Women and home, haggis, iPads, giant drinking vessels
among other things
Lots of new subscribers, I know not whence - one of the funny things about Substack is that you get loads of new people when you are completely SILENT 🤐.
So - a quick recap for those new people (hello! welcome! I’m glad you’re here!): when I first grabbed this Substack address five years ago, this newsletter was going to be called Things I’d Tell You About If We Knew Each Other. This was not at all snappy and won’t fit inside a logo, hence the name change, but that’s still the general gist. Sometimes the things are personal and intimate, sometimes they’re (I hope) useful. All of them are broadly to do with home life.
One of the recent subscribers (hi, Moira, and thank you!) sent such a nice message saying: "I always come back to you, India […] intelligent discourse on subjects that are often derided as not serious but immensely important to many of us. You’re unapologetic in blissfully dismissing that derision. Thank you!"
It’s cringey to me to quote a compliment (though it does seem to be what Notes is for?), but this is a topic that exercises me. I used to have an editor who would walk down the office and say ‘Ah, the shallow end,’ when he got to the writers that wrote about the things Moira describes. The Shallow End is quite a good name for a newsletter. Anyway: it used to get on my wick, because of course ‘the shallow end’ translates into ‘things quite a lot of women are interested in, and not because they are imbeciles who have no views about foreign policy’.
It’s strange, though, isn’t it, how this misogynistic idea persists in some quarters - that a woman who is interested in what she eats or wears or what her house looks like is somehow precluded from having views about eg social welfare or unjust wars or refugees. It’s so absurd.
Right - here are some things I’d tell you about this week if we knew each other.