LOVE AND CASHMERE
HOLIDAY PHILLIPS, TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF.
I am, first and foremost, a mama to my 18 months old son, Ocean, and a bonus mama to my stepdaughter, Akiko, and to complete the family, fiance to Jack. We live in London, but we’re about to move to Ibiza, in September. That’s my family life, and then in my work I’m a writer and speaker, a thinker and a coach. I work across a whole broad spectrum of things, so I always find it quite hard to pinpoint, but what I always say is that the core thread that runs across all of my work is holding space for people to be in inquiry about the big questions like why are we here? How do we live in more harmony with ourselves and each other and the earth?
TELL ME WHAT YOUR CHILDHOOD TASTED LIKE, SOUNDED LIKE AND SMELLED LIKE.
My childhood tasted like macaroni and cheese with a very thick crust of cheddar, and shepherds pie, all those wholesome English foods, which is weird, because neither of my parents are English, but that’s what it tasted like. It smelled like love and cashmere. I always say my mum smells like love and cashmere, and that’s what my childhood smelled like. And it sounded like classic ‘90s pop, so Seal, Kiss from a Rose or Simply Red Fairground and of course Spice Girls.
HOW DID YOUR MUM AND DAD USE THE KITCHEN? TELL ME ABOUT IT’S ROLE IN YOUR CHILDHOOD.
Food is the centre of my mom’s life. My mum’s Indian and French, so two massively culinary cultural backgrounds, and if I think about my childhood, I guess food must have just been the centre. Everything we ate was home cooked. My mum used to say that we would come home and say, “Can’t we just please have a ready meal, just something normal?”
I’m a mum now, and I’m really not that kind of mother. I’m a terrible cook, but I can really see for my mum, that food was such a significant part of her motherhood and it was amazing. My dad’s a pretty good cook also, but the only thing I remember my dad cooking as a kid was barbecue sauce or traditional Guyanese Caribbean food at Christmas, garlic pork or pepper pot. I do remember that my dad just used to eat hundreds of cashew nuts. That’s my memory of my dad in the kitchen, eating hundreds of cashew nuts! And now I do that!
HOW PRESENT WERE YOUR GRANDPARENTS IN YOUR LIFE GROWING UP?
My mum’s parents lived in Paris, until they died, in the same flat that my mum lived in when she was growing up, and now my cousin lives in that flat - they’re a really traditional Indian family. Everybody lives in the same apartment complex, and we saw them a lot. We didn’t have the same everyday kind of grandparent relationship, as my mum has with my son now. She looks after him two days a week and they are super close. It wasn’t like that, but I loved them, and my granddad was a potter and an artist, and my grandma was a poet, so I get a lot of my creative philosophical spiritual leaning from them. They were bohemian artists, really cool people. There were always people around the house, lots of weird and wonderful creatives. And on my dad’s side, my grandad died when he was young, so I never met him, and then my dad’s mum lived in New York with his aunt who also brought them up. And they were formidable, strong women. My dad’s one of 11 kids, and they are a really tight knit family with all these traditions and family mythologies. They’re also a pretty traditional Christian Caribbean family, very different to my mum’s family, in this way. When we’d go there, it’d be church and food and dancing. Whilst I didn’t have particularly close relationships with my extended family, they’re very present in my childhood memories.
YOU’VE GOT THESE REALLY DIFFERENT FAMILY SET UPS. THE BOHEMIAN PARISIAN, ARCHETYPALLY ARTISTIC SIDE, AND THEN THE SOUL FOOD CHURCH GOING ON THE OTHER SIDE. DO YOU FEEL LUCKY TO HAVE HAD THAT BACKGROUND? DID YOU SEE HOW SPECIAL IT WAS AS A KID?
I feel very privileged now, because I feel how it exists in me. But growing up, I definitely did not feel privileged, because I just wanted to be English. I wouldn’t say that I necessarily wanted to be white, but it was more difficult to not be English and white, because I grew up in a very white area. I didn’t feel that I fit in anywhere. My mum’s family are Indian, but they’re from a very small tribe of Indians called Parsis. Freddie Mercury was a Parsi. That’s the only other Parsi that people know, or Darius Danesh from X-Factor. We’re a really small community. And they’re white skinned, so even within the Indian community, Parsis don’t really fit. And then my dad is Caribbean, but he’s from Guyana, which is in South America, so a bit of an outsider too. It’s the one land based in the South American Caribbean nation, so it’s also not really an island in the island culture. I’m mixed race, with these two really different cultures. So for me at the time, that diversity was not that easy, and I don’t think it was very easy for my parents to navigate those two different cultures. They’re divorced now. I think the cultural differences were really difficult to navigate for them. So I’m very grateful for my background now, but I don’t think I was growing up.
GROWING UP IN THE 90S, THAT WAS A DIFFERENT WORLD. DO YOU THINK THINGS HAVE IMPROVED SINCE THEN IN THIS COUNTRY?
