Good morning! The cover image is of the flowers on my kitchen table. There’s another one right at the end - I just love that apricot-coloured iris.
On Thursday night Substack threw a very fun dinner in London, in the extraordinary setting of the Sir John Soane museum. We had a guided tour beforehand. I love a guided tour. John Soane (architect, built the Bank of England) had so many paintings in his Picture Room - including a giant Canaletto, lots of Piranesis, lots of Hogarths - that there is a faux wall that folds out, revealing another wall with more paintings, and another wall behind that, like a layer cake of paintings. This final wall opens out and you peer down into a sort of monk’s cell and beyond it a courtyard made of ruins. I had a slightly scary dream about it, featuring the ENORMOUS and unreassuring sarcophagus elsewhere in the basement.
Here’s everything else I’ve liked in the past 10 days or so. The post becomes paywalled in a bit. It’s very long, so use the app or web if it cuts off.
This outstanding piece about the Mitfords from Laura Thompson. This is in anticipation of Outrageous, the imminent BBC drama about the sisters.
Laura didn’t much like the BBC adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, ‘which again took a feminist approach - Linda’s pursuit of love portrayed as a bid for autonomy (but if only she had had a career!) - and, somewhere along the way, squeezed the delicate rose-scented enchantment from the novel, along with that most Mitfordian quality of all: laughter. Where were the jokes? Where that blithe unquenchable merriment with which they met the consequences of their often mad choices; the adamantine confidence, of the kind that women today find so hard to possess, which not even the soap opera horrors that befell them could destroy? That is what fascinates…
‘But how to show it, without inviting po-faced criticism? Modern life often seems to me terribly humourless, despite its hefty dependence upon irony, and the Nancy creed of ‘there’s always something to laugh at’, the streak of levity that runs through the family (I always think of Diana getting uncontrollable giggles when a hey-nonny-no folk singer turned up at Holloway to cheer the prisoners), feels almost alarming today.’
The bit I’ve bolded is exactly it, as is the ‘almost alarming’. People who don’t understand the Mitfords think it’s the poshness or the politics that has made the fascination endure, or U and non-U (I so love Ogden Nash’s riposte), etc. Those things are all certainly in there, but they’re secondary at best. It’s the jokes and the fearlessness, and the ice in the heart suggested by both.
Speaking of Mitfords, I must do showing off. From this week’s The Bookseller, Anna Herve’s piece on the BBC resuscitating Agatha Christie via AI mentions my Mitford retelling:
Did I preen when I read that? Did I prance? Yes. If you’d like to read Darling, here it is.
This is so great - Mo Dawood’s Sunseekr app shows you every sunny pub, bar and cafe in London in real time. It takes in both the position of the sun in the sky and the height of the buildings, meaning that on a beautiful day you never have to sit in the shade if you don’t want to.
Confit garlic in 7 minutes, thank you very much.
I like this summery shirt from Sarah O’Keefe.