A stranger wrote to me this week to tell me that while reading my book they had learned a valuable lesson about marine buoyage systems. This surprised me. The Way to the Sea is a personal memoir about growing up with sailor parents. While writing it I didn’t feel like I had any special maritime expertise to impart.

If anything, I tried to err on the side of omitting seafaring terminology. I didn’t want to sound like some kind of show off pirate who says things like “Lee ho!” all the time. Even though this is something my father says regularly while sailing… and I do still occasionally mutter it to myself while driving around a sharp corner.

This reader, who I think sails in North America, said that my occasional references to the buoys that you see as you sail into the river Thames had puzzled them. At one point I describe them as “green for starboard [right], red for port [left]” and they felt sure this was wrong. To their mind, the colours ought to be the other way around. In explaining this to me, they even referenced a saying they used to remember this fact that I had never heard before: “Red, Right, Returning“.

The purpose of such buoys in a waterway is to mark the edge of the safe channel. Knowing which way around the colours go matters, as you need to know which side to pass. It’s even more important when sailing at night because buoys have lights in the relevant colour to help you work out where you are.

This apparent discrepancy in my book bothered the reader enough that they did some research about it. From this reading, they discovered that neither of us was wrong. There are actually two completely contradictory navigational systems in use around the world. You can read all about it in detail here.

Basically, the world is divided into two regions: Region A is Europe, Africa, Australasia and some of Asia and Region B is the Americas and everywhere else. In Region A, where I learned to sail, port is always red. In Region B, port is always green. So if you sailed across the Atlantic, somewhere in the middle everything flips over. This seems needlessly confusing and like it could lead to avoidable accidents. My correspondent also noted that this is a recent consolidation of a much more complicated system, in which there were 30 different marine buoyage systems around the world. The switch to two, therefore, represents a state of relative clarity.

This was all very interesting to learn about, even though I don’t plan on crossing the Atlantic in a boat any time soon. But for me the more valuable lesson from this enjoyable and civil email exchange with a total stranger about buoys was that it’s always worth doing a quick google before confidently pointing out that someone else is wrong. No matter how sure you feel of your ground.

In the couple of months after my book came out in June 2019 I received quite a lot of emails from nautically minded men “correcting” me on minor details in the book. (This is not a turn of phrase, they were all men, I went back and checked while writing this.) The more aggressive ones I ignored and the merely condescending I enjoyed answering with a brief demonstration of how there was, in fact, more than one correct way of using words to explain something.

They were all disappointing compared to this latest communication. None of them had bothered to check if there was any chance that there could be a more interesting explanation than “this woman is wrong”. Their messages were so much duller as a result.

This aspect of becoming an author wasn’t one that I anticipated. I thought of the book as something finite, which once it had been finished and published would remain static. But it continues to evolve for me, even after being on shelves for nearly two years. I’ve been taken aback by how many people have taken the trouble to look up my email and write to me once they have finished reading it — I’ve never done this myself, so I naturally assumed nobody else did — and although they tailed off after it had been out for a while I still get two or three a month. I even sometimes get real letters, written on paper. Those are the best of all.

Most of the time people want to tell me about their connection to the Thames estuary, which I’m always delighted to hear about, especially when it’s an older person who remembers the area before the docks began to close in the second half of the twentieth century. The “corrections” are rarer although still fairly frequent. This missive about buoys was the first reader response that truly surprised me. I spent about five years, on and off, immersed in this subject matter to write the book. It’s reassuring to be reminded that I still have a lot to learn.

Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in WandaVision. Credit: Marvel Studios

I filed a piece this week about the new Marvel series WandaVision, which started releasing on Disney+ on 15 January. The magazine will be out in a few weeks, and I’ll link to it then, but I will say in the meantime that I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of the show so far and mean to keep watching it. And that should mean something coming from me, because I am generally Marvel-ambivalent, if not prone to actively avoiding the franchise.

During the process of writing the article I had to steel myself to go back and watch portions of the Avengers films, because the leads of this new show appear in several of them and I thought it would make it easier to understand if I refreshed my memory of who is dead in what timeline. I started out grumpily, ready to skip any boring fight scenes and just skim through the exposition I needed, but I shocked myself by watching one movie after another in its entirety. I even watched Avengers: Endgame all the way through, and that’s a film that makes very little sense even on a second viewing.

It took me a while to locate the source of this sudden enthusiasm for Iron Man 2 (yes, I did watch that one as well). I concluded that it’s a consequence of pandemic nostalgia and now being in my eleventh month of rarely leaving my house. Even though I’ve never been a fan of these films, it used to be a fun activity to go and see one on a whim with a friend really late on a summer evening.

We would eat M&Ms and popcorn for dinner and then come out of the cinema in time to see the sun set as we walked home through the city, enjoying the feeling of having turned your brain off for three hours and consumed a lot of sugar. That’s the sensation I think I’m chasing by returning to the MCU. I can’t have the friend and the walk, but I can have the sweets and the numbing effect of watching Robert Downey Jr blow things up. I’ll take it for now.

Has anyone ever written a long essay or a book about why, when you need to do a boring but easy chore, it’s really hard to force yourself to get started? I do not find vacuuming difficult or even that unpleasant, yet whenever it’s time to do it I feel like I’ve been glued to my chair.

I have possibly found a workaround, though, which I think I first saw the YouTuber Claudia Sulewski employ in one of her too-stylish vlogs. You set a timer on your phone for 20 minutes (or even less) and do as much of the boring chore as you can get done before it goes off. Almost every time I keep going to finish the job, because once I got into it really wasn’t that bad and the satisfaction of having ticked something off is worth chasing in these flat, unchanging days. There seems to be something about turning an ongoing task into something very finite that makes it seem doable. I’d love to know why my brain is tricked by this perception.

For the fifth anniversary of our first date yesterday my husband bought me a cassette player. I think at Christmas I had been reminiscing about all the great books I listened to as a child that don’t seem to be available as digital audiobooks, and he went and found a few of them on eBay for me. A delightful gift.

The player itself is perfectly serviceable, although not the sturdiest electronic device I’ve ever used. While we were setting it up he explained that he had spent ages searching for one to buy, and that it’s pretty much impossible to find a high quality cassette player to buy new these days. The one he ended up with is mostly tailored towards people who want to convert their tapes into mp3s — I had to read several pages into the manual before it admitted that you can also just listen straight from the device with headphones. I caught myself thinking longingly of the indestructible red plastic walkman I used pretty much every day until I was about 14. I think this is might be what getting old feels like.

What is this that I’ve just read, you might be wondering. Fair question. I’ve been struggling to get round to doing this newsletter (as you might have noticed from its total non appearance recently) and it hasn’t had a settled format for a while. It’s been with me in some form since 2014, which is a long time. I’ve changed my work a bit in 2021: I started a long term writing project, I’m now editing The Browser on some days, and I’m taking a break from reporting on the podcast industry. It felt like I needed a change of routine here too.

The process of assembling a Browser edition means that I spend hours reading other people’s writing again. It’s made me really appreciate the daily blogging habits of people like Austin Kleon, the weekly column writing skills of Peter Wilby, and the way that Julian Simpson puts together Infodump. One of my favourite newsletters these days is Three Weeks, which is written in just such an episodic fashion as I’ve tried to adopt here.

This change in how I spend my time has made me miss being on a regular writing and commissioning schedule, of making it a habit to capture ideas before they drift away again. I thought I would try to write something every day this week that I could send to you and see what came out. This was the result.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

A short opening notice: I have a few signed copies of my book left for people to buy (because the hardback edition is being gradually retired from sale in favour of the paperback). If you would like one for yourself or as a gift, please use this form to order it and tell me what inscription you want.

After a year of remaining fairly aloof from the Zoom revolution — I am lucky not to need to be on it all day to teach or collaborate — this week I was suddenly plunged into it as a few public events coincided on my calendar. I’ve always enjoyed doing talks at literary festivals or conferences and public speaking isn’t something that particularly bothers me. Although different, talking on a screen is still fun and honestly, a welcome interruption to my current routine of sitting, eating, sleeping and watching Seinfeld.

