Weekend supplement

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Good morning! It’s August, can you believe it? Having said I’d write a bit less this month, this is a supersized post because it turns out I’ve got loads to show you. I may take next weekend off, though.

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s go. Here are some things I loved this week. Trigger warning: the last section is about sewage tanks. Also, long post, so best read in the app or on the web (prettier).

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These headphones

One of my sons has the earbud version of these, but I like using over the head ones. Both kinds are beautifully designed, noise-cancelling, intuitive to use, and more to the point, the sound is great. The earbuds are £99 and the ones in the picture are £149. Various colours, including black and white. The company, Nothing, also do cool-looking phones.

Gyles Brandreth’s podcast

You wouldn’t necessarily assume that 78-year-old Gyles Brandreth - broadcaster, jovial cove, wearer of novelty jumpers, former Tory MP - was a brilliant interviewer. But he really is. He’s outstanding!

His podcast, Rosebud, has been going for three years (who knew? not I) and concentrates on people’s early childhood memories and experiences. Brandreth is clever, articulate, quick-witted, non-judgemental, and possessed of genuine curiosity. You get the sense that he has an almost anthropological interest in the human condition. He is also unfailingly courteous and never interrupts.

He asks intelligent questions, listens properly to the answers and follows up very deftly. This, combined with people talking candidly about their childhoods, means that he gets absolute gold out of his interviewees, who probably bumble in thinking ‘yeah, sure, I’ll have a chat with Gyles Brandreth, lol’ and come out thinking ‘bloody hell, that was a lot more revealing than I intended’.

As for the guests - stellar list. Take your pick, from Sir John Major to Jodie Harsh (of whom more anon) via Fran Lebovitz, Leslie Caron, Graydon Carter, Caitlin Moran, Lee Child, Jilly Cooper, Jeremy Corbyn, Rupert Everett - on and on it goes. I’m steadily working my way through and haven’t come across a single duff episode yet. Strongest recommend.

Pointless art

This is not pointless art! This is a lovely painting from Hue & Holasz

I loved this post about alternatives to fast art, those mass-produced, anodyne prints that you see everywhere and that have no meaning, no emotional resonance and no aesthetic merit.

Lucy writes: Perhaps you’re thinking, “what’s the harm?”, but the question should be, “what’s the point”? What’s the point in even hanging art in your home if it’s devoid of any meaning or sentimental value?

We Talk About Fast Fashion and Fast Furniture... Now Let’s Talk About Fast Art

(My book has a whole section about things to put on your walls, what constitutes ‘art’ and how best to display whatever you choose to frame).

This belt

If you’re anything like me, you own a few loose summer dresses - or tops - that are heaven to wear in the daytime heat but can look a little too plain and sack-like if you’re going somewhere in the evening. This passementerie belt is the solution. (I’ve been wearing it with the nightie of joy I recommended a few weeks ago, but I have a plain black long-sleeved crepe dress that it will look lovely on in the winter. It’s a belt for life. Also comes in green).

This sale

Image: The House Upstairs

There’s a sample sale at The House Upstairs, should you need sofas, chairs or ottomans. (Jodie is on Substack too, here - she currently has a very useful post about fabric that’s under £50 a metre).

This little side table

Rule of life: if people are sitting anywhere in your house, they must always have somewhere to put their phone, rest their book, deposit snacks and their cup of tea/giant glass of something cold. Side tables, like table lamps, are an essential part of making a room feel comfortable and convivial. I love this Gubi one, currently reduced at Westwing. It comes in more muted colours if yellow isn’t your thing.

Excellent trousers

Like the black poplin M&S skirt from last week, these only seem boring to look at. In fact they are really well cut and incredibly useful. Huge pockets, hurrah. Comfortable waistband. And not so summery a buy that you won’t know what to do with them come autumn. They also come in cream. I have to show you because they’re so nice, look:

In cooler weather (please God), those, a longish white t-shirt and the cream cotton jumper I mentioned a few weeks ago, and you’re dressed. I must talk myself out of buying them.

This is beautiful and devastating

Negotiating for one more day with the person I loved and lost

Turkish breakfasts

Image from Özlem Warren’s cookbook Istanbul (recommended)

Turkish Breakfast is the Best Breakfast in the World. Here's How to Make One at Home.

