11 tiny dopamine hits
plants, playlists, podcasts, hair stuff, tablecloth weights, Cedric Morris, knickers, etc
I appreciate that lots of places are in the grip of unbearable heatwaves, but here in the UK we are still waiting for summer to kick in properly. It’s nearly mid-July. Election outcome(s) aside, here are some things that are keeping me chipper.
This new variety of cosmos, called Chocolate Cherry. It came second in the RHS Plant of the Year category this year. It has much bigger flowers than normal chocolate cosmos and they are the most fantastic deeply saturated pink. Pollinators love it, plus it does smell of chocolate (which I feel ambivalent about, tbh). Great for pots. It’s a tender perennial, i.e. will probably come back next year if you give it a little blanket of mulch over winter.
These resin table cloth weights from Zara Home. The other three are a lemon, a pear and a strawberry. A tablecloth that flaps about is an annoying table cloth, and these are charming as well as useful.
Ignore the hideous bottle - this is an excellent hair product that does everything. Hair can behave in an extremely volatile way when it’s pouring one minute and baking hot the next, and this stuff keeps it consistent. I am most interested in its humidity-fighting, de-frizzing capabilities, but it’s also a leave-in conditioner and stops hair from frying (whether from the sun or from hair tools), among other things.
It’s brilliant on hair that you can’t quite be bothered to wash yet - dampen your hair a bit, spray this on and shape it however you want to shape it and leave to air dry, or obviously dampen it and apply heat. Not too heavy for fine hair, not too weedy for thicker, and you can use it from the shower or on bone-dry hair. I reviewed it years ago but I can’t find the link - anyway: A FRIEND TO SUMMER HAIR.
This pathetically easy, really delicious feta with orzo recipe from Rukmini Iyer’s most recent book, which genuinely takes about one minute to assemble plus 25 minutes in the oven. I keep making it because it’s perfect for the weather - it tastes summery but also cosy when you’re sitting in the kitchen feeling unseasonably chilly.
This is such a great podcast - meaty, intelligent, funny and informative. They’re very good foils for each other, plus they are forensically across their subject, which is broader than ‘entertainment’ suggests and veers into all sorts of directions. I always go away from it thinking about something new, like how complaint letters end up shaping the culture of television, not something that had ever occurred to me before (I thought people read bits out to each other in a prissy, nasal voice and then all fell about laughing). It also makes me feel vaguely on the ball, which is nice because I have become a person who has NO IDEA who anyone is.
I have been listening to this playlist while waiting for the sun to come out, which curiously it seems most prone to do at about 8pm. Nice in the background with drinks/dinner. It makes you want to mooch about in a kaftan and frosted eyeshadow in the 1970s, which is a feeling I can get behind. I like this one too, from the same people, the people being the Broadwick hotel in Soho, which I’ve not stayed in because THE PRICE OF LONDON HOTELS HAS BECOME INSANE but which has a lovely roof terrace, as per the pic.
Pots. The endless rain is at least good for the garden. I’m very pleased with my pots this year. Here are some of them. Make a pot (or pots)! They bring so much joy. Everything in these I grew from seed apart from the verbena rigida, but if you go to your local garden centre you will still find plenty of annuals, most likely reduced, to stick in a container. They will flower all summer long provided you deadhead them. Then you can make tiny little posies for the kitchen table and feel happy every time you look at them.
Playing Connections in bed with my morning tea (this is quite an elderly sentence, which is relevant because I have touching faith in the idea that word games will stave off Alzheimer’s). I like Wordle but once you’ve worked out what two words to start with you always get it in three. Connections, on the other hand, makes me feel like my brain is getting a small workout.
My ludicrous Stanley cup. These are beyond absurd. HOWEVER. I drink one in the morning, refill it at lunchtime and sometimes go for a half refill late afternoon (they fit 1.2l). It makes such a difference to how I feel - zippy and clear-headed - and also to my skin. Prior to the ludicrous cup I had a ludicrous one of these, complete with motivational sayings, but I don’t love drinking from plastic, especially in the sun.
