Saturday links
Frivolity, gingham, marriage, manners, etc
Good morning and happy weekend! Whenever I type Saturday Links or Weekend Links or Some Links or whatever, I picture an actual lynx, with tufty ears. I’m like an old man who doesn’t understand internet words.
Frivolity
Like so many of us who write about pleasurable or distracting things, I’ve been thinking about frivolity quite a lot. The sickening state of the world is on most people’s minds, but whatever we try and do about that in private, in public we choose to write about e.g. teapots (or peonies, or hotels, or bronzer). Why? Virginia Chamlee’s post below chimed with my own long-held belief that ‘frivolity’ is the best available corrective to fear, despair, rage, hopelessness, or all four.
For me, frivolity is essential to life. People drawing and painting, making things, thinking up stupid jokes, drinking cocktails, meditating upon the bumblebee, writing beautiful words about their dads, taking photographs, listening to music, sourcing old furniture, pottering about, planting gardens, compiling lists, cooking, putting clothes together brilliantly, knowing about birds, memorising poems, having thoughts, loving books, pointing you to the good bed sheets, inventing recipes — these are frivolities in name only. They all matter deeply.
They weave together to help make the fabric of daily life into something that is joyful and often beautiful, despite the horrors we are all too aware of. Because whatever you spend your time thinking about in the narrow gaps between work, family, the news headlines and your own personal woes determines the entire texture of your one precious life. So yes please to frivolity. I’d like much more of it, actually.
Tiny earrings
Essentiel Antwerp, £65, here (frog) and here (mermaid), or from them directly.
Manners
I liked this from
.(I love that newsletter - it makes me feel like I’m young and live in New York and know stuff, from where to go for a drink to industry gossip. It’s a testament to Emily’s writing and to the pitch-perfect tone of the thing that I - a middle-aged woman who lives in a field in England - feel this information is highly relevant to me. Veeeery clever thing to pull off. She has a proper nose for a story, too).
Anyway: manners, or rather things that constitute a lack of them:
Still on manners, I also had fun contributing to this in last week’s Sunday Times Style.
I can only write this newsletter thanks to the support of my paid subscribers, so the rest of this post is for them.