Keeping it soft

Because there’s enough hard stuff in the world

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.

• 🧀 Comté cheese. I love Comté cheese so much. It’s a ‘semi-hard’ French cheese (one of these that’s made in a specific geographic area with high requirements to maintain the quality) made with unpasteurised cows’ milk. If I could only have one cheese for the rest of my life… it would be this. In the last few weeks, I’ve had it in omelettes, and cubed on sautéed green beans with walnuts. And just from the fridge. The best.

• 📕 Portrait Of A Thief by Grace D Li. Depending on your tastes, I’d pitch this novel as ‘international art heist: Oceans Eleven meets 21’ or as ‘a searingly anti-colonial coming-of-age story of a group of Chinese-American students’. It was incredible. I’d recommend it if you loved Babel (which I wrote about last month) and also if you like thrillers or true crime. (Affiliate links to Bookshop.org - ad). 

• 🐧 Penguin Random House on Instagram. The most famous penguin in popular culture is Pingu, clearly (sidenote - during my final year of uni when it was all a bit stressful I found a collection of old episodes on one of the streamers and watched one a night to make me feel like everything was more manageable). The premise of @pingurandomhouse is simple: covers of books with images from Pingu as the cover art. It’s much funnier than that makes it sound, and this week’s take on Spare had me laughing out loud. (For extra funniness, the real Spare is published by the real Penguin Random House.)

The world continues to be hard out there. I mentioned last week that one thing I do to feel better is give money to charities and causes that are fixing whatever’s going wrong, but unfortunately that list continues to grow beyond the power of my wallet. I’m very lucky that in my day job I’m working to push decarbonisation forwards, to increase the chances of there being a future worth looking forward to - but the consequence of that is that I’m thinking about climate risk all day, every day. And that is hard. 

Not only that, but I have a tendency to be hard on myself - which is why I’ve chosen ‘gentle’ as my word of the year for 2023. I’ve already let that word guide me through at least one decision not to apply for a job which, on paper, would have been an incredible opportunity to progress in my career and open doors for the future (in a Devil Wears Prada sort of way), but which would be really, really tough. 

Industry disruptors and soul deconstructors

And smooth-talking hucksters out glad-handing each other

And the voices that implore, "You should be doing more"

To you, I can admit that I'm just too soft for all of it

Sweet Nothing - Taylor Swift

Earlier this week, I read a fantastic piece by the lovely Claire Maxwell on Emma Gannon’s Substack, The Hyphen:

The cosy delights of the Internet

Like Claire, I’ve been consciously unfollowing and muting the people whose content makes me feel bad about myself, or that I should be physically smaller or achieving bigger. So now, on any given day, my feed is full of boiled eggs with runny yolks, cinnamon buns and coffee, mountain or beach views, stacks of books, and recipes for healthy-ish food without morals attached. People to follow if you want more of this in your life:

• Julia Turshen: food writing that’s actively anti- diet culture and helping me build a healthier relationship with food

• Olivia Muenter: one half of the Bad On Paper podcast, Olivia and her husband have just moved to a gorgeous old house in the Hudson Valley and her main goal in refurbishing seems to be: cosy and warm. A dream.

• Laura Girard: her bio ‘body-friendly fitness’ absolutely sums Laura up. With a side of snarky mythbusting about ‘TikTok gym girly bubble butt’ type routines.  

• Mollie Campsie: someone with a body sort of like mine, looking amazing in clothes that are mostly within my budget (also she went to my old school, which feels very cool)

• Always Be Cozy by Alexy Arnold: The best place to start - she shares a lot on Stories, so I’ll be thumbing through those and just as I reach saturation point with ads or people selling me things, there will be a picture of gorgeous wallpaper or a steaming cup of tea. 

I’m linking to Instagram, but lots of these people also have TikToks or Substack newsletters. I use the Substack app in the same way as BlogLovin or Google Reader back in ‘peak blog era’, only now instead of lipstick swatches and ASOS hauls, my inbox is full of pieces with titles like ‘Chocolatey chocolate mousse birthday cake’ and ‘Pizza Beans & the problem with the wellness girl archetype’ (you know I have thoughts on that latter subject… for a later date).

Cancelling my New York Times subscription (this is why) has freed up a little room in my budget to support some of the writers whose Substacks I most enjoy or value and whose work I want to support. So far, that’s these:

• Savour, by Alice Vincent, the author of Rootbound, who writes about growing and changing

• Morning Person, by Leslie Stephens, whose writing about figuring life out is reassuring and heartening

• Culture Study, by Anne Helen Petersen, who brings together incredibly interesting views about culture with lighthearted fun and a positive community

• You Get In Love And Then You Die, by Ella Risbridger, who I firmly believe to be my generation’s answer to Nigella Lawson.

I’d especially like to recommend this recent piece by Alice, which is on her public feed, about all those little ‘love letters we didn’t realise we’d sent’:

small romances

What have you been intentionally curating in and out of your various feeds? 

Speak soon,

Lily