Weekend supplement
bumper edition, get the kettle on
Good morning! I’ve been in London for most of the week, packing things in back to back with no gaps, which is actually quite a poor idea because you end up knackered.
I was there for various bits and bobs and then for Jilly Cooper’s memorial service, which was at Southwark Cathedral yesterday and to which I was so pleased to have been asked (it was invite-only). The Dean of Southwark, Mark Oakley, set the tone by saying that Jilly had ‘a champagne soul,’ and the whole thing was golden, sparkling, fizzing with Jilly’s wit and charm. You don’t always feel the person at memorial services, in my fairly limited experience, but yesterday you felt her everywhere. The only way it could have been more like her was if there’d been a horse or two milling about.
Joanna Lumley gave the most perfect hilarious, lightly sweary (always quite thrilling in church, for I am juvenile) reading from The Common Years. Rupert Everett read The Parting Glass, the melancholy of which always makes me want to fling myself to the floor. The music was just beautiful and the hymns included I Vow To Thee My Country and Jerusalem, i.e. hymn bliss.
Also the Queen was there and her former husband Andrew Parker Bowles, who was the model for Rupert Campbell-Black and who is now 86, read a prayer. I found this quite moving - all these golden young people who knew each other and hung out at a particular moment in time, shagging and smoking and being slightly rackety, now silvered with age and unexpectedly finding themselves e.g. Queen of England.
The cathedral was packed and everyone stayed to raise a toast to Jilly afterwards. Possibly my favourite thing was that when the bells rang out after the service, it was with a specially-composed (by the bellringers) tune called RUTSHIRE SURPRISE MAXIMUS. Standing ovation for whoever named it, and for making the actual bell music so totally Cooperesque.
Here’s a report about it all from The Times.
I hadn’t realised the event was going to be quite so grand - I’d planned on wearing my trusty leather leggings (these - I live in them in winter because they work in town, where they look one way, and in country, where they are infinitely practical, being wipe-clean, plus they tuck into boots. They are nausea-inducingly expensive but they are also by far the most efficient cost-per-wear garment in my wardrobe). I figured a) they’d be concealed by my smart coat and b) nobody would be looking anyway.
At the last minute I thought hmm, maybe I should wear something slightly more formal. Me + Em to the rescue yet again. The service was at 11am and I was outside the shop at 9.59 on the dot. I bought this crepe dress, on the basis that my revamped wardrobe (weight loss) doesn’t currently include the sort of smart dress you can wear to memorial services as well as to well-behaved parties. It is very flatteringly cut, I love the passementerie detail and the colours, and it’s a great weight that moves nicely when you walk. NB it is long - I’d say for 5’7 upwards. Very useful, ageless sort of dress that you can wear to anything.
Other than that, I roamed around. I roamed into Townhouse Spitalfields to look at pots and was particularly delighted/flattered to find my book in there. I had a coffee in the tiny courtyard (one of the great things about the shop is its very good coffee and cakes - it’s an oasis when Spitalfields is heaving). Here’s the kitchen - it’s the basement of an amazing old Huguenot house in Fournier Street.
That evening I roamed to Rochelle Canteen for dinner with my eldest son. Look at the perfection of this menu. And of those Parmesan biscuits (my fav Parmesan biscuit recipe is by Simon Hopkinson via Rachel Cooke, who gave it to him. It’s here).
And this salad! It’s a painting.
Anyway: I roamed more for three days and caught up with lots of friends, but that’s enough about that or we’ll be here for hours.
Here are some things I loved this week, including egg cups, a jug, a really lovely lamp, a well-priced rug, an exhibition, fantastic dog beds and dog bags, and so on and so forth, followed by a ton of things I especially enjoyed reading. There’s also a brief bit about an aesthetic doctor you might like to know about if you do that sort of thing.
I’ve only ever had sporadic Botox and fillers. Part of the reason for this (laziness aside) is that I find it really hard to match the provider’s aesthetic to my own. I don’t like it when I can see what someone has had done or, even worse, who did it. As I say in my beauty book, you really really need to look very closely at the person wielding the needle/machine and you really really need to be 100% sure that their aesthetic aligns exactly with yours. The most fatal assumption is to go ‘well, yes, they look a bit over the top but what do you expect, it’s their job’.
I am not at all the sort of person this particular clinic usually treats - the clientèle is decades younger and a thousand times cooler. But they’re all girls - women - who have perfect, glowing naked-seeming skin and not a lot of evident makeup, the sort of look that you (I) usually put down purely to genes and Nina Park. Well, I know now - where there has been discreet intervention, this is often the person who does it.
This post is longer than usual, so I’ve put all my favourite reads at the bottom in one clump rather than interspersing them with the shoppy things.
I write these round-up posts for paid subscribers once a week, and for free subscribers once a month. This is a paid post. The most recent free post is here and the rest are all here. All posts auto-paywall after 4 weeks.
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