Things I Loved Lately

Bonus episode!

Hi, hello, is it drizzly where you are and what the hell happened to the sun?

We are on the “what if we moved to Madeira” stage of drizzle here. Do you have two million pounds and want to move to Madeira? Here’s a house for you. It’s got six bathrooms and a swimming pool and looks over the sea, so you’d be all set for water even if you never saw the drizzle again. I have never been to Madeira but I googled what they eat there and it sounds mad delicious. Let’s move to Madeira, or possibly- as in this article- Mexico. Swimming nude in Mexico on a queer beach and learning to love ourselves in the process? I’ll take it, thank you, yes!

A flooded golf bunker in suburban South East London is not exactly the same as the “breathtaking vista of a wide, flat beach, dotted with mountainous outcroppings that perforated the blues of the sky and the blues of the water”, but I will still take it. Or would, if they would let me swim without a wetsuit. Apparently it needs to be much warmer than this before they let you jump in in just a normal costume. I want to jump into the lake and be consumed by the cold, please. I am going insane without it.

But I mean: it is spring now, surely? Last weekend, Easter weekend, we ended up with about nine people for lunch and we ate Palestinian slow-cooked lamb on picnic blankets in the garden and I worried about not wearing enough sunscreen. Right now I have got an enormous orange jumper on and a blanket over my knees.

Admittedly this is because we have the door open, in order to get the cat fully acquainted with Outdoor Living. We are all being very brave about this. Well, no, the cat and I are being brave. Rich either is fully nonchalant, or the secret bravest of all. If I didn’t know that the cat is his best friend and his life, I would think he didn’t worry at all about the cat being free range; but since I know that the cat is his best friend and his life, I also know that he must be worried. Or maybe not? Maybe he is simply less inclined to terror. Having the cat is one long lesson in terror, for me: one long lesson in living with the idea that the things we love are free-range and free-roaming, subject to change and life and time like everything else. Trying to keep the cat indoors was miserable for everybody. He cried by the door every day, so last weekend when we were outside eating our Easter lamb we brought him out with us and he was immediately the happiest animal in the land.

He is engaged in a war with another orange cat, a struggle for control of our garden , and I think this war makes them both very happy. They mostly lie side by side, hissing at each other. I assume they strategise somehow, in their cat brains. They make little ambushes for each other. I have never seen them actually make contact with the other one, but the war nonetheless seems very real and satisfying to them both. I suppose so much of the cat’s life is dangerous, or potentially dangerous, that to be fighting one same-size cat feels like a nice rest, like a board game is for people.

I mean, as an example: his skull is extremely small and thin, and he will put the whole of it, the whole of his head, into Rich’s hand to be fussed. Here, hold my head for me. Use your enormous, ribcage-sized grabbers to gently scratch behind my ears. Perhaps if you yawn I will try and put my whole head directly into your maw in order to see what’s going on in there. That is his life! His life is being surrounded, at the base level, by enormous and powerful beings. Which, I suppose, is why he was so desperate to talk to the other cats through the door. Imagine if you were raised entirely by horses who loved you dearly and fed you on the parts of their horse food that you could safely digest: apples, Polo mints, carrots. That is the life of the cat. (I have just remembered that I wrote a picture book about this idea, last year, but it felt like an unlikely sell, so I guess it’s just knocking around the house somewhere? Most of my books are just knocking around the house somewhere, tied up with bits of string and treasury tags.)

Anyway, it’s Sunday morning, and the sun just came out, right here in the kitchen! The sky as far as I can see is thunder-purple but the sun just touched everything in this kitchen suddenly, and when I twist round through the skylight there is a sizeable patch of blue. Spring! Spring, with five or ten degrees to go. Some days, I feel my duty/ Some days I love my work.

This poem is engineered to appeal to every single thing I love, i.e. coffee shops, small moments, some sort of toast with cheese on.

(Related: this kid did a survey of adult politeness in coffee shops and we could all stand to pick it up a bit, manners wise!)

Let’s get a coffee and settle in for some gossip. Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn broke up! We had much to say about it in our household. “It lit Tash up like from within,” our friend G said afterwards. “It was like talking about it fuelled you all from some deep source.” And it did because there is a lot to say there! About power and women and success and also how maybe she will write a really great album about this, or at least one or two really great songs. I hope she is ok but also, the best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth. And she has all of those!

(Also lol at the tag line that the publishers have put on that Dorothy Sayers novel. “The best series you’ll read in 2022!” Probably true, but also, funny to put it on a book published ninety years ago. Saying that Have His Carcase was published 90 years ago makes me feel old, which is weird because I of course was not there on publication day. But I do feel that Harriet Vane and I are exact contemporaries.)

So I wasn’t going to DO one of these newsletters this week because I did a big essay about pain on Wednesday, and it felt a bit soon, like I might be cluttering up your inboxes with things you had no intention of opening. Even though I have a million tabs open and like chatting. Anyway but then the men came to deliver the new sofa for the study, and they came incredibly promptly at 8am and there was no going back to sleep, and I have a yoga class at 10, and also I have deleted Instagram so nothing to scroll through in the gap in between.