Toasties

As previously noted, I love Blasta Books’s series of small, skinny, one-topic cookbooks. Very good recipes, always written by people relevant to the theme - the authors of this one have a toastie food truck in Dingle, Co. Kerry. I mean, look at this:

The books are all available on Blasta Books’s website (in Ireland), on Bookshop UK, and on Amazon. I don’t know what is possessing me to think about Christmas in August, but these make fantastic stocking-fillers.

Actually I think this is quite bad for your tooth enamel, but never mind, you get the idea, plus I like her hands. Wholesome cooling water, yum

How to feel like yourself anywhere

Kat Chan is now the only person I read on health matters. She is so normal and sane-seeming, and also full of brilliant, doable ideas that don’t involve upending normal life. She also doesn’t seem keen on suffering, always a plus. (I often think people who write about health don’t seem to enjoy being alive very much).

How to Feel Like Yourself Anywhere

Jikoni goes Italian

Jikoni is one of my favourite restaurants, both the original in Marylebone and the outpost at V&A East, and chef-patronne Ravinder Boghal is such a nice human being as well as an incredible cook.

As part of Broadsheet’s Dine Out Festival next weekend, Jikoni is turning Italian for one night only. I think this will be a very fun evening - I might even bestir myself and get on the train. Tickets here, but I’d hurry.

This interview with Sarah Hiscox

‘Addiction is the symptom, not the cause’ should be taught in schools. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in life/therapy, it’s that the thing is almost never the thing. The thing is about another thing. The blazing row about who left the milk out all night isn’t about the milk. The alcoholism isn’t about loving alcohol. And so on.

Sarah Hiscox: 'Addiction is the symptom not the cause. Low self esteem is the cause'

These toes

Image: Pinterest

Or rather, this pedicure, though this one looks quite DIY. I have those very Birks in my Birk collection and I think these toes look so chic in them, with a brown leg (my favourite faux tans here). Here are some varnish options that won’t chip off: this one from Essie, this one from OPI, this one from Nailberry, and this one from Chanel.

This mini spray SPF

Ultra Violette (Australian brand) really know what they’re doing when it comes to SPF. This one is for reapplication whenever you need it. It’s handbag/pocket sized and sits nicely on top of makeup without bothering it - not all of them do.

This present for children

So sweet. Maybe one to bookmark for Christmas (2nd mention! what’s going on?) for your Matilda-loving young bookworm.

What you can do about climate anxiety

Dunwich Heath, as was. Photo © Justin Minns

You can’t fix everything that’s happening in the world, but it is within your gift to help the living things around you, and that matters.

Our beautiful, magical local heathland has been ablaze for days. It is a catastrophe, though at the time of writing it does now at least seem to be more under control, wind direction allowing. This optimistic- well, a little bit - piece by Melissa Harrison is both uplifting and timely. Thinking hyper locally is the key, she says, to alleviating climate anxiety/terror. Gorgeous writing, as per.

A little patch of ground

This teapot

Last year JW Anderson teamed up with Nicholas Mosse pottery and produced this pig mug, among other things. They immediately sold out, despite the prices being quite startling if you’d bought Nicholas Mosse before. Anyway: this new Emma Bridgewater teapot, part of a range, has the same vibe and I really like it.

One of the very best things I’ve read on Gaza

Gaza Is Where Israel's Story of Power Breaks Down

‘Listen to the logic he describes, because it is the logic of addiction: what is not achievable by force will be achieved by more force’.

This green top

I love apple green and denim together, so this top is a no-brainer - warmer than a t-shirt or shirt, but not jumper-levels of hot. New season Sézane has some notable offerings, but we’ll get to those when it’s not August.

The PM’s wife

Marie-France van Heel, who is Mrs Andy Burnham, has apparently been at the receiving end of misogynistic commentary. I can hazard a pretty good guess at the outlets and persons involved, but the content completely passed me by. It was simply not in my life until I saw people responding to it on Substack.

At a certain point you have to start respecting your own mind. It’s not a bin. We can all choose what we consume. We only see this crap if we choose to navigate to purveyors of crap in order to consume crap, maybe because it gives us a crappy little kick of pleasure, indignation, or whatever.

But why choose to even go near this stuff, to become crap-adjacent oneself? What is the point? It’s like eating shit fast food - delicious idea in the moment, greasy and squalid-feeling afterwards. It’s not compulsory and it eventually makes you ill. We could all simply… not do it.