For all that we have quickly acclimatised to this new way of doing things on screens, there are still these awkward little gaps in the experience that there isn’t yet the social grammar to close. The disjunction at the beginning as people are let in from the “waiting room”, and then the “no you hang up” problem at the end, when it takes slightly longer than anyone expects between clicking the “leave meeting” button for the call to actually close.

It’s the abrupt transitions that mess with my head, especially at the end of a session. After an hour or so everyone has adjusted nicely to each other’s voices and the format of the talk, but when it’s time to finish there is no gentle easing out of “public mode” as the audience drifts away, chatting to the participants and getting their books signed. It gives me mental whiplash, the sensation of going within seconds from speaking in front of 150 people to being alone in my living room with a blank computer screen. All of which is to say: if you come to any of the events I take part in (there’s another one on Sunday) I apologise if the first or last thing you see is a frozen, unflattering image of my face on your screen. I’m trying.

I’ve posted about this a few times on Twitter, but I really want to make sure that everybody knows how good the Google Arts & Culture browser extension is. If you use Chrome as your main internet browser, enabling this fills every new tab with a work of art, rather than a blank page or a tempting buffet of your most visited sites. You can choose whether you want it to show you a new work every time you open a new tab or if you want to see the same one all day before it switches to something else at midnight. I initially went for the former but found that all the art became a blur. Now I spent time with a single work for a day and look forward to what I’ll see when I come back tomorrow.

The extension chooses works at random from the vast number of institutions that have their exhibits digitised, and you can click through to read more information about them and sometimes even see them in situ in the gallery using Google Street View. Here is a small sample of the ones that I’ve liked enough to screenshot over the past couple of months:

One word of warning: if you do like a particular piece, you need to save its link and details before it disappears, because there’s no way to see your own art history, as it were.

Something really overdue has happened this week around the Reply All podcast, which if you’re not familiar, is a narrative storytelling show loosely about the internet and is (the makers say) downloaded around five million times a month. For the last two weeks, the podcast has published episodes as part of a mini series called “The Test Kitchen”, essentially a detailed recap of the events that lead to a mass staff exodus at American food media brand Bon Appetit last summer over racial discrimination and disparities in hiring and compensation. I used to enjoy watching their cooking videos on YouTube, and the wholesale unravelling of the now departed editor’s regime has been enlightening to observe as someone who has worked in magazines myself. I also used to report regularly on the podcast industry, and even though I’m not doing that work right now I felt compelled to take a closer look at this.

The Bon Appetit story has been covered well before, of course, principally by The Sporkful and Rachel Premack at Business Insider. What the Reply All treatment tried to add was a longer view of a quickly evolving internet scandal: the first episode, after all, starts at a point many years prior to summer 2020. I also found the decision only to feature the voices of the employees who were on the receiving end of this discrimination in the actual show interesting — the host says she talked to the various white managers involved, but used their interviews as background only in the final podcast.

I was intrigued by this choice because I thought it had potential to shift the narrative on from just a comparison between two competing versions of the same events or interactions. Rather than getting too bogged down in “He said this” / “I don’t remember that conversation like that”, we get to hear in detail how emotionally isolating and corrosive it is to be doing your work without fault and yet have no idea how to progress within a company because the secret steps to advancement aren’t shared with people like you. I think a lot of people who have felt voiceless in a bad workplace will hear something they recognise.

But there’s a much bigger story going on around Reply All than merely a couple of reported episodes. Gimlet Media, the Spotify subsidiary that makes this podcast, is now facing the consequences of being exactly the kind of toxic workplace that is profiled on the show. Eric Eddings, co host of a podcast called The Nod that I loved and a former Gimlet employee himself, has laid it all out in this Twitter thread, which is very much worth digesting in its own right. In it, he talks about the way a secretive clique existed around Reply All that shut out and even in some cases actively worked against Black people and people of colour in the wider organisation who were attempting to unionise and negotiate better pay and working conditions. The fact that this was all happening when the Spotify acquisition was on the horizon, which was personally worth many millions to some of the original staffers, seems more than coincidental.

The host of “The Test Kitchen” series is heavily implicated in this, and both she and one of Reply All‘s main hosts have now both posted (somewhat remorseful?) statements and announced their departures from the podcast. At the time that I’m writing this, there has been no news about whether the remaining two episodes about Bon Appetit — which were due to deal with the magazine’s implosion of summer 2020 — will be published as planned, or indeed ever.

More former and current Gimlet employees have followed Eric’s lead and posted about their negative experiences at the company (this is a good summary thread). In many ways it all fits into the classic pattern of a tiny startup run by a small group of friends that grows into an influential corporation very quickly, with leaders who never quite let go of the idea that they’re just bootstrapping something with their mates and the cliquey, closed off culture that flows from that. Except this was a media company built on the illusion that it prized transparency and self reflection — as shown through their fun podcast about creating their own podcast business — and it attracted many, many fans on that basis. Now, that audience is finally getting a small glimpse into what it was really like to work there, and it isn’t fun at all.

I think if there’s a point to take away here, it’s that racism, discrimination and toxicity in the media (and other industries too) is a system wide problem, not one that’s confined to a single organisation or group of people. Which is not to absolve anyone for their actions; both things can be true simultaneously. Eric’s co-host on The Nod Brittany Luse has posted about how this isn’t the first time she’s experienced this kind of behaviour in the workplace and deep down, we all knew from the start that Bon Appetit wasn’t the only shitty media organisation, or organisation of any kind, out there. There’s just a depressing symmetry to this situation that draws the eye: one outlet reported on the bad stuff at another, only to be exposed for perpetuating the same problems. Shows like Reply All pride themselves on their extensive editing process, too, so “The Test Kitchen” series will have gone through multiple rounds of feedback and discussion, yet nobody with authority felt that it was necessary or relevant to examine their company’s own history in relation to this work they were planning to publish to an audience of millions. That is very telling, I think.

While I’ve been thinking about this particular case study this week, I’ve been imagining the alternate reality that Brittany proposed on Twitter, in which she and Eric were still working at Gimlet and could tackle the Bon Appetit story themselves. But of course, by the time it came around, they were no longer employed there, in large part they’ve said because of the treatment they received. And even if they had still been employees, would they have been given the time, resources and latitude (as per my previous article about “The Problem of the Inconsequential Quest”) to make an expansive and detailed series about racial discrimination like “The Test Kitchen”? I have my doubts about that.

Seven podcast episodes I have enjoyed recently:

The Scandalous Sounds of Bridgerton by Switched On Pop

Sorry by The Allusionist (which is highly relevant to the previous item!)

Interview with Gaelic Poet, Crofter and Hip Hop Producer Griogair Labhruidh by Scotland Outdoors

Coping With a Mild Case of Covid by Oh, I Like That

The Case for Sweatpants by The Experiment

86 Days by Nocturne

Tristram Shandy by On the Road with Penguin Classics

I would like to suggest that you make Claudia Roden’s orange and almond cake this weekend. It is delicious and it’s also extremely satisfying to bake. It’s not like normal baking, which I think I understand — you combine fat, flour and a raising agent which the heat of the oven activates to produce a risen crumb. This is something other. It’s also an admirably flexible recipe, because I used basically none of the quantities it specifies owing to the feast-and-famine way I shop now, and it still came out perfectly.

To make it, you must first boil entire oranges in water for several hours. Then you cut them in half, pick out the bitter pips, and place these soggy fruits in a blender. You run it until everything, skin, pith, flesh, the lot, has been reduced to a thick orangey goop. Into this you mix eggs, ground almonds, sugar and a minuscule amount of baking powder, and then when you bake this liquid it somehow turns into a delicious cake with a dense, moist texture. Incredible.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I fell over this week. My unreliable left ankle gave way on the second from bottom stair and I toppled forwards, landing on hands and knees on the hard wooden floor of the hall. Somewhere in between I let go of the tea tray I had been carrying and shards of broken china went everywhere. It made such a noise that my neighbour, just leaving her house for a walk in the freezing wind, came and knocked on the door to make sure that everything was alright.

