In keeping with my long-established personal brand of arriving embarrassingly late to popular cultural moments – I’m only now watching the glorious Schitt’s Creek – I’ve come extremely late to the concept of “wholesome content”.
It’s been a good few years since people started posting stuff on social media to deliberately counter some of the grimmer content you see while doom-scrolling. Wholesome content covers a lot of joyful ground including babies, kittens, surprise family reunions and my particular favourite, older people doing energetic and highly skilled jives at weddings.
Wholesome content is the opposite of the kind of content that seeps into your feed like an unexplained noise at night, a noise that makes you lie in bed clutching the covers, afraid to go to sleep. In stark contrast, wholesome content arrives like a bouquet of flowers sent for no good reason other than somebody, somewhere, thought you might need cheering up.
Virtual wholesomeness is great, but wholesome content is even better when experienced in real life. You know when it occurs – the pure goodness of moments or encounters that land like a sunrise and taste like the first slice of toast you’re given in the maternity hospital, which is to say better than any other toast you’ve ever had. I was at a gathering recently where the talk turned to the joy of a good tea brack, and I immediately thought, “Ah, this sounds like some deeply wholesome content”, and immersed myself in the story.
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It turned out that John and Liz, both in their 70s, are part of a Brack Club, which is sort of like a Book Club, but instead of reading books you basically just eat brack. Nobody is more surprised than John that he became a member of a Brack Club.
He is slightly mortified that it happened, so much so that he was reluctant for me to use his real name. (Sorry, John.) He doesn’t really know what made him sign up for the subscription, only that he saw an article about it in this newspaper, and he’s got a sweet tooth, and he felt almost compelled to use his card to pay €55 for the promise of a different tea brack a month delivered to his door for three months. Then John and Liz waited, nervously, for the arrival of the brack.
The nerves were understandable. Like many of us, John and Liz have had various scam texts and emails purporting to be from their bank or An Post or Eflow. Their daughter Lisa is their go-to person in these matters, alerting them to which messages are authentic and which ones might spell possible financial ruin. Lisa worried about the Brack Club, concerned that it might be yet another scam, and when the brack didn’t arrive on the appointed day, it seemed her worst fears were confirmed.
Thankfully this was just a mix-up due to bank holidays, and the brack arrived a day or two later. It was not like any they’d ever tasted, even impressing Liz, an accomplished baker who knows her way around a brack. Listening to John rhapsodise about the different flavours in the brack was the definition of wholesome: “It was out of this world,” he said. “There were notes of prosecco, black peppercorns, white chocolate, strawberries and sultanas. The sugar, if you can believe it Róisín, was rose-infused.” It was far from any kind of brack John was reared on, “except for maybe the sultanas”. The brack was so good that it had to be rationed out, with various family members timing their visits just to have a taste.
After the brack chat, John and Liz also turned me on to the wholesome content that is the album Western Wall by Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, which I am listening to as I write this article. Sample lyric: “When the night is long, I’ll be the crack of dawn … when you’ve done your best, I’ll be your day of rest.” Magnificently wholesome.
I see wholesome content everywhere now. In my friend Q, who, on a trip home from New York, kept warm in the spring chill by wearing his “magic jumper”, the last Aran jumper his grandmother knitted before she died. I saw it in a children’s production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, where tiny children dressed as gingerbread people recklessly broke the fourth wall by waving at their parents in the audience. It was almost too wholesome for words. I spotted it when a colleague accidentally posted a photo into our work WhatsApp group of his grinning son proudly holding an impressive-looking school project. “Sorry,” my colleague said, but there is no need to ever apologise for wholesome content.
We had some teenagers in the house for a birthday celebration recently. It was the first party where us parents were not only not needed, but were actively encouraged to remain in another part of the house for the duration of the party. We spent that morning cleaning the house, setting out crisps, blowing up balloons and hanging up birthday bunting.
When the guests arrived we retired as instructed to our bedroom, but occasionally couldn’t resist opening the door, intrigued as to what might be passing for entertainment in the absence of more juvenile birthday fare such as pass the parcel or pin the tail on the donkey. I was thrilled, peeking down the stairs, to see the teenagers engaged in a game of that thoroughly wholesome favourite, “keeping the balloon up in the air”.
“The kids are alright,” I thought, snuggling under the duvet to watch another episode of Schitt’s Creek, which, for anyone late to it like me, is the very definition of wholesome content.
It’s pretty much the only content I’m here for these days. Pass the ridiculously fancy brack.