EXCLUSIVE - The Hungry Poet: A Life in Food - Introduction
- Andrew Jamison
- Jul 4
- 4 min read
An exclusive extract from Andrew's prose non-fiction, just for paid subscribers.

I have wanted for some time to write about food. My memories of eating, growing up in Northern Ireland and then moving away all seem intertwined, so here I am approaching middle age and writing about them. I am one of five, my mother worked in the Post Office and my father worked for what was then called British Telecom, mending telegraph poles and the like (think County Down’s answer to the Wichita Lineman). We grew up just outside a small village called Crossgar. You won’t have heard of Crossgar; however, there may well be people in Crossgar who haven’t heard of Crossgar.
It's a commuter village, really, not a destination. You might pass through it if you’re going from Belfast to Newcastle’s seaside or the Mourne Mountains, or going from Downpatrick (home to the Cathedral where St Patrick is said to be buried) to Belfast. At the time of writing, it has three petrol stations, two chip shops, a chapel, two churches (Presbyterian, and Free Presbyterian) and a Baptist Hall which often displays colourful posters with not-so-colourful Bible verses featuring words such as God, Damnation, Hell, You, Be Saved etc. It used to have three butchers and a greengrocer, but all of those have gone now, replaced with mini-supermarkets attached to the petrol stations.
It is a nondescript village in many ways and ironic that the most famous person to come from there is the inventor of the ejector seat. Instead of a monument to mark his achievement there is a large, unshapely rock with an engraved steel plate with an image of him parachuting down to earth. However, maybe the rock, a symbol of gravity, fixity, rootedness is appropriate to someone whose mission was to get back to earth safely. In many ways, the unassuming nature of the tribute, plonked on the verge of the carpark speaks to the down-to-earth nature of the place and its people.
Beginnings
I didn’t even come from Crossgar, really. We were brought up in a pebbledash bungalow my father built with the help of some relatives to the east of Crossgar. If you were to drive into Crossgar from Belfast and turn left at the roundabout our house was situated exactly one mile from there. All my life I have used this distance as a guide for a mile, the distance between our house and the roundabout in Crossgar. If someone says to me “X is about 20 miles from there” I can only ever picture it in terms of how many times I would have to walk into Crossgar and back. It is my frame of reference for distance.
Growing up a mile away from the centre of Crossgar, despite that not being terribly far, we were strangely cut off from it; to this day, I know few from the town and when my mother tells me so-and-so has died, she’s always astonished when I meet that news with ‘who?’
However, with four siblings it wasn’t necessarily as if we were stuck for company. I was by all accounts, though, quite content in my own company and solitude came easily to me. Perhaps being number four in a family of five leads to one receding a little into the background, a background of peace and quiet, solitary walks across the fields, dens in woodland, dens in the imagination, time spent in your own room organising the toy soldiers or, latterly, sitting on my bed strumming along to navel-gazey, solipsistic indie anthems of the early noughties.
Funnily enough, writing this in 2025, at the age of thirty-eight, married and with two children of my own, having lived in London, St Andrews, Leeds, Bristol and now Oxfordshire, I feel as near to my childhood in that corner of Northern Ireland as ever.
What follows recounts the food I ate in those places, and the memories that tag along, although in many cases the memories are simply about the food in itself – food for the sake of food, pleasure for the sake of pleasure, memory for the sake of memory. You might think that writing a book about food means that I grew up on exotic dishes or that maybe we went foraging en famille or baked our own bread or whatever – we didn’t. This is a truthful account of the very ordinary dishes and foods we ate growing up, and the food I’ve gone on to cook and eat as an adult.
I’ve tried to keep the passages short, on purpose, as I wanted them to be like morsels or little meals themselves, sort of snacks, or tapas maybe, you can go back to again and again. You could read this book chronologically, but you could also dip in and out, choosing the sections as you would items from a menu in a restaurant even if some, such as the first chapter Mince and Potato, might not seem the most appetising.
If you are looking for a big theme in all of this, an angle, you will not find it. The only themes I would say you will find in this book, are the themes that run through all of my writing, which is to say the themes that run through all writing itself: life, time and its passing. And what could symbolise such transience better than the scoffing of, say, a cream bun?
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