In brief:

• The chef who invented the modern British Chinese restaurant

• Boring millennial fiction (gift link)

• Terrible Puritan names

• A love letter to Jean Plaidy

• An interview with Christene Barberich, whose newsletter makes my life

• The Peltzes don’t strike one as especially adorable people

• Meet all the middle-aged women who don’t exist

• I love Clara’s review of Emily Wilson’s review of Odysseus (which I loved, but then I’m not a classics professor)

• Our plastic surgery nightmare

• If you borrow from our culture, don’t erase us

• The cult of perimenopause

• A particularly fine Notes Of Cheer

• Jeremy King on restaurant dates

• Nick Grimshaw!

• Why the world feels so weird

• This onion tart is behind a paywall, but I am 100% making it

• Stop pathologising ordinary life (gift link)

• Storks.

Poos

Other than that, my week has been dominated by sewage treatment plants. (Maybe put your toast down for this bit).

Our ancient, illegal, unfit for purpose septic tank with the rusty broken lid was removed this week, but not before my younger son’s girlfriend - not the pregnant one, thank God - partly fell into it while looking for Tails (dog) in the undergrowth. She was bruised and scratched but not badly hurt, though she did have to go to A&E for a tetanus shot. (I learned that you’re covered for tetanus for 10 years after you leave university. Should we all be getting tetanus shots?).

I was telling a friend this and she said someone she knew had fallen completely into hers - also ancient, also with a badly-fitting lid - and that it took him AN HOUR to haul himself out, which he could only do because he is a gardener and has excellent upper-body strength.

Anyway: this was unfortunate timing, because our new super duper Klargester - it’s a sewage treatment plant - arrived three days later. Look at the size of it! IT IS MASSIVE. It would make a perfect burrow for eg. hobbits (although I think hobbits are ground-level, like hares? Can’t remember).

The dogs were hysterical with excitement and super keen to help with the digging and excavation and laying of pipes, and I was stressed about them getting in the way of the equipment - there were 3 huge vehicles as well as the digger, including one that said Captain Concrete on the side, pleasingly.

I was also stressed about where poos went during this 3-day installation process. Like, with the old septic tank now removed and the replacement not yet in situ, were the household’s poos IN PLAIN SIGHT of the workmen? I badly wanted to ask them - ‘Hi, can I get you a cold drink and also can you see our poos?’ - but I chickened out. I tried to make my partner ask them, man to man, but he point blank refused.

I don’t know - I do think I am a competent adult, but I just don’t feel that e.g. my mother ever had to ponder these sorts of questions when she was my age. She’d have decamped and checked herself into a hotel. She wouldn’t keep thinking of the line in A Bug’s Life when the insect waiter at the bug restaurant says ‘who ordered the poopoo platter?’, and she certainly wouldn’t start laughing like an idiot every time she remembered it. Or feel compelled to keep saying it out loud in a terrible American accent.

Anyway. The new system is in the ground now, and I feel weirdly proud of it. I feel like inviting people over especially to go to the loo (‘Do you need to use the bathroom? No? Are you sure? Sure-sure? Oh, what a shame’). This does look quite mad written down, but it’s how I feel. Last winter I also felt like inviting people over to admire the new hot water tank and related pipework.

😍

The mechanism. I find this sort of thing intensely interesting

Here’s a palate cleanser.

Pierre Bonnard, Still Life with Lemons, circa 1918

That’s probably quite enough of that. I’m off to order hollyhock seeds. I’m going to plant them as soon as it rains and the ground stops being like concrete, and overwinter them as an experiment. The idea is that they’ll be strong and sturdy - well ahead - by next Spring. My gardener friend thinks this will work because winters are now so mild. And if not, it’s only a few packets of seed.

I have of course read but still not replied to the Comments under last week’s post, I’m so sorry - hectic week, plus full house, plus monstrous heat, plus the garden all dug up, poo angst, deadlines, etc. I’ll reply to today’s though. Do let me know what you’re up to, I love to picture it, and I’ll be back in the week with 🙌🏼 Mishal Husain’s 🙌🏼 Me & My Desk, which I'm thrilled to be featuring. As ever, do please really kindly leave this post a ❤️ if you enjoyed it, thank you, and have a really glorious weekend.

Also currently free to read:

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