Apart from the perennial ankle problem and a few minor bruises, I was unhurt. The sharp pieces of pottery all missed me. I didn’t bump my head on anything on the way down. I did spend the rest of the day trying to pin down an unpleasant unmoored sensation that I think was slight shock. It took my body a few hours to process that sudden transition from upright to prone and the loss of control it implied. Maybe it’s because nothing else happens, but I immediately started referring to this incident with capital letters, as if I was the Provincial Lady.

The much lamented casualties of My Fall were two bowls from a now discontinued Spode dinner set and a treasured tea cup with a badger on it that my sister gave me in 2013. My husband managed to find secondhand bowls for purchase on eBay, but it seems like my cup is not to be replaced: Pinterest is full of artsy shots of it from about 2015, but there are none for sale. I feel sadder than I should about this.

A piece of advice I’ve heard a lot in the last year is to use the fancy stuff. Don’t squirrel away your best china or nicest towels for a ‘best’ that never arrives. Burn your fanciest candle on your worst day. Eat your cereal with the best silver. Enjoy it all now, because who knows what trouble is just around the corner.

I generally subscribe to this. I don’t believe in some imaginary future occasion that will be fitting for all the nice things I’ve saved up to buy. We deserve good things now. But the flip side of this, which I had never really considered before but was forced to confront while looking at the broken pieces of my cherished badger mug, is that if you use it, you have to be prepared to lose it.

The phrase “narrative non fiction” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I’ve never read a book that is better described this way. My friend Samira’s debut Karachi Vice reads like a novel, with brilliantly drawn characters woven through a complex plot that has you turning pages as with a thriller, but a thriller that also teaches you a lot about the city of Karachi and its people.

I’m going to be talking to Samira about the book and how she reported it on Sunday at 6pm GMT on Zoom as part of the Conversations with The Browser series — sign up here if you’d like to attend, it’s free and there will be the chance to ask questions.

For me, the feeling of having finished something that I’ve been working on for a long time is like the happy glow I get after doing exercise: it’s an intoxicating high but it doesn’t linger long enough to motivate me to do it more often. I finally completed a draft of the book proposal that I’ve been writing on and off for… three years? It still has a long way to go, but I’m trying to hold onto the buzz of completion for as long as I can to remind me why it’s worth seeing things through (and going for runs even when it’s cold).

My writing pace has been accelerating over the last few weeks, which I put down to two things: the almost-arrival of spring and my rediscovery of the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations. The first is self explanatory, the mere fact that is now light at 5pm has done wonders for my mood, but the second is a bit odd. I’m not a Muse fan, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them live (Oskar will tell me if I’m wrong about that). I listened to their cover of “Feeling Good” a bit when it first came out, but I haven’t checked in with their discography in a decade.

But recently the serendipity of the iPod “shuffle songs” feature — yes, I do still use a real iPod, every day — brought the Muse song “Starlight” and thus this whole album to my attention. The rapid, throbbing bass line and rhythm section worked like a spell. When running, I’m terrible for going too fast just so my feet are hitting the pavement in time with the counts in a song, and it felt like my fingers were doing the same, racing to keep up with the high hat in “Knights of Cydonia”. On Wednesday I put the album on repeat for six hours and wrote 6,000 not-terrible words. I think fancy music people laughed at Stephenie Meyer when she thanked the band effusively in the acknowledgements of the Twilight books, but she knew what she was talking about.

Image: Roake Studio

There’s been a lot of chatter about “emotional spending” on my feeds this week, prompted I think by this article and Twitter threads such as this one and this one. I would like to humbly submit my entry: these oversized brass hairpins. Is there a better metaphor for 2021 than me buying something shiny from an Instagram ad with which to spear the coiled up mess of my frizzy, overlong quarantine locks and pretend it’s all fine? I’ll wait.

That isn’t my hair in the photo, by the way, that’s a picture I borrowed from Roake Studio, purveyors of these fine hair implements. I don’t know how to take a picture of the back of my head, or indeed if anyone would want to look at it if I did.

These hairpins give me the shoved up yet securely elegant hair of my dreams. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve been hunting for something like them since my early teens. I have moved through life leaving a trail of fake tortoiseshell combs, oversized crocodile clips and those ponytail turner thingys in my wake. Hair that is up gives me the same feeling of invincible preparedness as wearing dungarees. But it has to be a style that is achieved with a couple of quick stabs and twists — spending ages with elastic bands and kirby grips just isn’t it.

I’m far from alone in this. Violet Baudelaire was able to get her hair out of the way when an invention was needed with just a single ribbon:

And Miss de Vine, a favourite character of mine from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, had perpetual trouble with her hairpins. I love the early scene in that book where another character assists her by pushing them back in and she declares that she now feels “a marvellous sense of security”. That’s most certainly what I’m after, too.

I would like to draw your attention to this most extraordinary interview with Joan Didion, who is now 86 and apparently seeing out the pandemic at her home in New York. Now, I like The Year of Magical Thinking and Slouching Towards Bethlehem as much as any other youngish woman who fancies herself a writer, but I do also have a fair amount of scepticism about The Cult of Didion, and I think this piece rather bears that out.

I’m not sure whether this interview took place over Zoom, on the phone, or via email, but Didion’s replies are as near to monosyllabic as they could be without being actually rude. The introduction that the interviewer wrote for the transcript is far longer than her subject’s answers. There is absolutely nothing quotable; most of them are some version of “I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anything to say,” which is a verbatim answer she gave to a question.

She doesn’t have a book to promote or anything, so I can’t work out why Didion agreed to do this interview when she so clearly didn’t want to. Boredom? Maybe. It reminds me of Brie Larson’s infamous Wired autocomplete interview, in which she so clearly didn’t want to be there and took every question as a kind of personal attack. Send me more examples if you have them, I’m starting a collection of unnecessarily grumpy celebrity interviews. We’ve all got new hobbies now.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

One unexpected but delightful consequence of this newsletter format I’m doing at the moment is the volume of replies I get. Far more of you than before get in touch to comment on something I’ve included or to share a related recommendation, and I love it. Probably the biggest single topic in my inbox in the last week has been digital notetaking, which I mentioned in passing last week that I have been experimenting with recently. So, as promised, I’ll go into more detail.

The problem I’ve been trying to solve with my research technique is this: I take in much more information when I take notes by hand, but if I don’t then type them up I will most likely never refer to them again. And typing them up feels pointless, like I’m doing the work twice. I have tried typing notes from books and articles straight into the computer, of course, but I find that a) holding the book open and typing into a laptop is very uncomfortable b) I just don’t digest the information as well as when I write with a pen.

I’m a devotee of Scrivener for organising research and writing (again, I can talk more about why I favour this software in another edition if people are interested) and I really like having all of my notes in that one database where they are searchable. My handwritten notes, though, exist separately from that and therefore aren’t usually integrated very well into the final product. Having two overlapping systems frustrates me and so I’ve long been hunting for a way of bringing them together.

When I saw last summer that the latest iOS for iPad included a handwriting recognition tool called “Scribble”, I was intrigued. It converts handwriting done using the Apple Pencil into typed text. I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos of people demonstrating this and comparing the relative merits of different notetaking apps before eventually deciding to give this ago. I bought a secondhand iPad and the first generation Apple Pencil and started trying it out.

It works even better than I was expecting. I can easily have an open book and the tablet on my small bureau desk at the same time, and I write straight onto the tablet just as I would with paper. It took a little time for me to get used to Scribble’s pacing — I initially was writing too fast for it — but now that I’m acclimatised it works well. Most of the time it converts my writing perfectly, and whenever it encounters a proper noun it doesn’t know I just use the mini keyboard afterwards to quickly correct it.

Best of all, when I’m finished a set of notes, I use the sync feature on the Apple Notes app to bring them up on my computer and then I copy them straight into Scrivener. Everything now lives in one place, all neatly filed in the labyrinth of folders and tags that my brain needs to understand anything.

