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+ junk journaling

Hello and happy new year! There are now over 50,000 of you subscribing to this newsletter, which blows my mind. THANK YOU for subscribing. Also whenever I see anyone bragging - frankly - about numbers, I meanly want to unsubscribe on the spot. PLEASE DON’T! I promise I won’t brag again for ages. My lips are sealed and my beak is zipped. But really, thank you.

The guests have all gone home now and although I am not opposed to the idea of dismantling the decorations in the coming days, the idea of actually doing it makes me feel slightly melancholy. The way we are supposed to put away the gaiety is always startling to me, like being woken up in the middle of the night to do something amazingly boring like hoovering.

Speaking of which, this house currently contains 2 broken hoovers, 1 half-broken cooker and 1 kitchen drainage situation that is awaiting the plumber and means we can’t use the sink or dishwasher (I suspect a fatberg). I don’t really mind - they deserve a break, poor things, as do I. As Linda says in The Pursuit of Love: ‘I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened’.

My first discovery of 2025 is that the thing I’ve been doing with (paper) diaries on and off since I was 8 or 9 - sticking meaningful things in them and doodling everywhere - has a name. It’s called junk journaling and it’s been a thing for years, apparently. I think it’s probably more a young person’s hobby, but whatever - I have dozens of them now and I love doing them too much to stop.

To me the best book to use is either the medium Leuchtturm 1917 composition notebook, or their A5 day-per-page diary, though I am also not averse to an A5 Filofax (the plastic pocket inserts are good for things too bulky to stick. I have this one but it’s no longer available in that colour).

If you’re similarly keen on embellishing notebooks or diaries (or anything else), you will already know the joy of sticker books. There’s John Derian’s, obviously, which is unimprovable ↓:

but also look at this one, Le Bazar (cheapest from Amazon.fr if you have Prime) by Zoe de las Cases, which contains 1000 stickers:

She’s also done a sweet one called Paris Chéri. Nathalie Lété has one too ↓.

You can also very easily make your own stickers if you have a functioning relationship with your printer and buy some sticker paper. You could make really lovely highly personalised/themed stickers for a child (or adult), actually - I wish I’d thought of this when I was making my Christmas presents lists.

• The Traitors started last night. I’m going to start a chat about it for paid subscribers. There is already much to discuss (I’m going to try to be better at chats this year. I either forget I’ve started them or feel like I need to reply to every single person, when actually it’s probably okay for people to chat among themselves too, right? I feel like we’re all old friends now).

• Jocelyn Wildenstein has died aged 84. What strikes me is that I remember being so utterly shocked - properly AGHAST - by what she’d done to her face when I first saw photos (this is, what, maybe 20ish years ago?) that I could have cried for her. But the same photos, accompanying the obituaries today, don’t at all provoke that intensity of response. Where once she looked absolutely horrifying, by today’s standards she just looks like someone who’s slightly overdone the surgery in quite a commonplace way. Here she was in 2004. I mean, it’s a lot, of course. But I feel like I’ve seen a lot of people who aren’t a million miles online, on tv and in certain bits of London.

Jennifer Graylock/AP

• Which is why people urgently need to stop messing with their faces.

• I love Alice Vincent’s alternative resolutions list.

• I’m extremely taken with Netflix Fireplace (birchwood version), to the point of having it on in the same room as an actual real fire in an actual real fireplace. This says something really not good about fake everything, but I don’t care. It’s so cosy. The little crackles!

• Here’s Lauren Collins with a new batch of French things she’s learned (numéro 12 is in my novel Darling, pleasingly).

• Luca Turin on loafers.

• Anna Newton’s inspirational post (one can dream) about being organised. It’s full of actually doable ideas.

  How To Be Organised in 2025

• I enjoyed every word of this interview with Andi Oliver. She is completely herself and everything she says is direct, honest and interesting. Quite rare.

• I enjoyed Kirsty Young talking to Pete Doherty for the same reasons. That whole series is so good.

• Deborah Levy on Susan Sontag, even if you don’t think you’re especially interested in Susan Sontag.

• Wonderful Jojo Moyes on how writing will save you.

• I'm going to read this by Joan Smith, as in Misogynies (and as in the only crime fiction reviews worth reading). It’s about how the women of imperial Rome were grossly traduced by the misogyny both of the time and of historical retelling. The title comes from Joan Smith being on a tour in Rome and the guide blithely saying ‘unfortunately she was a nymphomaniac’ about Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus. Joan Smith, who knows her classical onions, said, ‘no she wasn’t’. Their argument was the seed of the book.

• I’ve been drinking hot chocolate when I’m out and about, and I recommend it. Most coffee is terrible and most hot chocolate isn’t, even from a machine. Admittedly my local machine is pretty amazing ↓, but e.g. train hot chocolate is still much more drinkable than the other offerings.

  

  

Have a lovely Friday Thursday! I MIGHT be back on Sunday with a painting - I was going to do this one, Evening by Isabel Codrington, 1925, but Victoria from the fantastic Beyond Bloomsbury has beaten me to it. Isn’t it lovely?

So maybe a painting, maybe not - but either way, normal service resumes next week. Meanwhile as ever, do please really kindly give this post a ❤️ if you liked it. Thank you! Look out for the Traitors thread in the Chat if that interests you!