Weekend supplement
+ a mini guide to Marylebone + some new makeup favs
I write these recommendation posts for paid subscribers once a week, and for free subscribers once a month. This becomes a PAID post in a bit. All the other posts like this are here (there are loads). Posts auto-paywall after 2 weeks.
If you’re looking for FREE things to read, here is food writer and novelist Felicity Cloake’s marvellous Me & My Desk, and here is Sarah Jossel, beauty editor extraordinaire, making a special film of some of her favourites just for us.
And window-shopping is also FREE, though not without risk.
Good morning! There is nothing I love more than coming home. Nothing. You could give me a diamond the size of my head to persuade me to stay away for long and I would say no thank you. (And anyway, I prefer semi-precious stones like peridots and cornelians and aventurines and tourmalines. You could string all those names together and make a poem).
Anyway: I love dear ole London, where I spent much of the week, but I love coming home. The weather has been grimly unseasonal but there was a double - if you look very closely - rainbow on the way home…
And then later there was the kitchen table and lilacs and candles and sighs of CONTENTMENT.
The order of service among the lilacs is from Rachel Cooke’s memorial service, which took place at St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in Fleet St, on Thursday. God, it was sad. It was so sad and so beautiful. It is mad that she is dead. I tell myself she’s just somewhere else, away, which I suppose she is, with other friends who died stupidly young. I mean literally away, like in Tonga or the Arctic Circle, out of reach with no signal, but in this world somewhere. It is jolting to be reminded that that’s not necessarily true.
But what a lovely celebration of her life it was. The people who read and gave eulogies give you a flavour of how full of interests and curiosity she was: the architect Dycella Cummings-Palmer, The Observer’s Tim Adams, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Alan Hollinghurst, Delia Smith, and her friend Jeremy Langmead, of this parish. Rachel’s husband Tony Quinn read from her interview with Gore Vidal. The music was extraordinarily affecting. We sang ‘He who would valiant be’ changed to ‘She’.
Guess how much Mounjaro costs in the pharmacy in Selfridges? FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS. The guy didn’t even blink telling me. While I was gawping at him like a fish, he helpfully added that they had a supplement that he really recommended to anyone who was taking the jabs. Herbal, marvellous, so good for one in… quite vague ways. Guess the price of it for six months’ supply? SIXTEEN HUNDRED POUNDS.
What is going on? Who are the people who pay these prices, and why are they so careless with their riches? (Once again London Falling popped into my head).
What with interviewing Sarah and Rachel’s memorial, I was in London for most of the week. Today’s weekend supplement is slightly short [edited - it’s in fact massively long] for this reason - but I have made you a little list of the obvious and less-obvious (hopefully) places I particularly like in and around Marylebone. It’s a pdf at the bottom of this post. I don’t know what possessed me to start writing it - it’s hardly an unknown neighbourhood full of secret corners - and it took me HOURS. I hope someone finds it useful!
Right, onto the things I liked this week. They include excellent new makeup, a great new gardening book, gorgeous dinner plates, the very French, or rather very specifically Parisienne en vacances cotton bag I post every summer (but now available on Net A Porter), a great coffee table, the aforementioned guide to Marylebone, some particularly interesting articles, and a few other bits. Let’s start with a quote from this post by Rebecca Humphries:
‘The thing I love most about country living is that joy materialises right in front of me suddenly and often’.
Me too.
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