This technique has also been good for reading articles and books that come as PDFs. I bought an app called GoodNotes which allows you to import and annotate files. I write in the margins of the PDF as I read on the tablet, or sometimes in an additional notes page inside the app if I need more space. I can then export the file with my annotations if I want, or take the text out alone. GoodNotes has a great feature where you can select handwritten text and copy it so that when you paste elsewhere it comes out as typed text.

Again, the accuracy of this really startled me. I remember trying for weeks to run OCR processes on old magazine pages in about 2013 and getting less than 50 per cent of the words out, and for some reason I just assumed the technology wouldn’t have moved on very far since. But it really has, and although I’ve only been doing this for a couple of months, I’m fairly confident that this is a good long term solution to my problem. I can write by hand and feel like I’m taking in information, but I can then search my notes in my main database. Best of both worlds.

If you have a similar dilemma and are interested in researching this process more, I would recommend the videos of this adorably earnest student to give you an idea of what is possible and the capabilities of the various apps. I don’t personally spend as long as he does making my notes look lovely, but each to their own. For some reason “GoodNotes vs Notability” is a really popular topic for people making videos about this, so search for that on YouTube and you’ll get lots of demonstrations.

Because I write a daily podcast recommendation newsletter, I listen to a lot of podcasts. And I’ll be honest: most of them don’t make of an impression. Maybe I’m just having audio ennui, but even the ones I hear that are objectively interesting and well made sound like everything else coming out at the moment.

Imagine my delight, then, when I stumbled across The Imposter, a Canadian series about the arts that woke my ears right up. The show sadly hasn’t published an episode since 2018, but there’s lots of great stuff still on the feed, from this episode about music for plants to this one about a virtual reality game that uses your emotions to power a holographic pop star that helps imaginary soldiers feel less depressed about war. Weird, yes, but nothing like everything else I hear.

My old New Statesman colleague Nicky Woolf has had a harder year that most: his father was in the hospital for 306 days after catching Covid-19, only recently returning home with life changing aftereffects to manage. Nicky has now written about this experience, and I strongly recommend reading the piece in full.

There are lots of parts that floored me, but I’ll just highlight two here. First, in March 2020, when Nicky had to call an ambulance after finding his dad facedown at the breakfast table, he didn’t get an operator who could dispatch paramedics immediately. He got a recorded message, because the emergency services in the UK were so overwhelmed, and there was a long wait for help to come. That terrified me.

We’re so lucky here to be able to rely on free healthcare, and I’ve always believed that although the NHS is a bit creaky at times, it will always come through when I need it. I’ll never forget the meeting my family had with a famous London cancer specialist when I was very ill, and my father (born and raised in a country that does not have state funded healthcare) asking whether it was worth investing my parents’ life savings in doing my treatment privately. The answer? The food might be slightly better, but I’d be seen by the same doctors, cared for by the same nurses, and receive the same drugs. The differences were merely aesthetic. Going on the NHS did not mean I had any less of a chance.

I’m sure we can all point to the things in the last year that have brought the reality of this situation home to us, and that observation of Nicky’s about calling 911 and nobody answering is one of those for me. And then there was this part, about the way superstition surfaces when you’re dealing with unrelenting trauma:

“I developed rituals: I pressed my lips to a childhood teddy bear for luck before going to bed each night. We have a framed telegram sent by my grandfather to my grandmother when he got back from Dunkirk, a family treasure I began touching every time I passed it, like a religious relic.”

I think lots of us will find that very familiar. Read the article for more.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you will know that I really like obituaries — writing them is, ghoulishly, a job I would love to have one day. This week I read three extremely different obituaries for three very different women, and I’d like to share them with you.

Leith Mullings, anthropologist. Reading about the life of this distinguished scholar brought me into contact with “Sojourner syndrome”, a term she coined for the intersection of oppressions that Black women experience and the impact this has on health outcomes.

Nina Alexandrovna Andreeva, Soviet revolutionary. I’m really recommending this one for the writing style — it’s probably the most Stalinist thing I’ve ever read.

Margaret Marilyn DeAdder, “self described Queen Bitch”. This one is very idiosyncratic and full of family in jokes, but this line really got me: “In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you do something nice for somebody else unexpectedly, and without explanation.”

I find elaborate cooking projects a good way of distracting myself. They keep your hands busy and unlike crochet, knitting or embroidery, you can eat the results. Over the last year I have: kneaded a lot of sourdough, experimented with the perfect recipe for the softest white roll, and made a lot of fancy soups. I even made Samin Nosrat’s “Big Lasanga”, which took an entire day because it involves making your own pasta from scratch.

Even though I am a big fan of Kate Young’s blog and books, it’s only just occurred me to combine my love for books and my love of food. I’ve once more fallen very deeply into my perpetual Habsburg rabbit hole, via the newish Martyn Rady book and a recent rereading of Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and now all I want to make are foods from pre WW1 Vienna. So far we’ve had a fancy dinner of Schnitzel, Kartoffelknödel and Rotkohl, plus a huge vat of Erbsensuppe for lunches. This weekend I’m going to make Vanillekipferl and maybe Sachertorte. Apfelstrudel is definitely in my future too.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

For me, life is all about small, iterative improvements at the moment. Big plans are shelved, for obvious reasons. I’m oddly lucky in this regard, because I’ve had this happen to me before: when I was very ill at the age of 17, I similarly had to just turn off the future as if it was a tap to tighten because there was no way of knowing what I would be fit for in six months’ time. That was perhaps harder than this, because it affected only me. Apart from my immediate family, everyone else’s plans remained largely intact, leaving me feeling like I’d involuntarily dropped out of the world.

It was my mother who devised for us a new way of thinking about what was to come. She zoomed right in, concerning herself only with this afternoon or the day after tomorrow. She showed me that while there needs to be something to look forward to, in a pinch it doesn’t have to be a month’s holiday to the destination of your dreams. It can be surprise scones for tea today or the arrival of soft new pyjamas. I’ve been trying to replicate this for myself since Christmas, as I’ve glowered my way through the longest January of my life, which brings me to what I really wanted to write about here: my prized collection of helpful plastic things.

I have five so far. Each is the product of lengthy research and much reading of online reviews. I go in search of them because I have a small and annoying problem and because I have hope that an inexpensive solution exists. Each one has individually provided a small measure of improvement to my days. In case you are also irked by these same things, I will list and link them:

This silicone head massager*. I’ve done a not terrible job of trimming my own hair in the last few months, but my head always hurts at the end of the day and I powerfully miss the aggressive head massages you get when they wash your hair at the hairdresser’s. This device provides a similar sensation if you grind it repeatedly into your scalp and when very tense, it feels amazing.This pill box*. I have medication I’m supposed to take every day and I often find it difficult to remember if I’ve done it or not. This problem has completely gone away now that I own one of these week-long organisers, which has a labeled compartment for each day so once it’s empty, you know you’ve already taken the medicine. Filling it up on a Sunday evening is also an easy task that makes me feel productive and accomplished.This bath plug thingy*. If you have a bath similar to mine, ie a standard depth domestic bath with an overflow drain let into the side under the taps, then you will be familiar with this issue. You run the perfect bath, get into it, and then the crucial two inches of water that keeps your chest warm immediately starts to drain away because it is “too full”. This circular plastic device suctions onto the side of the bath over the overflow and gives an adult who isn’t going to splash too much just enough extra water height to have a nice full bath. Just in case, it does also have a hole in the top so that if you fall asleep with the tap running you won’t flood the room. This wrist rest*. I had to get a new laptop last spring because my beloved 2014 model couldn’t cope with all the Zooms and I immediately started getting terrible wrist pain because of the cramped way in which the trackpad was designed. I solved this eventually by getting an external mouse and this squishy cushion to rest my wrist on while I use it. The pain dissipated and I enjoy poking it when I’m bored.These stylus attachments*. I recently got a refurbished iPad and I’m finding the handwriting recognition option brilliant for taking notes from books. I no longer have to juggle laptop and book on the desk, I can just scribble straight onto the tablet and it turns into searchable text (I will write more about this process another time if anyone cares, I have strong feelings about handwriting notes in the digital age). However, the design of the first generation Apple Pencil is not brilliant, with lots of little detachable parts that are easily lost. Rather than forking out for the shiny new one, I got the cheaper original but bought this inexpensive set of tethers for its cap, charging converter and so on. The same company even makes a magnetic grip that sticks it to the tablet so you don’t lose the pencil itself.

