The January sale is still on! Roll up, roll up, get your premium subscriptions half price.
🎧 anne with an e feels Spotify playlist. The subtitle of this playlist is ‘any dragons need slaying’ and this is exactly the playlist I put on when I want to feel like I could slay a dragon, but I could also be a big creative and take my time with the dragon-slaying. This has been on repeat for most of the last couple of months. (And if you haven’t watched the CBC/Netflix series Anne With An E… you should!)
📕 Eating for England by Nigel Slater. Nigel Slater reads this for audio himself, which means you get to hear him read his double-entendres with full deadpan deniability. A lot of fun. This reads like it’s made up of a collection of newspaper columns - Slater dots all over the UK’s eating traditions and habits, sometimes returning to themes he’s already discussed an hour before - but it was an excellent companion on some long train journeys earlier this month. (Audible - ad, affiliate link)
🍴Lidl Choco Shells. This cereal reminds me of being on holiday as a kid. What a treat.
January is dragging. Everyone I’ve spoken to, whether my colleagues at work, my pals in the board game group in my apartment building (yes, yes, it is very Thursday Murder Club), or the team behind the tills in my local branch of the ubiquitous American coffee chain, has been talking about it this week. Plus here on Substack, I’ve read a bunch of newsletters saying the same - Sarah Knight, for example, celebrating making it halfway through.
Rather than just talk about how fed up I am of the cold and the fact that it gets dark so early, and all of that… I want to talk about some of the fun things I’ve been doing lately, to help stave off the ‘blahs’. The ‘morbs’, if you will (one of my favourite pieces of defunct slang).
In short: I’ve been playing. I’m such a firm believer in the power of play for helping us feel better about life.
Last weekend, I went to a textile printing workshop run by Lovely Lydia (as she’s known on Instagram - she is indeed lovely!) - each of us came away with a tea towel and a tote bag that we’d printed, but on top of that, I came away with a deep sense of creative satisfaction.
Before we started printing our actual makes, we had time to play with the fabric paints and the stamps - and I had so much fun just experimenting with layers of different coloured paint! I found out what would happen if I offset a dark and then a light print with the same printing block, and discovered that adding silver paint onto the block with the coloured paint worked less well than adding it afterwards. I tested using the rectangular patterned Lino block Lydia had made as a repeating pattern, to see if it looked as much like a bookcase as I had imagined it might (it did). I used my fingertip to dab gold paint on top of my prints, feeling just like a kid in an art class.
I revelled in colour.
It was also a total treat to see what everyone else came up with - the lady I was next to was using letter blocks to create really interesting shapes and patterns, and some people had incredible colour combinations which I can only describe as ‘groovy’ (this is a mark of extreme praise).
You can see some photos of what we did in the ‘Workshops’ highlight on Lydia’s Instagram page - but what the photos don’t capture is the shared commitment to fun. In A-Level English Lit, we studied Philip Larkin’s poetry collection The Whitsun Weddings. In the title poem (bear with me, gang), which is about a train filling up with couples on their way to their honeymoons, there’s a single line which I think of all the time: ‘their lives would all contain this hour.’ I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of how our lives overlap with each other, how an experience we share features differently in each of our own timelines. But it’s a shared experience, on all of our timelines.
I digress!
A friend of mine works at a company that’s in the business of wholesome fun (my description, not theirs!) and we have had long discussions about the importance of fun and about prioritising fun in our lives. Joining the board game group in my apartment building has been a really great example of this - and my dance classes are too. In my tap dance classes, last week and this, we have been doing a routine to the Becky Hill/ David Guetta track Crazy What Love Can Do, including a playground-style hand-clapping section. We have been giggling like, kids in the schoolyard as we try to get our heads - and hands - around the routine, and it’s so much fun.
I have much more to say - maybe next week? - about fun in reading (and my bread-based categorisation system…). In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you do for fun.
Speak soon,
Lily
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