Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.
🎀 Invisibobbles. As ever, I’m well behind the tide on hair & beauty trends, but in case any of you with long, curly, or otherwise hard-to-contain hair are yet to discover the Invisibobble (the newish style of hair tie that looks like a coiled up telephone wire or Slinky)… please take this as your cue to head down to Boots or TK Maxx (outfitter to the Duke of Sussex?!) and try them out. My hair is wavy-curly (depending on weather and how I’ve dried it) and putting it up has been significantly less painful since I discovered the Invisibobble. They’re especially good if, like me, you tend to pull your hair up to work (I blame Violet Baudelaire) but want to have it loose for meetings and video calls.
📔 £6 journals from Paperchase. As ever, when talking about a big chain, I feel the need to emphasise that I do also spend money with independent stationery companies (new finds for me are The Completist and Pretty Post), but for my daily scribbling, I love these ‘exercise book’ style journals from Paperchase. They’re thin and light enough to slip into my handbag when I’m out all day, and have really encouraged my habit of keeping my journal-cum-commonplace book. I take screenshots of poetry on instagram or photographs of lovely sentences and paragraphs in books I read, and then copy it all down. A good way of adapting ‘Morning Pages’ when the words just aren’t coming. I finished my last one of these over the Christmas break and picked up a new one at Kings Cross.
📖 Annie Stanley, All At Sea. I picked up this book, by Sue Teddern, in Waterstones a couple of months ago, entirely on the basis of the title and the cover. After reading the premise (‘After the sudden passing of her landlubber but Shipping-Forecast-obsessed dad, Annie Stanley takes his ashes on a tour around the sea areas of the British coast’) I knew I wanted to read it, and added it to my library holds list. I’ll steal the phrasing of the Shipping Forecast to describe this book as ‘Emotional, sometimes funny, satisfying later’. Bookshop.org affiliate link (ad).
When looking back at life in the Beforetimes and wondering what parts of my pre-2020 life I wanted to get back, I realised that some things were habits that I had fallen out of by 2019. In the three or so years before Covid, I was swept up in the busy-ness of professional life at a big company (I graduated from uni in summer 2016 and moved to Edinburgh to start my grad job that autumn) and had left behind some of the habits that I’d enjoyed the most. So, this Sunday, I wanted to tell you about three of them.
First, taking a pause to sit in a cafe with a book. This was a habit I picked up during my year studying in Germany, where (at least in small cities in the conservative South of the country) pretty much all the shops and a lot of other things are closed on Sundays. So, after lunch on Sunday, I would cycle down into the city centre, get myself a coffee, a slice of cake, and a window seat at das Voglhaus, and watch the world go by. As an introvert (and moreover as an INTP if you set any store by Meyers-Briggs personality types), I really like being in a public space full of people, soaking up the energy but doing my own thing, or catching up with friends in a welcoming friendly cafe. That’s what led to this newsletter in the first place - during the first lockdown in 2020 I really missed sitting in cafes having a chat. In the years since then, I”ve often ended up doing this by default at weekends, but I’m determined to be more intentional about it in 2023.
Second, ballet. I went back to ballet classes towards the end of 2016/ the start of 2017, and loved it - but faded away when I changed jobs in the summer of 2018 and then moved to a different part of town shortly afterwards. But after encouragement from a friend who goes to a different class at the same studio, I’ve signed up for a term of beginner ballet, to get my barre back. It was the first class this Thursday, and I absolutely loved it. One of my favourite things about it is that you can’t possibly think about anything else, once you’ve been concentrating on the position of your hands and your hips and whether your toes are pointed properly or your back is straight enough. And then there’s the satisfying ache afterwards in all those little muscles I don’t use in everyday life - and the luxury of sinking into a stretch the next day and feeling your whole body relax.
Third, embroidery. My grandmother taught me to sew and embroider and I have to admit that since finishing high school (when I used to spend hours stretched out on my bedroom floor making fancy dress costumes, or sticking up pages from Vogue with blue-tack on the walls) I’ve only sewn pretty utilitarian things. Fixing buttons, adding belt loops, sewing patches onto my summer camp shirt… that kind of thing. But at Camp Wildfire last year I took an embroidery workshop and it reminded me how satisfying it is - so since then I’ve finished two embroidery kits, and I’m hard at work on a third - with a bag full of others to move onto.
I’d love to hear what pre-2020 habits and hobbies you’re reaching back to, and what joy you’re getting from them - or if you remember quickly why you stopped doing them!
Speak soon,
Lily