These* are Amazon affiliate links, I should say. I don’t especially love supporting the Bezos empire, but unfortunately it is the most reliable purveyor of this kind of small plastic device that I’ve found. I’m not interested in profiting off your purchases, either — if you do buy something through these links, my account is credited with about three pence for referring you — but I thought it might be fun to see how many people also need a bath plug cover. I’ll be matching any money that results from this newsletter and adding it to my regular monthly donation to my local foodbank, which is delivering food parcels to people in need during lockdown.

I really enjoy Nigella Lawson’s Instagram. Mostly this is because I like her recipes and it’s a good source of culinary inspiration. I recently made her take on minestrone soup after seeing a picture of it that she posted and I would recommend it. Very hearty.

However, there is another reason that keeps me going back to her account, and it is her constant struggle with people who don’t grasp how to get from the picture of the food to the recipe. This is mostly Instagram’s fault, because for some reason probably to do with wanting to keep you on the app they don’t allow working links in photo captions. Nigella (or her social media team?) therefore do what lots of people do, which is have one link in her account’s bio that goes to a landing page from which you can then navigate to the photo/recipe that you want.

I think this has become the standard workaround, with the phrase “link in bio” prevalent as a shorthand to tell followers where to look. In my experience of the app, anyway, it is used so often that it doesn’t merit a longer explanation. Except on Nigella’s account, that is. Her every caption includes a step by step breakdown of how to access her bio and click the link there, and yet her every post also has multiple comments from people asking some version of “this looks great but how do I get the recipe??”. I have no good guess why she is singled out like this — perhaps lots of people join Instagram just to follow Nigella? But for some reason, I enjoy observing this phenomenon and always scroll down on every post to see it in action.

I’ve been trying out a to do list variation this week called time blocking, which I think I first heard about in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work* — a book, by the way, that I have started reading or listening to at least half a dozen times and have somehow never finished, more on why that is another day. I do this on paper, but there are various apps that offer it — the Todoist app website has a good primer on how it works. My own version involves writing a quick list of everything I want to do and then drawing a little timetable for the day that allocates an amount of time to each task.

I have found it useful so far. Of course, I don’t stick to it rigidly — lunch usually takes longer than I give it! — but it makes me feel less anxious about which order to do things in. I think Newport recommends this technique as a way of allowing yourself to do one thing at a time without interruption, but the main attraction for me is that it forces me to be realistic about what I can do in a single day.

My list of tasks is always too long, but by mapping them onto the working day in priority order, I know from the start which ones just aren’t going to fit and I can immediately bump them from my expectations. As a consequence, I get to the evening feeling fairly satisfied that I achieved what I set out to do, and without any guilt hanging over me about the things I meant to get to but didn’t manage to address. It’s a feeling I like.

My friend Cal’s book Islands of Abandonment* has just been published and I’m enjoying reading it so much. It’s always lovely to consume the final version of something that you’ve heard about in its various unfinished forms — like seeing a film after watching the DVD extras first — and this is no different. She writes gorgeously, which I was expecting of course, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how upbeat the whole argument is when it comes to the consequences of our changing climate. I’ve been listening to the How To Save A Planet podcast recently as well, and although there’s only a little overlap in subject matter, the show and the book share a clear-eyed yet non-gloomy take on our environmental situation. I didn’t realise how much I needed that.

We’ve been watching a French-Belgian crime drama on Netflix this week, La Forêt (minor spoilers follow). It’s very obviously influenced by Scandi series like The Killing and The Bridge, as seen in the damaged female protagonists and the overhead shots of the wilderness (in this case, the forests of the Ardennes). The story is fairly gripping even if the characters are forgettable, but the aspect that keeps striking me is the cultural differences when it comes to policing.

The investigators in this show are constantly hamstrung by judges reluctant to grant search warrants or permission to examine phone records. The police captain is always explaining in the early episodes that even though two teenage girls have gone missing and a third has already been found dead, the authorities want more evidence that they have been abducted or harmed before they will be allowed to track their phones to aid the search.

I don’t know much about privacy legislation in France and Belgium, but even in this fictional form it’s such a contrast with UK and US dramas where detectives seem to be allowed to comb through a person’s entire digital footprint the second they are connected to a case. I’d need to know much more about the relative real world legislative positions to have a proper opinion, but on screen I found it a refreshing and intriguing limitation on the modern detective.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I think I have found my ideal pen. It is the Pilot G-Tec C4 and its extremely fine nib and smooth ink flow suits my tiny scratchy handwriting perfectly. I first bought one because it is the pen that Francis Spufford uses and I am not above imitating everything that one of my favourite writers does in the hope that it will work on me like a spell.

I already can’t imagine using another pen by choice. I don’t think I’ll ever completely abandon my two preferred fountain pens — a Lamy and a Cross — but even they can’t give me, good as they are, that frictionless feeling of there being nothing between my thoughts and the page that the Pilot G-Tec C4 provides.

Francis Spufford spoke about his pen choice on an episode of an excellent podcast called Better Known, which itself deserves to be better known. He talked about the satisfaction of having a growing shelf of filled notebooks, even if all they contain is shopping lists and random phrases, and the joy of finding that this best of pens comes in multiple exciting colours. “I’m partial to the black-black and the sepia brown, but if you want you can write in turquoise with them,” he says. “I’ve never had any turquoise ideas so far, but I’m open to persuasion.” I, too, dream of one day having turquoise ideas.

Related: my top three Spufford books, in descending order, are: Unapologetic, I May Be Some Time and Golden Hill. If you haven’t read any of his work yet, you have a treat ahead of you.

And what am I using the ideal pen for? Mostly writing lists of everything that I need to do, but also drafting sections of articles and chapters. I don’t normally write longhand like this, but I’ve found that when I’m struggling to make myself sit down to something using pen and paper instead of computer can somehow feel less pressured. Like it doesn’t really count if it’s just scribbled down on a random page; I can put the notebook away and pretend it never happened. Naturally, feeling the weight of expectations lift conversely makes me write better, and then I have to type up the scribbles because they’re worth saving. Being my own typist is a chore I quite enjoy.

The handwritten lists are also back because I’ve finally ditched the app I used to use for organising myself. Nothing against Todoist, which was just doing the job it was built for, but as the undone recurring tasks built up inside it I started feeling like I was receiving a nuclear nagging every time I innocently tried to check when my next deadline was. Also, I realised that it had done a good job of training me in the manner of Pavlov’s dog and that scared me; the little popping noise it made when I marked a task complete had begun to sound to me like the sweetest sound on Earth.

The notebook and pen feel much more like a tool that I am making use of, rather than a semi-sentient consciousness that is manipulating me and always telling me off. As an added bonus, the notebook really just has the one purpose, which is to be written in by me, and I can’t wander off and look at Instagram while thinking about my to do list like I can with an app.

If I don’t get to the end of the list by the evening — and when does anyone, let’s be honest — a quick stroke of the pen crosses the rest out and I start again in the morning. Hardly revolutionary, I know, but if you are like me and prone to being seduced by the lure of productivity systems peddling false promises perhaps you need to hear this too: a pen and paper is always as good, if not better.

What I’ve been up to

I haven’t published any new work this week, but I have been frantically beavering away on two exciting podcast projects that I hope are going to be very good. One of them will be available for you to put in your ears much sooner than the other; subscribe here to get it as soon as its published.

Other than that, I’m gearing up for a season of home renovation and the associated chaos. I have looked at so many near-identical kitchen worktop samples that I have lost the ability to tell the difference between shades of brown, but as long as the supply chain gods smile on us, the current crumbling laminate’s days are numbered.