Do you ever get that thing where you have looked too much at Instagram and you feel kind of hollow behind your eyes? I had that. I had been online too much and I felt all exhausted and blank, like after a huge big crying jag, but I hadn’t cried at all. Is that grief or just lack of will power? RIP Instagram, at least for a few days, until I can regulate myself like a grown-up. (I should say: please feel free to promote this newsletter in my absence!!) I deleted Instagram because I was becoming a bitch about things.

For example: in this article, about how to make your house nice for no money, it seems a touch irritating that the author already has an incredibly exquisite home full of beautiful candy-striped sofas and high ceilings and original radiators and fireplaces and wooden shutters? It seems like, if you already own a lot of beautiful books and art and furniture, it’s nice that you can pay a person to come arrange them but also not worthy of an article in the newspaper. I am jealous because the sofa we have just had delivered is pretty gorgeous but was from Argos and you can so tell that the sofa in these pictures is not from Argos. I long to inherit a candy-striped antique sofa that we are so easy about that it “it’s practically a dog bed”. I may be bitter because of how expensive sofas are and you can’t get a good squashy one that is also attractive unless you have, like, £3k spare. Which I don’t.

The cheapest way to make your house nice is to go to the nearest corner shop and buy three big bunches of herbs and wash them really well and trim the stems and put them in jam jars on a shelf. Also, you have to make the house all very clean. Tell me in the comments: your best and cheapest and nicest tricks for Making The House Nice!!

The least cheap thing you can do, I have discovered, is really get into gardening. There is a sale on here, at this plant shop that everyone recommended, but also I already went very hard on these bulbs and bare roots last week and as soon as I opened the tab to link it in here, I wanted to buy more. Dahlias! Grasses! Exquisite things!

I just read this book by a woman from the fifties named Margery Fish, called We Made A Garden, and it was very nice. It made me want an open fire to burn garden things on to make ash, and also to have stone flags everywhere, and make my own clothes. (I want to make this dress. I have never successfully sewn anything. I want to make this dress. Then I will wear it with these very expensive and definitely impractical clogs. I really want these clogs! Everyone has told me that I can’t afford these clogs and that they will really really hurt my very sweaty squashed feet and I will fall over if I buy them. I still look at them every day.)

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Why do I have the Wikipedia tab open for the Siege of Sidney Street? Why do I have the Wikipedia tab open for the Gillingham Fair fire disaster? I know why I have the Wikipedia tab open for every Crayola crayon colour ever invented, and that’s because I love to look at lists of colours. I have not read this book by Kassia St. Clair (what a perfect name) but know I would love it.

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We went to IKEA on Tuesday and bought a mattress and some curtains and a red and white striped throw. I am so surprised by this but I think that the colour of our bedroom is going to be terracotta and white? I have never liked red but somehow I am gravitating towards it and I think maybe I love it now. Look at this lamp that is half off! Also in IKEA, we bought these oat and chocolate biscuits, and they were so madly delicious we burned through a sweet half-kilo in no time at all. We do have a lot of people round for tea and biscuits but still. I keep googling “Swedish oat cookies” and I think I am going to try this recipe. Any Swedes out there want to weigh in?

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How good does this intensely gay play look and should we go to Brighton to see it?

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This title! (Which reminds me that I wanted to say thank you to the people who reached out after Wednesday’s essay and that your responses were why I wrote it. Thank you. Thank you for being here. It was a weird day in the end, and I did feel things but I could identify none of the feelings as being correct. And then we did not win the pub quiz.)

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Huge trigger warning on this piece that made me feel very much less alone in thinking about how insane my life became between December 2016 and April 2018. Good writing though.

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Light relief: do we like jadeite now? I don’t think I could pull this kind of life off but maybe you can. Because look how pretty.

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I am eight years late to the party on this Modern Love piece but I need us all to read it. I mean, as an opening gambit:

When I checked the home answering machine after my ferry commute across San Francisco Bay, there was a proposal of marriage from my old friend John Basso, who was now living in Florida.

I listened in awe to his rambling message: “You are the love of my life, and I want you to be with me while I take care of my mom in Gainesville. She is now bedridden. She’s got half a million in stocks and bonds, a pension, two properties in Crystal River, the house in Gainesville, a fur coat, two diamond rings, antique furniture, rugs from Panama and Wedgwood china. I’ll send you a plane ticket, and you can help me take care of her.”

He didn’t sound drunk. He must have thought this would win me over. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years. Spoiler: IT DOES WIN HER OVER. ???????!

I do not like Modern Love because their guidelines for submitting say explicitly “No cancer stories.”, just like that, full stop, which I am sure the person writing the guidelines thought was kind of blunt and brisk and funny, but when your only interesting love story was also a cancer story just comes across as sort of an asshole thing to say. However: I would rather read this, a million times rather, than any cancer story including my own. You win this round, Modern Love.

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This takedown of the A Little Life misery complex is brutal and delicious.

