If We Were Having Coffee (1 December, 2020)
Happy Advent, friends!
I know rules are changing for some people in the UK this week - here in Edinburgh we’re still trucking along with our Level 3 restrictions (similar to English Tier 3 pre-lockdown) and a steadily decreasing case count. Sunday before last, I met up with a friend in a coffee shop for the first time since…. February? It was lovely.
If we were having coffee, I’d be telling you:
That I ‘won’ Nanowrimo! Nanowrimo is a 30-day annual month of writing with reckless abandon, trying to get 50,000 words on the page in a month. I had attempted it a couple of times before but never with much success. I owe a huge amount to the motley crew in the Discord channel set up by Jean Menzies of Bookish Thoughts on YouTube, for all their moral support and the endless writing sprints. Thanks, team! <3
My project this year, currently named Into The Courtyard, was the first new fiction project I had started since my novel Checked Out, which has been in progress since 2018. I threw caution to the wind and just enjoyed the adventure of writing this modern retelling of The Secret Garden. I’ll be spending this week doing everything but writing (Virgin River season 2 just dropped on Netflix…!) and then figuring out how to whip it into shape and finish it as much as I can ahead of the Lucy Cavendish Prize 2021 deadline in February.
Now for some food! Last week a Waitrose recipe card from 2018 dropped off the bookshelf in my kitchen, for a warm vegetarian sausage and puy lentil salad, which I thought looked rather delicious. I can confirm, it was! I added a wrinkly red pepper from the fridge and used spinach instead of rocket, and lapped it up.
I’ve also been baking - having always loved a Twix, I couldn’t look away when I saw this recipe for a Twix traybake. Instead of making the ganache, I used some pre-made frosting from Betty Crocker - and the only other warning note I’ll give is that mine took around 45 minutes in the oven, rather than the 25 in the recipe.
I would like to recommend to you all an Instagram account that has eaten a whole lot of my time in the last week or so - it belongs to the actor and comedian Luke Millington-Drake, who is using the Reels feature and his Kiera-Knightley-like cheekbones to their full potential.
I’ve mentioned my obsession with Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton (affiliate link) books before - so when I came across this story in The Atlantic about aristocrats fighting for the right of their daughters to inherit peerages I was always going to read it.
You all know I love Michael Bernardini’s Spotify playlists - I’ve moved on to Dark & Stormy SZN for the next few weeks, until I go all-Christmas all the time.
Given that I’m likely to be working from home full time for another few months, and probably won’t ever go back to being in the office five days a week, I decided earlier in the autumn that I wanted to invest in a really nice pair of joggers. I had a thin summer pair that I bought from Sainsbury’s in 2014, but nothing else - I wanted full on, thick and cosy, a similar vibe to the Jack Wills ones that I remember being popular in about 2010. Anyway, that was my purchasing mission last week to make use of Black Friday discounting, and I found a pair of Superdry Track & Field joggers in their reductions. Pals, I love them. I have my eye on some of the colours here that aren’t reduced yet too…
I am really looking forward to dressing for other people again, though, and before I had even got out of bed this morning had gone a little bit mad on the Toast sale online. My dream wardrobe is a cross between Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail and Jo March in Little Women (2019), and the needlecord and prints at Toast are my kryptonite. You can get 15% off (and I’ll apparently get a treat too) at this link.
Wrapping up this week’s consumerist-central of a newsletter, I found this Guardian piece about Ocado completely fascinating - it really investigates the fact that they’re a tech company as much as they are anything else. What you really want, though, is the discussion of the different phases of purchasing during the pandemic - the home-baking, the booze, and so on. Relatedly, there’s a fantastic piece, also in the Guardian, by Kitty Drake, about the effect of the pandemic on the British food staple that is the prepackaged triangle sandwich.
By the time this reaches you, I will have opened the first day of my Advent calendars - I hope this season of anticipation brings you all an opportunity for stillness and happiness. And remember, only three weeks until the days start getting longer again!
Stay safe,
Lily
Find me on Instagram - @LilyMCooks - and my shop at Bookshop.org (AD - affiliate link)