Giant Friday links
+ what I find romantic
If you read newsletters on your iPhone and have updated iOS, you will know that its AI separates your email into folders called Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions. I only really look at Primary and realised the other day that I’d completely stopped getting newsletters via email. If that’s you too, they’re all in Updates.
Good morning and happy St Valentine’s Day! I know it’s made up and silly, but the world is a binfire and this year celebrating love feels like a particularly good idea.
A big chunk of today’s round-up is free to read. Paid subscribers also get thoughts on clothes, a postscript to the piece I wrote earlier in the week, a list of things I find romantic, plus my undying gratitude for making this newsletter possible in the first place.
A recipe for preserved blood oranges from Helen Graves. Beautiful, aside from anything else - imagine someone coming round and casually handing you a jar of these. I’d be so happy.
Here’s a fantastic dinner menu from Rosie Mackean to have up your sleeve. I say this with total confidence because I made it recently and people practically licked their plates clean while making mmm-mmm noises. (It’s also in her brilliant book Good Time Cooking).
“I promise this is not a cliched “dal is love” post. Or maybe it is?”. I can’t wait for this book.
Valentine’s dinner tonight: it doesn’t do to overthink these things, in my experience. Here is a terrific, easy recipe for steak and potatoes for two (gift link). The steak marinates for half an hour in garlic and rosemary, is seared in hot cast iron for a delicious crust and finished in the oven, and then you serve it in thin slices. The potatoes are cooked in butter and garlic and tossed with lemon zest and parsley. Simple and perfect.
Even easier: here is another NYT recipe (gift link) for fondue - absurdly easy, ready in 15 minutes and completely delicious. The only thing with fondue is that I would not attempt anything vigorous afterwards.
If you anticipate vigour and can shuck oysters without stabbing yourself, do that (although, poor oysters). Or make one of the many heartier salads from the Department. Before the DoS I would have laughed meanly at the idea that salad recipes could ever make me feel hungry.
In a more midnight feast type situation, I would like to eat these buttery chilli crisp noodles with cheese, which are ready in under 10 minutes. Actually I would like to eat them in pretty much any situation.
I’ll be making moules-frites with oven fries - so good and so easy. Rosie Birkett has a lovely recipe here, with fennel and chilli (and adaptable).
Having said all that, tonight is also the night to just buy it in. Light candles, make the various bits look nice on a board or platter and leave it at that.
Look at this ravishing colour palette from artist Emma Webb, who posts at Petal & Pencil. It popped up on my Notes and I liked it so much that I kept it open for reference when I was ordering paint (for the walls) on Tuesday - thank you very much, Emma Webb.
🙌🏼 This obituary of resistance heroine Andrée Dumon, codename Nadine, who has died aged 102.
🐦⬛ How to feed the birds without feeding the birds (via
, whose gardening books I cannot recommend enough, especially though not exclusively if you do your gardening in pots. He is also a fount of wisdom on the subject of keeping happy hens. Also his drawings are lovely).🐓 Hen fact: after slowing down production for winter, they come properly back into lay today, Valentine’s Day, meaning that I should have an egg for breakfast by about 9.30 this morning. If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is, as Kurt Vonnegut wisely urged us all to say more often.
💄 ‘In October, I began the “75 Hotter” TikTok challenge, which promised a 360-degree glow-up in 75 days’. Riveting long read about the utter dementedness of beauty culture.
📈 Fantastic post about meaningless white-collar work.
🐶 If you have a subscription to The Times, this is a really charming piece by the paper’s Head of Investigations (oops) about buying a fake cavapoo.
‘It's incredibly easy to tell yourself that real life is coming later: when you finally get the right relationship, or the right promotion, or have kids, or when the kids leave home, or when you buy a house, or just when you get your life in order. If you're a productivity weirdo like me, then it’s when you've got the right systems in place that life will be smooth sailing and all will be great. And the problem is, that's not how it works! Because time is passing away underneath you.
It’s a little bit forgivable if you're 20, to have the attitude that real life is coming later, but it gets harder and harder to maintain as you get through your 30s. And I can testify, when you get to the end of your 40s, it's like, well, this is a bit ridiculous at this point, to be saying that the real moment of truth is still in the future. If the things that you're putting off are things that you consider to be absolutely central to who you are, and how you want to show up in your life, then don’t put them off’.
I also loved this, about deciding what to fail at:
‘The point about deciding what to fail at is about making a decision. This idea comes from an author called Jon Acuff, to give credit where it's due. The example I tend to give is that if this is a busy time in your professional life and a busy time in your parenting life, then maybe this is not the season where your house is ever going to be very tidy. The difference between constantly trying to have a very tidy house and then failing, versus deciding at the beginning of a period that that’s just not going to be, is that an untidy house does not then represent a defeat - because you had already recognised that it wasn’t possible’.
Do read the whole thing - it is richest pickings and had me ordering his new book, Meditations for Mortals, on the spot. Also his old Guardian columns are all still online.
When I talk to people about Lucy Letby, who I am convinced is the victim of a miscarriage of justice of seismic proportions, the question of her ‘confession’ always comes up: okay, but didn’t she as good as admit that she’d killed all those babies when she wrote ‘I am evil, I did this’ as part of an exercise suggested by counsellors? (The same exercise saw her write ‘I haven’t done anything wrong’ and ‘I can’t breathe’). So I thought this piece by the psychoanalyst Darian Leader was fascinating.
Jo Thompson’s new book, The New Romantic Garden, is transportingly lovely. Many of her gardens remind me of unlaced bodices and flushed cheeks and a sort of abandoned dishevelment - they’re frothy and loose and full of roses - just divine. (I think I’m thinking of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. They’re like that, but gardens. Well, sort of, because they’re also unmistakably English. They are dreamy). Also she’s amazing at structure that doesn’t look all stiff and prissy. Highly recommend - not just as a visual treat but because, like her newsletter, it is full of tips and truly inspirational. It’s out on the 25th. Here is a link to pre-order via my bookshop.org.
I like this rug from Oka.
I have been using my favourite hair product again and I don’t know why I am ever unfaithful to it. One 10p-sized dollop of this and you’re sorted. It just makes hair behave. It gives both grip and sleekness and is particularly useful if your hair is frizzy or dehydrated.
(Although note that in an emergency, anything slippy works on frizzy and dehydrated, like the miniature moisturiser in the hotel bathroom or the hand cream you have in your bag. It does slump and start to look greasy after a couple of hours, but sometimes two hours is all you need).
My daughter’s eyelashes have been looking spectacular - noticeably long and curved and perfectly separated. I asked and it’s this mascara (NB not tried it myself).
My over the ear wireless headphones have amazing sound but are bulky, take up tons of space in my bag and are never charged enough. So thank you to Sophia Money Coutts for nudging me towards the unarguable wisdom of basic wired EarPods, £19 from Apple. They’re ever-ready and the sound quality is perfect for when you’re on the move (in London I don’t like being so cocooned in sound that I’m oblivious to what’s going on behind me).