Mostly links

jumbo edition

I’d normally do this tomorrow, but due to it inexplicably being January 16, I have to deliver some of my book to my publisher and I need a clear run at it for a few days. Here are slightly more things than usual to compensate.

Look at this utterly marvellous jute rug from The Braided Rug Company, from £149 to £197 depending on size. The colours! 😍

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Smith & Munson’s Lincolnshire-grown tulips are back. They are quite little, what with it only being January, but they bring the joy. Here they were on my coffee table yesterday:

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I liked Michelle Reijngoud’s illustrated post about feeling sorry for inanimate objects.

I do this too - ‘oh that poor dish, someone created it with their hands and made it feel so proud, and now it’s sitting in the cupboard in the dark, not understanding why.’ This yet another good reason to display your nicest things and use them all the time, as opposed to hiding them away or saving things for ‘best’, which I am virulently opposed to as a concept.

(I also liked Michelle’s post about not liking herself in French - she is Dutch. I totally get this because when I was first learning English, I was very conscious that it was other people’s English - learned sentences, not ones I’d assembled, so not my English, and not the words I’d have chosen if I’d known more of them. Becoming fluent in a new language is in a way also learning a new personality - very similar to the native one, but not identical. And then it gets weird again when you realise one day that language 2 has superseded language 1. I think about this a lot).

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My new favourite app/browser button is called mymind and it’s brilliant if you gather a lot of stuff from all over the internet but don’t have the time or inclination to organise it.

Do watch the vid - basically this app saves everything for you in an aesthetically pleasing way. But the GREAT CLEVERNESS is that whatever you’ve saved - a painting, a quote, a playlist, a video, an article, the title of a book, a pic from Instagram, a recipe, a Substack post, whatever you want - then categorises itself. It gives itself tags and highly accurate descriptions - well, AI does.

It is therefore completely self-organising. You just click on things you want to save and you’re done - no arranging stuff into folders or files and no manual tagging.

All you have to remember is that at some point the thing you’re looking for entered your consciousness and that you had the presence of mind to save it. Then you just type ‘artichokes’ or ‘FT piece about hotels’ or ‘painting with a bench and two trees’ in the search bar and up it all pops, linked to the original web pages.

The other thing about it is that it’s just for you - it’s completely private. It has no social media element whatsoever.

Here’s a rather better explanation of it. It’s so good, so useful and so easy to use - I hugely recommend it, whether you’re trying to wrangle a book list, your wardrobe or a giant project.

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For a while when I was young we went on summer holiday to various dude ranches in Montana and Wyoming, which is where my great love of a cowboy boot originated. (In Wyoming my 12-year old sister ‘borrowed’ an enormous car, filled it with the nice small children of the other guests and drove them into Jackson Hole for an adventure. The adults were all out riding and so nobody noticed for ages).

I bought myself this ↑ pair of Mexicana boots for my birthday in December, and I love them so much that I have barely taken them off. Designed in Paris, really well-made in Mexico, slightly pre-knackered, insanely comfortable. Not cheap. Mine are these, and I got them from here. I will love them forever. People forget how practical cowboy boots are - they’re perfect in the country.

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I loved this literary romantic comedy by Jessica Stanley so much that I’ve read it twice. It comes absolutely lavished with praise. Ella Risbridger said ‘I loved it, I loved them, I loved the Cazaletty interior details, I loved the social politics, I loved the actual politics, I loved the time span, I loved how complicated everyone was. I already know I will read it again… A beautiful romcom for grown-ups.’

Maddeningly (because until 2 seconds ago I thought it was February), it’s not out until May - I will remind you - but never mind because I can point you to Jessica Stanley’s excellent newsletter ↓ instead.

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There’s a Suzanne Valadon retrospective happening at the Pompidou centre in Paris. It opened yesterday and is on until May.

Valadon was extremely interesting, free-spirited as well as hugely talented. She was born into poverty, father unknown, left school at 11 to work, joined the circus at 15 as an acrobat but then buggered up her back and had to stop. She had a child at 18 (he grew up into the painter Maurice Utrillo). She modelled for artists including Renoir, Berthe Morisot and Toulouse-Lautrec (she’s the girl in Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, below). She’d always drawn, but then decided to become an artist herself, encouraged by the painters she sat for and by Degas, who became her mentor. Her nudes are especially terrific - she painted women exactly as she saw them, sans male gaze.

Teenage Suzanne in 1883

Self-portrait, 1927

Anyway - good excuse for a trip to Paris. There’s always yet another a hotel I want to try in Paris - currently it’s Le Grand Mazarin.

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Also:

• This is a beautiful and fascinating post about lichen.

• I was given this Greek olive oil at Christmas and it’s delicious, plus really beautiful tins.

• Skye McAlpine’s guide to Marrakech.

• Deborah Vass’s incredible photograph of cormorants in a tree, which she took in her dressing gown. This is going to sound so inane, but I didn’t know cormorants came inland.

• (The Common Cormorant or shag/ Lays eggs inside a paper bag./The reason you will see no doubt/ It is to keep the lightning out./ But what these unobservant birds/ Have never noticed is that herds/ Of wandering bears may come with buns/ And steal the bags to hold the crumbs. - Christopher Isherwood)

• I love Jessica Fellowes’s newsletter, Your Fellowes Reader - a complete treasure trove, and so engagingly written. Also I was very taken by this, from a recent post: ‘My Dad always said that if something awful happened you should ask yourself if it would make a chapter in your autobiography – the truth is, most things wouldn’t even make a paragraph’.

• I liked this conversation between Bella Freud and Nicky Haslam on her podcast, Fashion Neurosis.

• Anna Jones’s Cornershop Pasta is a very useful recipe.

• Why don’t birds’ nests blow out of trees?

• As someone who finds most things - houses, outfits - over-styled and over-thought, I enjoyed this and this.

• Colm Tóibín on Los Angeles.

• It’s been out (and been a bestseller) for ages, but I’ve only just finished listening to Rory Stewart reading his book Politics On The Edge. I so enjoyed it - think it’s the best political memoir I’ve read/listened to (my favourite political diary is Chris Mullins’ A View From The Foothills). Stewart is a proper writer, has a proper brain, is dryly funny, and is enough of an actor to do all the voices, so that you’re chuckling away in the bits when you’re not shouting hysterically about the whole British political system being absolutely fucked.

Right, I’m off to write more. Do please really kindly give this post a ❤️ if you liked it, do maybe consider a paid sub if you’d like more of the same sort of thing (this is the last of these link-heavy posts outside the paywall), do please forgive my not replying to the comments for a few days, and I’ll be back next week - sooner than that in the Traitors chat. Have a wonderful rest of Thursday, Friday and weekend!

PS THE CRAB - we never found it but I am assuming Lupin finally finished it because he comes back smelling normal.