What I’m listening to, reading, watching

Under the Influence did a good episode about bookstagram. How to write an email. How to start getting stronger. Malcolm Gladwell on… laundry? Why not.

I consumed Ruby Tandoh’s new book Cook As You Are very rapidly and then made the tomato and fennel risotto. Delicious. I also gobbled down Laura Wood’s A Single Thread of Moonlight with similar rapidity, which is a YA historical romance in the style of Eva Ibbotson.

The thing I am watching is under embargo so I can’t talk about it. What I am not watching: Squid Game.

Until next time,

Caroline

Links to bookshop.org and Blackwell’s are affiliate links, I donate any and all money this ever generates to the Chester branch of Women’s Aid.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter (although I’m not really there anymore) and Instagram (where I am, arguably, too much).

I read a lot of articles every day. My job at The Browser means that I’m generally sifting for the five most original and interesting pieces I can find that would still be as good if you read them a year from now to include in the newsletter. This criteria automatically excludes anything too topical or embedded in the current moment; my most common reaction when reading is “I love this, but it will make no sense to me in a week’s time”.

Very occasionally, I find an article that prompts the opposite response, such as this one. I could read these short first person accounts from people who track down missing pets tomorrow or in forty years’ time and I would love them just as much. The combination of altruism and expertise is intoxicating to me. For instance:

“They say the golden window for tracking down a missing person is within the first 72 hours; with cats moving quickly, a similar approach will also lead to the best results. But if they’re not found immediately, don’t give up: hiding cats can stay hidden for weeks on end before needing to venture out, desperate for food and water. Knowing a cat’s personality will determine nearly everything I do.”

Sharon from New Hampshire takes a psychological approach to finding missing cats and birds, interviewing the owners about their pets’ traits and then using that data to find likely places to look. I’m imagining Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, except it’s a retired school administrator hunting for runaway animals. Would absolutely read a 6,000 word New Yorker style profile about this.

Like a lot of people, I listened to Taylor Swift’s first quarantine album folklore obsessively last year when it first came out, and then it dropped out of my rotation as 2020 drew to a close. This song, “The Lakes”, was the bonus track on the deluxe edition, though, and it’s the only one that has stuck — albeit in this live version. As much as I appreciate the swooping strings of the album track, there’s an openness to this performance that I really enjoy. As well as the fact that TSwift managed to do an (almost) non corny Wordsworth / word’s worth pun in the lyrics.

Don’t laugh at me, but I’ve only just realised that you can click “reject all” on the cookie warnings that pop up everywhere online now and still access the websites. I hadn’t ever given it a great deal of thought, but my people pleasing instinct had — I must click “accept”, I unconsciously theorised, because I don’t want a collection of inanimate pixels to be cross with me.

However, I now know better thanks to Terms and Conditions, a little in-browser game that satirises the ridiculous lengths that publishers will go to trick you into consenting to being tracked. Your mission as the reader is to make it through 29 increasingly surreal pop ups without accepting or opting in to anything. There’s even a “review” mode at the end where it will show you all the times you unknowingly said “yes” when you thought you were saying “no”.

In my ever present quest for romcoms that are not distractingly problematic, I recently watched the 2019 film Plus One (on Netflix in the UK, your mileage may vary according to territory). Two friends from college, played by Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine, decide to be each other’s “plus one” for the ludicrous number of weddings they have to attend in a single summer since they have hit that age when everyone they know is getting married. It’s a classic friends-to-lovers scenario that avid readers of fanfiction will be very familiar with.

And I enjoyed it greatly, not least because it includes possibly my favourite comic cemetery scene, and it does indeed fit my rubric. The plot doesn’t rely on a woman’s questionable consent or assume that all men are automatically irresistible. But when it was over I still had a lot of questions.

What jobs do these characters have that they can fly to Hawaii for one wedding and still afford to stay in hotels for about six more? Do they have any non-marrying friends? Where do they even live? Maybe these kind of gaps are just inherent to the romcom genre and nobody except me cares. But if you’ve seen it and you wondered too, then let me know.

No Complaints and my Writing Hour will be taking a summer break now. I’ll be back in a few weeks.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

If you have any of those “on this day” features enabled on your social media accounts, you have like me probably started receiving reminders of how one year ago, you were doing a lot of things you took for granted for the last time without knowing it. I’ve already had the last time I hugged my parents (23rd February), the last time I went to London (24th February), the last time I went to a chamber choir rehearsal (26th February), and I’m now morbidly anticipating the pictures of final cinema trips, restaurant meals, and coffees with friends.

In the past decade I’ve oscillated back and forth between wanting to post a lot on Twitter and Instagram and wanting nothing to do with them. If anyone has ever wondered why I have a different handle on each (and nobody has, I can guarantee it) it’s because I got spooked by some creepy messages on the latter a few years ago and deleted my account, only to discover when I tried to revivify it years later that the app wouldn’t let me have my old name back, even though nobody else is using it. I similarly deleted the Facebook account that I’d had since university and then started a new one that I now don’t use. I’m still unsure how much of myself I want to be on the internet, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer to that question.

I found this piece about how the pandemic has shifted the writer’s attitude to photographs interesting in light of all of these visual reminders of our past lives. She is surprised to find that she misses the old fashioned activity of having photos printed and slotting them into physical albums, because when there is no curation or limit on what we can snap with our phones, it’s much harder to assemble a meaningful parade of memories to peruse when times get tough. I likewise have no desire to flip through the many blurry photos of my dog or screenshots of memes I like that live on my phone, but I do want to be reminded of what I enjoyed doing last week, last month or last year.

I’ve made a couple of changes to accommodate this shift. I started posting on Instagram much more, because for better or worse that’s the way I look at other people’s photos, and my own. We also bought an actual camera, a little pocket digital one of the kind my mum had in 2007, and have been taking photographs with that instead of our phones. It’s nice to be able to snap away while on an outing without also feeling the pull to check email because your phone is out anyway, and I have grand plans about sifting through the photos once a quarter and making them into an album. Who knows if I will actually do it, but just the idea is comforting enough, for now.

Call for contributions! I’m finding myself oddly fascinated by other people’s posts about what their “last real life day” was, as the first anniversary rolls around. I’ll write about mine next week, and I’d love to include snippets from readers around the world about theirs too as well — reply to this email with a couple of sentences describing what the last “normal” thing you did before going into quarantine/lockdown last year was, and I’ll publish a smorgasbord of them in the next newsletter.

How often do you clean your glasses? I’ve realised that I do it only very occasionally, when I notice that the world has acquired a certain soft focus that it does not actually possess. Even then, I don’t spend much time on this task, and am probably just smearing the same dirt around into a new pattern and then putting them back on.

I mention this terrible habit of mine for two reasons. Firstly, I recently watched this video, where after not cleaning their glasses for a week the maker then looks at them under a microscope. You should really watch it to appreciate the full horror of it, but I’ll just say: it is extremely greasy on there.

Secondly, I thought about my non glasses cleaning for more than half a second and realised how silly it is that I’m washing my hands a lot but not the object that lives on my face that I touch regularly. Since I was doing a Lakeland order anyway (yes, there must still be some joy in life, and buying a special brush that lets me clean behind the radiators was it this week) I bought some glasses wipes to take care of any microscopic wriggly things that might be living on my lenses. Shudder.

It’s such a simple thing, but it made such a difference. When I was a teenager my eyesight would be worse every year when I went to get it tested, and I would walk out of the opticians with a new prescription, suddenly able to see individual leaves on the trees for the first time in months. Cleaning my glasses was a lot like that, and I shall be doing it often from now on.

I’ve been really enjoying listening to poetry podcasts recently — the kind where someone with a lovely voice reads a piece to you, and maybe shares a few thoughts about it afterwards. Here are three of my favourite shows / poems that I’ve heard lately.

“All That Life” by Dawn Garisch on Badilisha Poetry

“WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline” by Layli Long Soldier on Poetry Unbound

“What The Tide Brings In” by John O’Donnell on Words Lightly Spoken

I watched the Billie Eilish documentary The World’s A Little Blurry this week and I do not recommend it unless you want to feel like you’re viewing an Instagram Story that lasts two hours and twenty minutes.

