If We Were Having Coffee (24 November, 2020)
"Our daughters' daughters will adore us..."
Hi all!
Super quick one from me this week. I’m very much at the bitter end of Nanowrimo; last week I was 3,500 words behind and today I’m 3,200 words behind… this coming week is going to be tough. If it’s coming down to the wire, you can expect next week’s newsletter to be a bit late, for which I apologise in advance!
In any case, if we were having coffee, this is what I’d be chatting about:
It feels to me like all the good news of 2020 has been squished into the last two and a half weeks! If you’d told me a month ago that we were looking ahead to a Biden/Harris Presidency and that I fully expected to be able to get a COVID vaccine within the next 4-6 months, I’m not sure I’d believe you. Some of the (non-medical) podcasts I listen to have been using ‘vaccine plus 3 months’ as a metric for when to expect some things to approach an ‘old normal’; I’ve made my when-it’s-safe list and I can’t wait to get a gang of pals together to go for nachos and then out dancing.
Those of you in the knitting world may know about Clara Parkes, writer and wool campaigner extraordinaire. If you don’t, please allow me to recommend her as a great person to follow on Instagram! She’s just genuinely really nice and funny!
I promise that this isn’t going to become a Peloton fan newsletter. That said, if you have access to Peloton workouts and a stationary bike to do them on (I have this one from John Lewis and use the app on my iPad) I highly recommend Sam Yo’s Pride Broadway workout from this June. So sweaty and so much fun.
It’s Thanksgiving in the US this Thursday and of course for many people that has involved painful decisions about whether to see their family or not - decisions which I think we’ll see in a few weeks’ time here in the UK about Christmas. The predominant media narrative seems to be about whether ‘families’ can join together to have big crowded dinner tables, but for me it’s more about whether I as someone who lives alone can go and see my parents (short answer - yes, I will; they’re my ‘bubble’). I found this article from The Lily (part of the Washington Post) to be more representative of the kind of questions I’m facing.
I know it’s very early, but I’m fully getting into the Christmas spirit. Rebecca Plotnik at Everyday Parisian has got a series of lovely Spotify playlists and has just launched this year’s Christmas one and it’s lovely:
My tree has been up for a week (don’t judge me!) and at the top of it I have a lovely suffragette decoration which my mum gave me. Who needs an angel?
As we look ahead to reclaiming some parts of our pre-pandemic normal, I found this article by Nesrine Malik in today’s Guardian to be super interesting. She talks about being really conscious about what we let back into our lives and about specifically reclaiming the things that we really miss - for her, as for me, that includes sitting in a busy place and people-watching.
One of my favourite bookshops in London, Stanfords, has got a crowdfunder going at the moment - it is a haven of travel books and maps, a shop full of possibilities. In waiting for payday I missed out on a couple of the perks that were particularly interesting but I still might grab one of the remaining ones for my dad’s birthday.
I’ve been sharing information with you already about some of Edinburgh’s best independent shops - one more I wanted to talk about is Lighthouse, the radical bookshop. To copy their own description:
Lighthouse is a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop based in Edinburgh. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space. In 2020 we were named Scotland’s Best Independent Bookshop!
I personally have found so many interesting books at Lighthouse that I’d never have found anywhere else, thanks to the curation of their shelves.
At the moment they have a collection of books to support the work of Back Off Chalmers, an Edinburgh-based campaign to make the anti-abortion groups who like to sit outside the sexual health clinic with scary signs sit much further away than they currently do. It’s a campaign I support wholeheartedly.Lastly, I have a podcast recommendation for you: Bad On Paper. It’s a books-and-things podcast hosted by Becca and Grace, two intelligent and interesting 30-somethings. Every month there is a book club book, and in between there are chats with really great guests. A recent pick was You Had Me At Hola - AD, affiliate link - which was excellent. Not one to buy your mother for Christmas though (pretty steamy)!
On that bombshell… have a lovely rest of your week! When I speak to you next it will be December; I hope you’ve all got your advent calendars sorted. Go on, you deserve it!
Best,
Lily
Find me on Instagram - @LilyMCooks - and my shop at Bookshop.org (AD - affiliate link)