I think we have a lot of yards left to run on this. I think we’ve just had a global awakening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and this is a new stage. I never really opt in for a narrative of whether there’s been progress or not progress. I think things just change and I have an enormous amount of generosity for humanity, so I don’t even look back necessarily, and think things were so bad then. I just think they just were as they were. And now they are as they are. But yes, I think certainly it would be easier to be a non binary kid at school or a black kid at school now. There’s a much higher level of consciousness and sensitivity, but I’m sure there are also other problems that we don’t yet see. For example, when I think back to the ‘90s, my memory of it is that it just was such a good time. Economically, things were good. There was all this, in the UK, all this hope about new Labour. Even if you listen to the music made at that time, it’s all pretty positive. Of course, there were things happening globally, but there was a real, I feel like a real clean fun high time. Nowadays, that is not the case. There’s a lot of despair in the world, and in social media. I imagine in some ways it’s really difficult to be young now too, because you can’t really be so innocent anymore. That’s maybe what it was, even though things were difficult, specifically for minorities, there was an innocence to the ‘90s, where you could just be happy with what was going on in your little world. We’re all more awake now, and that’s a good thing but it can also make things harder.
DO YOU THINK THAT’S AS MUCH TO DO WITH THE AGE YOU WERE, RATHER THAN THE AGE YOU WERE IN?
Maybe that’s the gift of youth, innocence.
WHAT A GIFT IT IS. I CAN SEE YOUR CHILDHOOD LIKE A FILM IN FRONT OF ME; I CAN SEE THE ERA, I CAN HEAR THE MUSIC. I CAN SMELL LOVE AND CASHMERE. I CAN TASTE IT MAC AND CHEESE. WHAT DID YOU DO AS YOU GREW UP?
There was the love and cashmere, and joy and innocence of my early childhood, but when I got to around 13, I went the opposite direction. My teenage-hood was extremely wild. It was all the classics - sex, drugs, and rock and roll, except for not so much rock and roll, it was more sex, drugs and drum and bass. It was a classic wild rebellious teenager. I was partying all the time, tried all the drugs that I was aware of by the age of 16. And sex - boys, girls. Talking of gender fluidity, I didn’t know the term at the time, but I would have been pansexual. I lived life large. But my parents were pretty oblivious, to be honest. I was a really good student, very academically gifted, so I could just pass under the radar. I have the kind of brain that is set up for taking exams, which is why I think exams are such a poor measure of actual ability, because I have the kind of brain that can consume a large amount of information quickly, and then regurgitate it easily. So I coasted through school doing little to no work, and then I would cram for my exams and get straight A’s. In that way, I was really set up well to be wild and truant, and then get away with it! But I don’t know how free I was, to be honest, I think maybe I got more free in my 20’s, but I’d say in my teens it was maybe not coming as much from a place of insecurity. A lot of that stuff was numbing and I was experimenting for sure, but I don’t know that I felt free. I think I felt quite troubled.
WHAT IS FREEDOM TO YOU?
It’s really difficult to know. I think that you always get exactly what you need at the time. As a mother and in my general philosophy, each soul comes into the world to go on exactly the path they’re meant to. And so for me, it was perfect, and perhaps there couldn’t have been anything different that would have felt more free, because that was just what I needed to go through at that time. But I was really angsty. I was pretty much in an existential crisis from the age of 12. What is the world? Why do people suffer? I was having these thoughts from really young, and so I had to go and experience everything, and go to some really dark places. In fact, the reason I maybe don’t say it’s free is because I really feel free now. I know what freedom tastes like, and it wasn’t that, but I don’t think I could have had the capacity to really have freedom as a teenager, because I was really in the depths of processing what it meant to be alive, but I had no consciousness that I was doing that.
HOW DID YOU NAVIGATE THROUGH THAT PERIOD AND INTO EARLY ADULTHOOD?
With great difficulty! I followed the path of being a good student, got a place at Cambridge University and didn’t really want to go, but felt I should go, because it was Cambridge. I went and hated it, and dropped out after eight weeks. I flew straight to South America, and travelled around South America. I came back and I worked for a bit. Then I moved to live in Malawi for a while, to work on farms. I bounced around and was really searching, searching, searching. I guess what my friends would say about me is I never settled. If something felt wrong or not deep enough, or not the thing for me, I would change and I would try something else. We have these friends’ Christmas parties every year and they’d be like, how many jobs has Holiday had this year, to the nearest 10? I think I just really tried on a lot of different outfits, and by outfits I mean ways of living, and I think I’ll probably continue to do that for my life, so I guess the question of how did I find my way through… I feel like I’m still navigating what it means to be alive and happy, and so I’m just always on the path, always walking.
IT’S OK TO CONTINUALLY CHANGE. IN YOUR CURRENT CARNATION, WHAT DO YOU LOVE DOING?