To my mind, the most interesting thing about Eilish is her voice and her music, but the film spends relatively little time dwelling on the path she trod from self publishing songs on SoundCloud to a major deal and billions of streams.

Instead, it is made up of endlessly meandering shots of her walking onto the stage for performances, texting a boyfriend who never bothers to show up for her, and getting (understandably!) stressed when she is injured or her shows have technical difficulties.

If this were to be your first contact with Billie Eilish, you could be forgiven for thinking that she had been groomed for pop stardom from babyhood, rather than coming sideways at the music industry with a sound that was completely different to what was making megahits at the time.

There is so much about the film that I generally like that I was surprised to feel so negatively about it. I enjoy documentaries that are stitched together entirely from unplanned footage with no narration or sit down interviews, and I also think it’s illuminating to see a very public person in their private mode.

There are even a few tantalising moments that made me think the film would go deeper on the music, such as when her brother (who is her producer and songwriting partner) tells their mother out of Billie’s earshot that the record label has asked him to steer her towards making a more “mainstream” song, or when it shows the duo recording vocal tracks in his bedroom and her hating every single note of her own voice. But neither theme is followed up, and all that’s left is a kind of unstructured tour diary that is deeply unsatisfying. Recommendations for better music documentaries will be gratefully received.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

I cannot remember ever watching for the advent of spring so avidly as I have this year. Every dry day, every flash of colour as a crocus pokes out from the sodden grass, every extra minute of daylight past 4pm has detonated a small, juicy bloom of serotonin in my dehydrated brain. On Monday, when I woke up to a perfectly blue sky traversed by small, fluffy white clouds I wanted to cry with joy.

I’m usually someone who revels in autumn and winter, in windy wet days when I can legitimately curl up by the fire with a book. But of course there is a difference between not wanting to go out in bad weather and not being allowed to really go anywhere – the removal of the choice is what chafes.

Having become so intensely local, the incremental changes of the seasons are that much more noticeable too. In the absence of any other events to discuss, my husband and I have taken to updating each other in detail on the antics of the fox family who live in the park and the never-ending repair work on a nearby municipal fountain. On the day that the village gardeners clipped the hedges, I rushed home from an otherwise extremely dull walk to share my topiary gossip.

Even though the pandemic restrictions aren’t going to change where I live for another month, at least, it feels like the warmer weather gives me back some of my old life. With no need to pile on layers and laboriously lace up outdoor shoes, I can more easily pop out for a quick stroll when I need some fresh air. There is no longer a narrow window of about six hours when it is light enough to make being outside feel beneficial. And of course, if the weather is better it means that time is actually passing, no matter what my brain might think.

I’m so annoyed to discover that the morning people of this world have been right all along. After weeks of sleeping badly and failing to do any meaningful work before midday, I finally summoned the willpower from somewhere to charge my phone at night in another room and try going to sleep before 2am. Having internally sneered at the concept of “sleep hygiene” for ages, I expected nothing to change.

Imagine my frustrated chagrin, then, when I slept deeply for eight hours at a time several nights in a row and started waking naturally at 7am. I even went running before 8am on two separate occasions! I don’t mind admitting that I was wrong about blue light being a real thing, but I am reluctant to acknowledge that my mother — who has never, as far as I’m aware, stayed in bed past 7.30am in her life — was right about the knock on effect of my lying-in habits.

I was supposed to publish a new episode of my podcast, Shedunnit, on Wednesday, but a few days ahead of my deadline to send the final script and recordings to my editor I had to face the realisation that there just weren’t enough waking hours left to get it done properly. I spent an afternoon agonising over what I could do about this before finally accepting that I needed to take a pause. My capacity for pulling allnighters while still working full days is limited at the moment, and since this was an episode with multiple interviewees who don’t all speak English as their first language, it required more time than I could give it if I was going to both do it well and stick to the original schedule.

Believe it or not, making this decision to skip an episode — I reran a classic from the archive instead like I’m This American Life or something — represents serious progress from me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve worked all night to keep putting out this show every other Wednesday, and accepting that this isn’t sustainable is a new kind of self awareness.

I’ve always been a big advocate of consistency for regularly-publishing podcasts. People sometimes ask me for advice on what the best day of the week is to put out new episodes, and my answer is always “the same day you did it last week/fortnight/month”. Even in the age of binge listening and full series drops, I still think there’s value in building up the trust with your audience that will hear from you when you said you’d be there. I’ve certainly found that there is a marked dip in listenership if I publish 24 hours later than usual without announcing the delay ahead of time.

But consistency isn’t everything. Faced with the choice between putting out a mediocre episode on time or a good one a fortnight later, in this instance I chose the latter. I hope listeners eventually think it was worth the wait.

I got several delightful messages from people who took my advice in last week’s newsletter and made the Claudia Roden cake that requires you to boil and then blend entire oranges. I enjoyed seeing pictures of your bakes enormously, so I think we’ll have a recipe corner for the second edition in a row.

This time, I want to suggest that you try making Sohla El-Waylly’s Pizza Party Strata. I’m afraid I don’t have a photograph of mine to share because we scoffed it too quickly (full disclosure, this wasn’t my first time making it this week; I like it so much that it’s already entered our weeknight rotation) but you can watch a video of her making it here.

“Strata” is a word that El-Waylly coined by combining “frittata” and “stuffing”, and that is pretty much what this dish is: a mash up of a frittata and that American-style stuffing that is made by pouring an egg mixture over bread croutons and baking it. You can really make it with any combination of flavours that you like, but this one is designed to mimic pizza.

I don’t think there’s anything revelatory about the flavours here — cheese, tomato, bread, egg, what’s not to like — nor is it an exciting technique like the blend-an-orange-to-make-cake situation. It’s really a dump and bake recipe. The thrill here is in the texture. Even though it is full of bread and cheese and egg, there is something oddly light and fluffy about this dish, especially if you follow her instructions and use properly stale or dehydrated bread to make it. It’s almost like a soufflé. Unlike real pizza, you can eat a lot of this and not need to lie down in a carb coma afterwards. Ideal.

There was a great edition of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist this week about the so called “provisional life”. This section sums it up nicely:

Allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you’d never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life’s troubles. What if I’ll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days?

I still feel the pull of this thought pattern occasionally, the idea that there is an ideal state of me just out of reach that if I work hard enough I will attain. I’m not nearly so prone to this as I used to be, though, because I was mostly cured of expecting things to magically change for me by a series of coincidental political events that happened roughly bewteen 2013 and 2017. I was an editor at a British current affairs magazine during this time, and one year after another things beyond my control happened that just kept ratcheting up my workload and stress level.

First Scotland had a bitter independent campaign and referendum in 2013/4, then we had a UK general election, then there was the Brexit referendum, and then another general election. Every time, I felt sure that the degradation in my enjoyment of work was temporary, that things would revert to some kind of manageable “normal” once the short term stress abated. But it never did: each time, the heightened level of work became the new expectation even after the election results were in, and when the next incident came along, everything just stepped up again.

Eventually, I had to confront the fact that there was no rewind button and my job had changed into something else even while I was doing it. If it wasn’t suiting me anymore, then I had to do something about that myself, rather than forlornly and passively waiting for that idealised state of… 2011? 2012? to return. I’m not sure what point exactly I wanted to go back go, but I think Barack Obama was president and tweets were still mostly appearing in my timeline chronologically. Halcyon days.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: receive my daily podcast recommendations from The Listener, read me weekly in The Browser, listen to my fortnightly podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

Everyone has lived through their own pandemic, but one entirely common experience is that memory of the last time we inhabited the world without fear or restriction. Depending on where you are in the world or what you do, this will have happened at a different point in the first three months of 2020. For many in Europe and America, where we were late to catch on to the severity of the virus and the necessity of isolation, the one year anniversary of that final excursion into what is now The Before is passing around now.

