Things I Loved Lately

easter! stuff!

Hi, hello, happy Saturday! Happy Easter Saturday! I hope you got a bank holiday that felt meaningfully like time off, and/or will get one on Monday.

I worked all day, but I did it with first, a salmon bagel, and then, in the pub with a friend who also had to work all day. All around us the happy and beloved families of Islington enjoyed a beautiful meal. At about 3.02 we decided it was time that we, too, should enjoy a beautiful meal. Of course the kitchen closed at 3. Such is life! Such is life.

But then at the end of the day I saw that while I had bought two Lindt bunnies as Easter treats— one plain chocolate, and one white chocolate, if you can believe such a thing— my partner had bought an exquisite tiny hot-cross-bun flavoured fancy chocolate chicken, sitting on a little nest of chocolate eggs, and put it on the highest shelf in the kitchen for me to look at as motivation until Sunday. Which is love! I write, I edit, I do my little tasks, the exquisite chocolate chicken surveys me from her perch. It’s hard not to think of her as too beautiful to eat.

I am surveyed by the chicken and the cat. The cat is surveying me, superbly, from the second storey of this cardboard castle. This is the thing he has loved lately! I am loath to link to it because then you will know how much I spent on a cardboard castle for a cat, but in my defence, I also spent way more money on other toys for him that he has one hundred per cent ignored. He likes the castle! He goes in it of his own free will even when there are no treats inside! The other toys were of the wood-and-hemp type tasteful sort and he does not give a single shit about them. I thought a scratching post that was a ball that spun on an axis would be just his jam, but no: nothing. He won’t even look at it. When I spin it he looks at me pityingly. What a fool I am to be so entertained. The castle, though, he loves. He is a big large orange hunk of a cat, so if you’re worried about whether the castle will bear your cat’s weight, I can tell you that it supports our fat princeling’s endless lolling with only the slightest of sags.

These wide-leg high-waist trousers get no end of compliments. They are correctly wide-legged, in that when you sit down they remain wide legged instead of suddenly being thigh-sized (just me?). I am wearing them in green twill right now, and they are kind of like a thin denim but softer: I wear them with soft wool sneakers and a little cropped top, or black ballet flats and a scoop-neck ballet thermal from Uniqlo, and fondly believe that proximity to the word “ballet” will bring me elegance beyond my physical capabilities. They are on a fantastic sale right now. I have just bought the stone-coloured corduroy pair because I couldn’t resist.

Unclear, I think, as to whether I will actually be the kind of woman who can wear white trousers. When? Where? How can I be sure I won’t sit on the grass or spill coffee or have an impromptu period? Last year I bought these at vast expense, wore them once, then never got up the courage again and now they live in my One Day When I Learn How To Vinted pile. The shape of them was not quite right on me, maybe? But maybe that’s just cowardice because I’m so afraid about the idea of pale white jeans. Maybe I’ll dig them out of the heap and have another go.