If We Were Having Coffee (13 Oct, 2020)

Once more unto the breach...

Oct 13, 2020

Hello lovely people! By the time you read this, we in the Central Belt of Scotland will have gone through the first weekend of our two-weeks-and-three-weekends ‘circuit breaker’; essentially what this means is that restaurants and bars are shut, with cafes operating only until 6pm and with any alcohol licenses paused. Time to reinstate the weekly takeaway, I think!

If we were meeting for coffee in my local unlicensed cafe:

I’d tell you all about what I got up to on my week off work last week. I hadn’t had a full week away since Christmas and although I didn’t manage to switch off completely (I listened to last Tuesday’s Wake Up To Money and got so excited about the investment stewardship coverage I had to switch on my work phone and send the link to my team!) I had a very chilled out week including a few days lying on my parents’ sofa and laughing at their cats. I can tell you that, while we wait for the new adaptation, the 1993 film of The Secret Garden holds up well - although I wasn’t expecting face masks to be such a big feature of it!
In full holiday tradition, I finished three books in three days: First Comes Scandal (great fun), Rodham (fantastic), and Sex and Vanity (excellent). It was especially interesting to read Rodham (Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘what if Hillary hadn’t married Bill?’ counterfactual) back-to-back with Sex and Vanity (Kevin Kwan’s retelling of A Room With A View); both featured many knowing sideways glances at their source material.
As we look forward to a winter unlike any other, there has been a lot of chat online about David Robson’s piece in the Guardian: “Dreading a dark winter lockdown? Think like a Norwegian.” I am the first to admit that a positive mindset can’t make up for everything (relatedly, I loved this New York Times piece on how resilience shouldn’t be the only option) but I am really trying to go into this winter celebrating the crisp air and the opportunity to hug a steaming cup of coffee and wrap up in woolies.
I’ve mentioned in previous weeks that I now have a bevy of pen-friends all around the world, so I’m using up postage stamps like nobody’s business. This has been a great excuse to dive into the Royal Mail’s Special Stamps - they have just released a set featuring Rupert Bear, and still to be unveiled are this year’s Christmas stamps!
I am a massive fangirl of Deb Perelman and her recipe website, Smitten Kitchen. While I was at home we made a batch of her new whole-wheat chocolate chip and oat cookies - or rather, two half-batches. When baking the first half of the dough, I froze the second half, which we then baked in the residual heat of the oven after roasting some salmon later in the week. It tasted just as good the second time around.
I’m also planning to make her pumpkin loaf in the next week or two; it always goes down a storm.
If you’ll indulge me going back to my days as an amateur beauty blogger, I’d like to tell you about an Empty - that is, a skincare product I loved so much I managed to get through the whole bottle of it, rather than just getting bored with it and pushing it to the back of the cabinet. After the Micellar Water cleansing craze had died down a little, Garnier brought out a wonderful Micellar Gel face wash - I have very dry and quite sensitive skin and this is gentle and soothing and I love it. It’s only £3.99 - I have tried some significantly more expensive cleansers that don’t leave my skin even nearly as nice as this one. I also want to mention that Boots have brought out a recycling scheme that’s similar to the H&M and M&S clothes donation systems - if you bring in five empties you get £5.00 worth of Advantage Card points. None of the branches near me are included yet, but I’m saving my empties in anticipation.
Another Guardian article link for you this week - Ella Risbridger wrote a wonderful piece about kitchens as a place to fall in love and show love which has so much in common with how this newsletter is intended that I had to share it.

We measure love, round here, on the Kitchen Scale: a practical method for swiftly and accurately finding out your feelings for a person. Pick a person. Imagine, now, that you are in their kitchen, alone. How comfortable are you? Have you been there before? Do you know them well enough to make yourself a cup of tea? A sandwich? A full-scale meal? Could you make yourself a meal? Would you open their fridge? Would you start digging in the Coco Pops packet? Would you want to? Would they mind?

The piece is an excerpt from In The Kitchen, an essay anthology which I didn’t know was in the works but which has swung straight to the top of my wish list - and for more of Ella, you must buy her wonderfully soul-soothing cookbook, Midnight Chicken, if you don’t have it already.
A face mask is now as integral a part of my wardrobe as a pair of socks were before 2020, and a few weeks ago I experienced the Corona-times equivalent of running out of clean socks - I ran out of clean masks. So I went back to the source of my favourite masks - Cathy MacDonald on Etsy - and ordered three more made out of Liberty prints that weren’t already in my collection. In the months since I’d first bought masks from her, she has refined her fabric and elastic choice slightly, so they’re even more comfortable.
In terms of music, I’m right back on the Prince Fucking Charming train, as I feel the need to dive back into the world of Red White & Royal Blue and forget the realities of 2020.
Lastly, you might remember that my novel, Checked Out, was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize earlier this year. As a first-time novellist still in my 20s, this was a very big deal. The shortlist has now been announced and features six fantastic writers. I can’t wait to see their books in print in the coming years - and you can be sure I’ll keep you up to date with progress on my own book.

Stay safe, friends - I’ll talk to you next week,

Lily

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