If you already drink loads of water consistently through the day, great. If you gulp down a ton of water because you realise you haven’t had any for hours, do consider a ludicrous vessel. Downside: you pee all day. You become the sort of person who says ‘I must stop you right there because I absolutely have to pee’. And the sort of person whose cup is laughed at (people also love telling you it’s made out of lead. It isn’t). But it’s worth it, because you do feel great.
I’m really bad at going to exhibitions - I am full of good intentions but often never quite get round to it - so now my new thing is nipping in to somewhere, looking at one thing and nipping out again. It's very satisfying - there’s no overwhelm because you are just staring at one thing, and the staring makes you really see it properly. I heartily recommend this technique, which is the definition of a tiny dopamine hit. When I lived in Primrose Hill we had an omni-pass to London zoo and would often nip in just to look at e.g. the okapis, observe them for ten minutes, done, home again. You felt you got to know okapis, in a way that you wouldn’t if they passed you by in a blur on the way to 25 other sorts of animals.
Having said that, I am absolutely going to all of this exhibition, about Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who met on Armistice night in 1918 and were together for 60 years (once Lett’s wife had obligingly gone back to America).
They lived in various places including Cornwall and Paris before moving to Suffolk and founding the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, which after a fire moved to Benton End. The students, which included Lucian Freud and a child Maggi Hambling1 - she was about 15 - lived in the house and everyone rambled about being talented and slightly louche. Ronald Blythe described the setup as ‘robust and coarse and exquisite and tentative all at once. Rough and ready and fine mannered. Also faintly dangerous.’ (Ronald Blythe was friends with Patricia Highsmith, as in Ripley, when she lived in Suffolk - I find it so improbable that she was ever here, a couple of villages away from where I live).
Arthur Lett-Haines, who was called Lett, was a very good cook, extremely into food and produced things like couscous and olives in grim post-war England. I’m very interested in the intersection between food and art. The cook, or the person cooking, is often so central when you have artists’ communities, see also Charleston. Here’s a piece about what life at Benton End was like.
ANYWAY - I love Cedric Morris’s paintings, and his irises (he became a renowned plantsman), and his paintings of his irises. But I really passionately love these eggs. Elizabeth David bought them in 1953 and left them to the Tate gallery, who have lent them to this exhibition along with 70-odd other paintings. I can’t wait to see it. It’s on until November.
I said half-jokingly that a knickers post was coming for anyone who wasn’t interested in my election remarks, but actually I have found Knickers of Bliss, and they are by Kim Kardashian’s Skims brand. No better pant has ever been made. They feel like wearing nothing - they are so thin and comfortable. They’re undetectable under clothes. They’re just amazing. I am aware that they’ve been around for a while, but I scoffed at these pants for years before a friend persuaded me to try them, and also I thought they were shapewear. You can certainly buy a shapewear version, but I’m talking about just the normal pants. They come in every possible permutation, from shorts to full briefs to micro-thongs, in every skin tone, and although I have worn similar seamless offerings from M&S, among others, nothing comes close to these. BEST PANTS.
If you liked this post, do please give it a ❤️ - it helps with visibility. Thank you and have a great rest of Monday! Do you feel like there’s been an uptick in national mood? I do.
that programme is the most wonderful listen
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Kept me sane in the summer of 1985, when I was temping in a medical centre in the middle of a council estate in Shepherd’s Bush.
It was too far for me go home and come back between morning and afternoon surgeries so I cowered in a little common room for hours on end. I bought this book, read it and read it again. And again. A small pool of middle-class civility in a war zone. I hated every second of being there.
The good thing was that I went for a wander down Uxbridge Road during one interminable extended lunch break and found a junk shop with loads of ravishingly pretty old pink and white china - I bought the lot. Must have been a house clearance. Getting it home nearly killed me. I’m still using it.
This was a bumper post, great info and great recommendations. I wonder if you would do a bit of a travel post around Suffolk. Places to visit, top tips for a visit. You have inspired me to think about a holiday there this summer. Just a thought. X