Mostly links

also birthdays, ageing and Richard Scarry

I’m hugely looking forward to seeing some of you at the event Substack is hosting on Monday night. Hanif Kureishi has posted about who is involved, so I will too - Hanif himself, Nick Hornby, Jameela Jamil, Annie Mac, Dan Jones, Pandora Sykes and me. Should be a fun evening. The waiting list is full but you never know - here’s the link again.

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I was in London yesterday and I woke up absurdly early, I think partly because I’m not used to ambient light from street lamps anymore (what have I become? Half a century of city living undone because it’s not dark enough and I can’t hear the owls).

Anyway - I thought I might as well go and get some fresh air and see if anywhere would do me a coffee at 6am (no). It was still dark so it felt like the middle of the night, but there were plenty of people with proper jobs - bins, buildings, street cleaning, deliveries - out and about, and it suddenly reminded me of Richard Scarry’s Busytown books, of all things. It was a nice feeling.

It’s my birthday on Saturday. I love my birthday, and I don’t understand people who pretty much ignore theirs on the grounds that they are somehow too old to celebrate. So what? It’s a triumph to be older and to be well and happy and to still be around to have a birthday - a far greater achievement than being e.g. 5.

In Barbara Skelton’s memoir Tears Before Bedtime (three volumes, recommend), she quotes one of her own diary entries: ‘My birthday. Insufficient fuss’. I know exactly what she meant. She was married to Cyril Connolly at the time. He was driven mad by her exotic pet (and also by her). I can’t remember what the pet was - a coypu? A lemur? Something like that. Sharp teeth. It bit everybody all the time. So did she, really.

Why isn’t there a proper biography of Barbara Skelton? She’s such an obvious subject. At one point she had an affair with King Farouk, of whom she said, ‘He wasn't a grand passion, but I was bored to death with all the British officers I knew in Cairo. Life in the palace with Farouk was not boring’. (She was in Cairo because during the war she’d been recruited to the Foreign Office by Donald McLean, as in the Cambridge spies. This little Farouk interlude - he used to whip her with the cord of his dressing gown, which she thought a feeble implement - is the merest tip of the most gigantic iceberg).

Barbara Skelton in 1948. At one point she modelled for Elsa Schiaparelli, but that’s really the very least of it. Pic: Getty Images

On the topic of birthdays and ageing: do you know what I find strange? Women who define themselves by being middle-aged, like it’s their entire identity, and complain about it all the livelong day. One day we’ll wake up and be properly ancient and decrepit and have a ton of legitimate, life-altering things to complain about, like illness and frailty and bereavement and loneliness. But now? Now we’re broadly okay. Wasting these good, precious years of life, which are finite, on MOANING is such a poor use of time.

I wonder if I actually am still middle-aged. I’m going to be 59. Maybe I am now actively old. Who cares? I’m grateful to be alive in the world.

To the links! Here are a few things I’ve loved reading this week.

Luke Honey on The Railway Children.

This piece by Matt R. Lohr about Edie Sedgwick, who I used to be obsessed by in my youth because of this book.

Edie Sedgwick

Lisa Dawson with a table game I really want to play at Christmas, called Sixers.

Polly Vernon with some really outstanding self-gifts.

Farrah Storr on presents that feed the soul.

Really good kitchen cheats from Sue Quinn (also two recipes I am 100% making asap…

… and really good Christmas shortcuts from Skye McAlpine.

I loved Henry Begler on Martin Amis.

And Iain Robinson on jackdaws - just wonderful.

Ochuko Akpovbovbo’s newsletter, as seen on, is always intensely interesting and clever about things I’m not ordinarily across (too old) - here she is this week about Gen Z and money:

The average American thinks a salary of just over $270,000 a year qualifies them as "financially successful." For Gen Z, that figure is nearly $600,000—roughly three to six times what any other age group said they would need and almost nine times the average U.S. salary. Slay. You’ve heard this story before: young people can’t find good jobs, prices are rising, home ownership looks impossible. Long live the bank of mommy and daddy. All true. But then there’s also the money dysmorphia of it all—the fact that lifestyle ideals are no longer dictated by our immediate environments but by celebrities and influencers who literally get paid to project these lifestyles.

Minotaur! This sort of blew my mind.

Omar Kadkoy observing the fall of Assad from exile in Istanbul.

Craig Smith on plants for winter pots.

Pablo Na Boso on the flawed idea of English as lingua franca.

And Lev Parikian’s Six Things is always such a treat. That pheasant book (Thing 6) has been making me smile to myself on and off for nearly 24 hours.

That’s it for now, I think. Probably NOT back at the weekend due to birthday times, but see you early next week. Please give this post a ❤️ if you liked it! Thanking most kindly.