If you asked me what my favourite thing to do is, it would be lying under the stars on a balmy summer evening, talking about the meaning of life with someone who’s equally as into it as me. I really have a philosopher’s soul. And I have a deep, deep love for existence and for humanity. So just attending to all parts of what it means to be alive and looking, and having conversations like this, and seeing where patterns in my life are playing out,that is what I love to do. I want to live deeply and keep deepening my capacity to love. I really love that stuff. I’m very grateful that it’s my work. Because that’s what I would choose, if I could do anything most of the time, it would be that.
LOOKING AHEAD TO OCEAN’S GROWTH, HOW WILL YOU FEEL IF OCEAN WANTS TO DO THE THINGS YOU DID?
I think there are all different ways to be a mother, and different capacities and natural abilities that we have as mothers. For me, it’s very clear that the kind of mother that I naturally am is, if you could picture someone standing behind their child, that’s how I am. I feel that he’s come into this life with his own life path and that’s really not my business. He’s chosen me as his mother, and I’m just here to be behind him and catch him if he falls, and love him and maybe guide him a little bit, and put in the hard boundaries about safety and stuff like that, but ultimately, it’s not for me to say what life he’s meant to lead. It’s not for me to say that he shouldn’t do something. Freedom is my core value, so that’s why there’s very few things that he could do that I’d really be like, “Wow, this is really not what I would wish for my son.” Ultimately I trust his soul’s path completely. Me, I worry more about him getting older and him not wanting to spend time with me, and all of that kind of stuff. That worries me and I’m like, “Am I going to have to deal with that?” But I don’t worry about who he’ll become.
I LOVE THE IDEA OF BEING ABLE TO RAISE A CHILD SO CONFIDENTLY IN THEIR OWN SOUL, IN THEIR OWN LIGHT. WHAT ABOUT YOU? WHERE ARE YOU GOING FROM HERE?
The kind of growth edge that I’m navigating at the moment is really leaning into what it means to live life in an overflowing, joyful, pleasureful, sensorial way. I’ve always had quite an intellectual leaning and thought about the big stuff, and my work can be quite serious, because we’re talking about the real big important issues. That’s been really right for me, up ‘til now, but now I’m a mum. I’ve worked really hard my whole life and I’m doing this motherhood thing, and that’s really hard, and I feel like there’s a calling for me now, to spend some time just really enjoying the bounty of life and the beauty of life. And so it’s less work, more space. More about the small self, actually, and less about the bigger picture of humanity. More about what do I need in this body to just really enjoy the experience of being human, and for me, that’s good food, great music, dancing, time with my family, comedy TV programs. That’s the focus for me now.
I think one of the things in my work that a lot of people have resonated with is this deep love for humanity, and there’s a way in which lots of activism actually, isn’t rooted in a love for humanity, for all parts of our humanity. It can be quite punishing, actually, like we can only be the “good” or “moral” parts of ourselves. But we as humans are a multitude of things. We’re not just these noble altruistic beings. We’re also these sensory bodies, and that’s also what it means to be human.
YOU MUST HAVE SEEN A MASSIVE INCREASE IN DEMAND FOR YOUR WORK OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS. HOW HAVE YOU NAVIGATED THE RIGHT TYPE OF PEOPLE TO WORK WITH?
At the beginning, like any entrepreneur, I just took all the work, any work. I was like, “I’ll do it,” and now I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can say no to things that don’t resonate. I think the things that don’t resonate for me are anyone who wants me to do things from a position of blame or shame. I’ll never do that. That’s not my style. There is an appetite for that, because it can seem like the best way, or people want to be blamed or shamed as a way of alleviating their guilt, so that’s a thing that comes up, and that’s a no for me. I don’t work with people, organisations who don’t want to take responsibility for themselves. That’s a cornerstone of the way I live my life, so I wouldn’t work with people who aren’t at least open to that idea, who want to stay stuck in a victim / persecutor framework.
It hasn’t come up, but I guess I wouldn’t work with a weapons company, or a big pharma company, but then everything is interconnected. You can be judgemental of an organisation, and then you look deep enough into any organisation and they’re all doing the same thing, so I’m also very sceptical of seeing certain groups or certain people as bad, and certain groups or certain people as good.
TO FINISH, DO YOU COOK FOR OCEAN LIKE YOUR MUM DID FOR YOU?
No. I’m a terrible cook. I don’t enjoy cooking! The best he’s getting from me is pasta with tomato sauce. Cooking, unfortunately, for the poor boy, will not be the way he will receive my love. Luckily, we have my mum. When we move to Ibiza, my mum is coming to live with us, so she’ll keep cooking.
LOVE IS BEST SERVED. WHETHER IT’S SERVED ON A PLATE, WITH A HEART, WITH A HAND OR WITH INTELLIGENCE AND WIT. IT’S BEST SERVED.