Cook. Speak. Eat.
Write. Travel. Share.
My name is Susan Hepburn and I am a writer, traveller and cook.
In this about section I share with you my own story of literally cooking my way back to life after losing my husband in 2021 and now living with a terminal cancer diagnosis. These two things have obviously changed my outlook on life dramatically, and also the contents of this blog. I started it to write about my travels and, more specifically, travelling and living on a trade route in Italy. Now I’m navigating different things but I still hope to intertwine my current experiences with travel and food to show that even the most difficult journey can still be full of love, hope and positivity.
A bit of background - My husband and I traveled the world for 15 years with our 4 world-schooled children, using a ramshackle farmhouse in Northern Italy as a base. This house, on an ancient salt trading route, had truffles growing in the garden and a great position between the mountains and the Mediterranean. It gave us not just a beautiful lifestyle and much loved home, but it gave me an enduring love of trade routes. I don’t mean the big ones, like the Silk Road but smaller, less well known ones, the ones that ordinary people used in their ordinary lives, much like we did.
After losing my husband, we returned to the UK and had to start completely from scratch, rebuilding our lives and creating an income, I turned to my love of international flavours and human geography and set up WeCookSpeakEat project, helping people learn English through food and cookery(@wecookspeakeat).
Every week we took a dish from a one persons country, cooked it together with English as the common language, and ate it together. It was glorious.
I learned so much from that project but had to give it up after my diagnosis. It lives on though; the knowledge and friendships I gained from @WeCookSpeakEat has made me feel like I’m kind of creating my own trade route as I navigate this diagnosis. I’m using knowledge from my migrant friends in my nutritional support, my little home has become a waypoint for all my friends and family going about their busy days as they call in with plates of food, flowers, books. Stories are swapped and news exchanged and everyone gets a chance to just sit and be for a while, as my normally fast paced life has slowed, which actually I’m quite grateful for.
I know from experience how healing food and cookery, travel and story telling can be. All these things were and are part of the trade routes, created by humans that used them. It’s not just the tangible things like food and ingredients that matter though, It’s the crossover spaces in between the sharing of them, made up of memory, hope and sustenance of the soul. We use dishes from our lives to tell our stories, to tempt others into the shadowy spaces of new experience, joy and generosity being the touchstones of humanity, vulnerability and strength passed around with the bread in equal measure.
So, back to this blog. I started writing about our lives, more as an aide memoir to myself and my children, to record our experiences and remember what we’ve done. It’s partly to remind myself what a rich and beautiful life I have lived, and will continue to live. I use it myself for inspiration and I hope what I write will be at least enjoyable and maybe inspire you a bit. Life has been a bit tricky over the last nearly 5 years, but there have been plenty of golden moments too and plenty to be thankful for.
So, if you read it, I’d love you to leave a comment. Let’s reach out to each other and create a virtual trade route of our own. Happy travels to you all.