Related:

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I would never go on this holiday but Caity Weaver is very, very funny.A group holiday? With activities? And strangers? For making friends? I am terrible at going on holiday in the first place, even with no activities and people I already like. I like my house! I like my neighbourhood! I like pootling around and working and writing and shopping for bits! I would like to go to Greece again some day. I have not had a sun holiday in I think ten years, but also if it’s a question of choosing between e.g. a terracotta lamp and a night in a hotel I will choose the lamp every time. The lamp will last!!!!!!!!! Every day I will love the lamp! Do you know what I mean?

I think I just I love objects, generally. I love the way they are and feel and last and be. I love touching things and making things nice and being in their fabricness or potteryness or glassness with them. I love the thingness of things.

I love food, though, which I suppose is the most fleeting of all experiences. Last night we ordered Mauritian takeaway which I have never eaten before and it was completely worth it, largely for the very delicious bol renverse, which we will be making this week just to see if we can do it at home. Outrageously good! Mauritians, please weigh in. Is this recipe good? Are there more Mauritian things we should be eating?

What are you cooking? What are you eating? What are you reading? What are you watching? What are you listening to?

I am in a recipe development bit of life, where everything is fun and experimental and not very pretty, so all inspiration welcome.

WATCHING: I cannot tell you how much Kate and I, two big-time Christie devotees, loved Why Didn’t They Ask Evans. It was funny and silly and so scary at one point that I hid behind a cushion like a baby in a film. MORE Hugh Laurie Christie, I beg! MORE interesting adaptations with beautiful clothes and jokes in! MORE light, LESS dark, MORE TV with an evil man in a bowler hat and an incredibly attractive woman in men’s trousers smoking a cigarette and riding a horse!

READING: I have read nothing this week! Well, no: I have read Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Nemesis and am now on They Do It With Mirrors, but I reread Christie so often and so fast that it doesn’t really count. I simply love her.

I also remembered I Am Bat, by Morag Hood, and read it to Richard because he was being very Bat about something. (I think the good granola?) Bat is a bat who loves cherries. People try to take his cherries. He will know if you take his cherries!

A perfect picture book honestly.

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LISTENING: This Is Dating. You can eavesdrop on actual first dates between strangers, psychologists and stuff talk about what they’re saying and doing, it is from the Esther Perel studio. I am loving it I think! I have just listened to the first episode of this yesterday when I was brushing the stairs. Related: if you have a fixed stair carpet runner, how do you…clean it? Do you have to buy a little tiny hoover for stairs? I am doing it with a dustpan and brush which feels madly Victorian and funny and satisfying, but also it takes forever because we have three sets of stairs.

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I am loving comments being open, by the way, friends! It’s so nice! It’s so nice to meet you all, and my hope is that you will also meet each other and we can hang out here instead of other places. There is a new Substack Notes app which as far as I can see is simply Twitter from the past. Luckily there is no way this one, full of smart and brilliant people who just like writing and making connections and talking about breakfast, could ever turn into a cess pit of Nazis and politics! Ha ha ha. I said this on there, on the Notes app, and some very nice person replied to me with words to the effect of: “Do you think? I’m a bit worried that it might, even though it seems nice right now.”

I was there at the dawn of Twitter. I had a Mastodon account early enough to have the handle ELLA. I had a Substack early enough to be ella.substack.com! I have seen empires rise and fall in my quest to talk online about everything all of the time. I have seen that the human condition is to either turn a nice idea full of hope and promise into a cess pit of Nazis, or abandon it as boring. We need danger, right-size danger, like the cat. We are all looking for chaos one way or another, or maybe we know that the whole thing is chaos so we’d like some chaos we nominally have some control over: delete your Instagram, sign out of Twitter. Maybe. Come hang out in Notes, if you’re a Substack person, but my hopes are very low as I already saw someone getting righteously mad yesterday. And, like, we are all righteously mad about stuff, but I cannot be righteously mad all day and still function as a person in the world who has to go to work and plant lettuces and feed the cat. I like my life low key! Come make this Notes app low key, if you want, or just be in the comments with what you’re eating and reading and cooking and loving and planting this week; and I am gonna go and investigate my garden in the singular beam of sunshine.

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This edition of Things I Loved Lately, the biweekly link roundup arm of You Get In Love And Then, is free to read! I dunno why, I just felt like it. The essay on Wednesday was a big lad and I felt like I wasn’t going to pull this together this week, and then I did, so it was sort of a bonus episode anyway. If you have enjoyed this and think you would like more, please consider subscribing! It is £5 a month, £4 a month if you sign up for a year in one go, you can cancel any time, and the link is right there. The paid subscribers make my life possible, and also they get access to everything I write. Without the paid subscribers, there would be no newsletter ever. Without the paid subscribers, actually, I would be in a real pickle. I don’t think I could even be writing books right now, and I am, and I hope you love those too. To make this my job is an honour and a privilege I never ever forget. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Comments are for paid subscribers only because nobody is paying me enough to moderate potential lunacy from anyone who feels like wandering in.

(Oh my god, I’ve just seen the time, I have to leave. This has been so nice and I will see you all in the comments!!)