to leave the village or the culture in which they’d been raised. But, at that moment, it was necessary for me to leave. It wasn’t easy to readapt to the concrete jungle, because I always felt I didn’t belong there. The decision made by that 19-year-old girl brought consequences that demanded maturity and strength to face.

Destiny, always surprising me, brought me to England. Here, I live a completely different reality, where time seems to move at the speed of light. It’s another pace entirely—a pace that’s not mine, but one I’m learning to manage so that my essence doesn’t disappear. I’ve come to understand that I don’t need to become the same or ‘adapt’ by erasing who I am; I just need to respect the new culture while remaining Kunhã Poty, the name I love and which truly defines my personality.

Today, even from afar, I make myself present through words. Every year, when I step into the village, I feel as though I’m arriving home. Though I suffer with every departure, I understand my children’s choice for the silence of the earth. I stepped out of a glass bubble to experience the diversity of the world, and I will never regret it. These choices have allowed me to evolve and to finally have the power to decide who I want to be.

I may have been born in the city, but it was the soil of the village that taught me how to bloom.

© Andrea Cunha, 2026

Connect with Andrea on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrea-souza-da-cunha

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Andrea writes that reading enhances creativity and broadens horizons but, for me, it awakened a curiosity to explore the world. Unexpected adventures came to her as Andrea pursued them with curiosity, learning how to bloom as a result of literature that sparked a torch for travel.

I wonder whether reading Andrea’s teenage journey to Brazil caused you to remember your own unexpected explorations from youth into adulthood. I remember as a teenager declaringI would never leave Minnesota. Having married an Englishman, become a British citizen, and lived in England for more than half our 18 years together, I laugh with my younger self who never would have believed it.

There’s a real fondness Andrea shares about her younger self and all the lessons learned from living abroad for such a long time during her formative years. I love the challenge and gentleness to recognise the past is the past and there’s a possibility to feel grateful towards our former selves for carrying us to here and now.

 

For our third piece, Tomasz Hearfield’s poem reveals the many layers of identity of those we encounter throughout life and history. Nostalgia offers a perspective that nods to the complexities of relationships and what it means to be a human.

Marsha Malcolm Howard Johnson’s

They cannot promise us tomorrow.
Or that we can be safe in or around
The concept of rivers
Or the concept of sui(homi)cide –

You and I are sisters, with as much love as I
Was born a sister
And brothers, as much as you can ever be my
Brother.

–           or that the married man and
The Catholic woman inside us won’t
Argue sometimes,
And find bricks to blame and not blame

And wish they were
Conceived,
Immaculate.

© Tomasz Hearfield, 2026

This week’s reflections on nostalgia have given us the chance to wonder at the mystery of living in the present to later look upon it as our past. Reminiscing comes in mugs, teapots, glasses, cups of all kinds. Our senses ignite nostalgia, too. We’ve recalled drinks and what they represent for us, sometimes holding special memories from past eras.

We’ve contemplated our youth and people we thought we knew, those we might never have met and people with whom we were once close. Even with hindsight, not all is crystal clear. This might be one of the benefits of nostalgia. We can admire the beauty of our mundane lives and those of others, yet hold it with curiosity since we can never fully recall it all.

With one final collection of pieces to consider, next week we conclude our shared conversation about nostalgia. Perhaps you’ve been inspired to write something of your own as a poem, a short story, or even a personal essay. As memories come knocking, will you answer their call and open the door with nostalgia in your eyes?

Keep in touch with Molly (here). Join Writers’ Hour (here).

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