Weekend supplement
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Good morning! I have vanquished the germ. Well, about 80% vanquished. I don’t know what it was - the flu, a virus, Covid? - but it was absolutely horrible. You know when you’re so achy that your skin is sore and the roots of your hair hurt? Like that.
In the end I had to go and live in bed for three days, during which I slept almost solidly. Sometimes I’d hear the Einstein-Mandelson-Starmer-Windsor news on the radio, half-asleep, and wonder if it was real or if I was delirious. (I think the royal family is facing an existential crisis).
Thank God for The Rest Is History. I listened to the history of the Iranian revolution, to Joan of Arc and to Laura Cumming talking about The Arnolfini Portrait (that one requires a sub) - all massively recommended.
Anyway: I’m not totally back to normal and I think you can tell by my writing. It’s a funny thing - despite earning my living writing for close on 40 years, for me it’s a muscle that atrophies exceptionally quickly. I sort of forget how to do it if I don’t do it all the time.
I can write certain things on autopilot come hell or high water, like a review or an opinion piece, but writing as myself in my own real voice is much harder (people often think it’s the other way round and that writing as yourself is easier - it isn’t, or at least not for me, because it takes much more of you. The other things are more like putting on a costume - you just have to remember to stick your arms in the armholes and so on). I can only do the writing I do on here if I am feeling completely and comfortably inside myself. Which I’m not, entirely, because my head still feels sluggish. So apologies if this reads at all oddly. Imagine me with piggy little watery eyes for the full effect.
Also, happy Valentine’s day! I know it’s crass and commercial but I don’t care. Celebrating love is always an excellent idea. Love for your partner, love for your children, love for your pets, love for your friends, love for tonight’s dinner, love for books, love for your house, love for new socks, love for the sight of crocuses, love for your community, love for yourself - it’s all worth celebrating, and I hope you do, even if only in a tiny way.
Part of my celebrations will (I hope) involve eggs for breakfast, because the hens have finally come back into lay, apart from the old lady hens who have finished egging altogether. We’re going to get a few new ones to make up the egg numbers but I feel the old lady hens need thrones or something, or like a special Elder Hen house in which to live out their days in maximal splendour. I feel like we don’t honour older animals enough.
Here are some things I loved this week.
I write these round-up posts for paid subscribers once a week, and for free subscribers once a month. This is a free post. The rest are all here. All posts auto-paywall after 4 weeks.
Small Prophets
I feel like writing this bit in giant capital letters. Small Prophets, written and directed by the colossal genius that is Mackenzie Crook, is one of the best things I’ve ever watched. Detectorists is my all-time favourite sitcom (though sitcom doesn’t really cover its bursts of transcendent profundity), and this, while completely different, shares a lot of the territory and whomps you in the soul in the same way. It’s about loneliness, friendship, wonder, hope, love, pain, loss, the worlds that coexist, and how beauty and magic(k) are all around us.
I wish I hadn’t binged it, so that’s my advice to you - try to eke it out if you can (it’s 6 x 30 minutes). My other advice is, if possible, not to look up the plot before you sit down to watch it, because it sounds like it could potentially be self-consciously whimsical, whereas in fact it is anything but because one of Crook’s great strengths is to root wonder in the bluntly quotidian. It is absolutely beautiful, wonderful, transporting, unforgettable, and the entire cast is outstanding. Here it is on iPlayer.
Bad Bunny at the Superbowl
Bad Bunny’s set gave me goosebumps throughout, including for its beautiful, tender, meticulous rendition of so many instantly recognisable aspects of the immigrant experience. Old men playing dominoes, nail technicians, food stalls, multigenerational house parties (small children asleep across two chairs), defiance, joy, pride in ancestry, and the beauty of ‘small,’ ‘mundane’ lives. There was even a real wedding! It was the most exuberant, joyful celebration of everything that I (still) admire about America. And the roll call of countries at the end, ugh, it made me want to cry.
Here is something to read if you want to understand all the references to Latino culture that might have gone above your head. They built a whole world on that stage.
Also the bushes were people and I really loved them sauntering into place.
This poem
Small Prophets and Bad Bunny made me feel like this poem by Danusha Laméris, which I didn’t know until I saw it on this note.
This shell mirror
…which I found via Sarah Clark. I LOVE shell things but I do think they work best if you live in a shack on the beach, or under the sea with your friend Flounder. Might make an exception for this, though. It’s here.
Washing with soap
I watched quite a detailed video of a woman explaining that we no longer wash properly because we don’t use soap and a flannel. I wish I’d saved it, she was so persuasive. Or maybe you do use soap? I don’t, I use body wash and a scroofy (I don’t know what the proper word is - I mean those not very nice plastic mesh puffs). Anyway, this woman made me nostalgic for the soap and cotton gant de toilette routine of yore, which left you absolutely squeaking, almost shining, with cleanliness - zero need for extra exfoliation.
A gant is a glove, a mitt, i.e. not just an open square of towelling, which I think does a much better job of getting into awkward areas. I couldn’t find any soap, so I ordered some online from trusty French Soaps - the woman in the clip was very specific about using soap-soap, not any kind of ‘beauty bar’. I went for Marseille and Aleppo.
I got into my bath two days later with even more excitement than usual - honestly, how tragic, but I love baths, I start looking forward to mine pretty much the second I finish supper - and also wondering whether my skin would feel unpleasantly stripped and tight afterwards. Not a bit! And I did feel cleaner. I don’t think it’s because I’m suggestible - I think you do just get a better clean, but nobody ever says because soap is accessible and cheap, ergo underappreciated. Btw, you can use normal unscented Marseille soap to do the dishes with, too (and to wash dogs. And clothes. I also rub it directly onto carpet stains).
These photos and captions
These kettles
Annoyingly it sold out in red while I was lying in bed coughing being too weak to type, but it’s still available in other colours. Those people also do very good knives.
This candle
As I must have written before, I really like Neom candles - I think the scents are delicious and that all things considered the candles are not outrageously priced (also they burn nicely). My default is this one, called Happiness, but they sent me this new one, optimistically called It’s All Rosy, and it is lovely too - it’s sort of a calming, lightly spiced rose - not too improbably summery, but it does makes you feel like sunshine is coming.
How to pick a colour palette
This Eppie from The Fabled Thread and the context is embroidery, but really the method has multiple applications.
It’s tulip season!
Your annual reminder, if you’re in the UK, that Smith & Munson exists - spankingly fresh British-grown tulips straight from the source - and, more to the point, that the Dutch still life glory of Columbus is now available. They’re double, peony-style tulips. They’re nice enough when they arrive, but they become completely spectacular as they open and age. I look forward to them every year. Here are some I made earlier. Strongest recommend, and obviously other varieties are available should these not be your thing.
And while we’re on tulips: this poem feels apt given the date.
Kate Corbett Winder’s paintings
Kate is a gardener as well as an artist, and just look at her eye for colour and light. I absolutely love these vivid, exuberant canvases, on show at Brown & Darby in London SW1 until the 27th. (She is Willow Crossley’s mother - talented family).
Merchant & Mills homewares
Merchant & Mills in Rye is the best fabric shop, and their patterns are brilliant too should you feel like trying your hand at rustling up a frock. Now they’ve opened another shop, selling textiles and homewares.
The whole offering is dreamy. See it all here.
Lucinda Chambers’s dahlia collection for Sarah Raven
Featuring Dahlia ‘Break Out’, Dahlia ‘Otto’s Thrill’, Dahlia ‘Polka’ and Dahlia ‘Sweet Sanne’, here.
My dahlias arrived from Farmer Gracy this week - I ordered them so long ago that I have no idea which ones I chose or what I was thinking in terms of colours and so on. They’re staying cool in the barn and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they are.
In brief
I have nothing to say about Wuthering Heights, you’ll be relieved to hear, because I haven’t seen it yet. Annoyingly I’ve now read so much about it that it’s slightly put me off going. It’s such a teenage book, Too Much in every way - something that Emerald Fennell says she has been very loyal to. I feel I might be past this particular interpretation of ‘passion’ (also to me Heathcliff and Catherine are essentially siblings - these two lost, broken children clinging to each other through the trauma and violence of their childhoods - and I’m not sure I want to watch them getting it on in meat-coloured rooms). Also Jacob Elordi’s mouth is too high up in relation to his chin. Do report back, though, if you go and see it.
Speaking of reading too many reviews - I loved this observation about critics. It’s so true generally, I think, though truest of all about literary criticism. I’m adding ‘enjoying hatchet jobs’ to my list of things I’m too old for.
Thank you for reading! I’m off to catch up on the 72 million things I couldn’t do last week, including making inroads into my particularly exciting pile of new and imminent releases (also, new Simon Mason incoming). I also really need to update
in readiness for the spring. Which WILL come. We’re on the home stretch.
Have a wonderful weekend, let me know what you’re up to in the comments, do please really kindly leave this post a ❤️ if you liked it, and I’ll be back all BRIGHT AND PERKY in the week.
PS Did you see Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo running uphill in skis ?
“Legs like string and head like a boiled owl?”
Lifted from Provincial Lady, It’s my favourite description of being mundanely ill, and a friend and I
So glad you are feeling better and back with an excellent roundup as usual. I feel as though Substack is all about the writer’s voice: every so often I read a journalist on here and find they are still writing in their Sunday Times voice, with similar content, and it jars. I do think that one of the reasons you are so successful in here is that your voice (always clear) is even more so, so it feels like a conversation with someone one likes very much, rather than reading something produced for an audience.