My own last day was 9 March 2020. It was a Monday, the first day of the week that would end with Tom Hanks testing positive for Covid-19 and America cancelling all major sports fixtures. The work I did was entirely unmemorable, so I went back through my email to check up on myself — I did revisions on this piece for Granta, it turns out, and I filed an article about the rise of multi-language podcasting that would publish the next day. I also sent some pictures from our weekend dog walk to my mother in law, and I was interested to see now that this one could have been taken at any point since then. This is pretty much all I have done when going outside in the last year. Things have changed a lot, and also not really at all.

It was the evening of that last day that lingers in my memory. My husband is an academic and he had arranged to take a group of students to see a screening of Brief Encounter at the Philharmonic in Liverpool. Mid afternoon, he messaged me to say there had been a drop out, so I tucked the dog up with his favourite treats for the evening and took the train into the city just as it was getting dark. We sat in a coffee shop and shared some food, and then waited in the lobby of the concert hall to give the students their tickets as they arrived.

Nobody was wearing masks. There was no hand sanitiser, or marks on the floor for social distancing purposes. The usual pre-event bustle was all around us, with people rushing in to pick up tickets, find their friends, and get to their seats. This seems absurd to me now, given that we had already been reading the terrible news from China and Italy for weeks, and the fact that my own father was only just recovering from a mysteriously terrible flu he seemed to have caught from a fellow charity volunteer who had just returned from visiting family in Wuhan. And yet.

I love Brief Encounter. I love the music, I love the accents, the trains, the clothes, the food, the flimsiness of the doomed romance. I even love the “thank you for coming back to me” bit at the end, and anticipate it eagerly throughout like it’s a big showstopping finale. I have been multiple times to Carnforth station, where much of it was filmed in 1945, to visit the little museum on the platform. Eating cake in the refreshment room there again is quite high up my list of post vaccination priorities.

On that last evening, I enjoyed the film all over again — seeing it on a big screen in the acoustics of a hall built for orchestral performance is a pleasure that far surpasses squinting at a small laptop screen. It was a sold out show, with an audience mostly of elderly people. I try not to dwell on that too much, given what we know now about mortality rates.

After the film, we lingered by the door again to make sure that the students found their transport back to campus safely. While we waited, I chatted to one of my husband’s colleagues who had also been in the audience. That conversation is where I now draw the line of before and after, because after my blissfully unaware evening the virus did intrude then, as it has every day since.

The person I spoke to then was supposed to be attending a conference in America the coming weekend, and was feeling unsure about whether it was safe to fly: the news was concerning, but if they didn’t go the funding for a larger project they were running would be withdrawn. I agreed that they probably shouldn’t travel, and then thought little more about it as events overtook us in the following days. About a fortnight later, my husband mentioned that this colleague had gone to New Orleans for the weekend after all, and upon their return had immediately gone off sick with Covid. They are only now coming back to full time work after a year of illness.

At the end of that evening, though, I didn’t know that that would be the last face to face conversation I would have without thinking about whether I was two metres away from the other speaker or not. We walked back to the car in the freezing March wind and drove home, not knowing that over a year later we still wouldn’t have driven back into the city yet. I haven’t watched Brief Encounter since then either, and I don’t know when I will again.

I asked in last week’s newsletter and on my Instagram what you did on your last day. This is what you sent me.

Greeting the return of my daughter from her London job. She’s still here!
— Anonymous

I work in STEM education, so we celebrate Pi(e) Day every year. Last year, we held our Pi(e) Day on 16th March, which unbeknownst to us was the final day that we would end up working from the office. That afternoon we were told that we would all be working from home for the next little while, and we haven’t been back since. It wasn’t quite normal since we had modified Pi(e) Day with Covid precautions, which included serving the pies while wearing gloves, instead of our usual serve-yourself method, and making everyone take the pie back to their desks instead of chatting while we ate. But it still sticks in my brain as the final “normal” thing that I got to do before everything really changed.
— Mallory

Last normal trip out — a Pizza Express and the Harlem Globetrotters at the Leeds Arena on 4th March.
— Adam

Immediately prior to the quarantine, I lost two aunts within a week of each other. So my last real day was a Monday. I was off work for my aunt’s funeral and I remember going into the funeral home with hand sanitiser everywhere. We went to my aunt’s church where they fed us and we spent time reminiscing. I remember riding back with my parents to Ohio (we were in Indiana) and getting messages from coworkers that we were being sent home to work from home the next day. Our governor announced the quarantine and I had to rush into work to get my computer and supplies to work from home. I felt so surreal because I had been barely paying attention to the Covid news — one aunt was in the hospital for several weeks before she passed and my other passed right before her funeral.
It was a small consolation that we managed to have both of their funerals and grieve together before the shutdown. Many people didn’t get that opportunity.
— Tiffany

Finished work early, got the bus home, met an old friend in our local pub for some drinks.
— Anonymous

Met my new boyfriend’s sister, cuddled a dog in the pub, and had my first Morley’s.
— Katie

I think it was the Saturday before NYC shut down and my partner and I went into Manhattan to get glasses which was just an evolving failure (wrong locations, Warby Parker’s flagship store in SoHo when they had a HUGE anniversary party) but we wound up wandering around and getting snacks and drinks at different cafés because it was one of those early spring warm days that happen in New York in March, and it was great. The next day I went to a women’s soccer game with friends in New Jersey which was fun but also I remember a lot of announcements about being careful because of Covid and I remember wondering if going was a mistake but also there was so little information and so much confusion I dunno what I could’ve done differently with the information that I had.
— Alicia

Went on a date getting burritos and watching Little Women in the movie theatre.
— Anonymous

In the pub playing pool with old uni friends before stumbling home eating chips, glorious.
— Abbi

I was on spring break from law school and knew I had boatloads of studying to do, but I blew it off to join my dad for a day of jeeping in Moab (a couple hours’ drive). I’m so glad that I did. We hiked to Corona Arch (partially as a joke and partially because I’d never been), and then spent the day enjoying the beautiful scenery and each other’s company. He’s a doctor and leads a youth group in his church congregation. On our way home, he got a series of emails postponing and then canceling the youth camp planned for the next month. That’s when we knew that things would be quite different, but I’m so glad we spent that time together because I haven’t seen him in months.
— Jackie

I went to a second run theatre by myself to see Little Women. A man sobbed when Beth died.
— Stef

Visited my godson who had just been born. Didn’t even think to wear a mask on the train!
— Amanda

I went to Florida for vacation with my mom and sisters on 7th March. Things were normal when we got to our condo on the beach, though we were reading the news with various levels of alarm throughout the week. By the end of the week, we saw people selling toilet paper for $5 a roll on the side of the road as we drove to the airport. I didn’t have a mask so on the plane ride home I wore my jacket backwards and pulled the hood up over my face every time I was near people. I got home on a Saturday. On Sunday 15th March, my fiancé and I went over to our friend’s house so that she could marry us. I needed to get on my fiancé’s health insurance sooner than we were actually planning to get married (September 2020, now postponed) so we were having my coworker/friend sign our marriage license. We stood 6 feet apart in her living room while she signed the document and then we left and that was the last time I saw her. So I guess the last normal thing I did was get married?
— Anonymous

I flew back from Hong Kong without telling my parents, who were at the time stranded on a cruise off Cape Horn, and waited in the house for them to get back.
— Anonymous

Cancelled our wedding, which was not fun.
— Georgia

My office declared work from home on 13th March when they heard news of the situation worsening. The second week of the month is generally busy on account of three birthday celebrations. Last year — maybe as a last hurrah or an almost farewell — I spent time with most of my friends. (I stay with my family, so there was no fear of missing them.) On the day before I started quarantining, we went to a lovely café with not-so-good food. The birthday girl gifted us roses, which was a pleasant and weird surprise. We played with a couple of dogs who happened to visit at the same time. We left with smiles on our faces. And as the days went on, the flowers wilted.
— Kriti

Headed to London for a conference, went for dinner after, stayed in a hotel where, amazingly, they gave us free wheatgrass shots to help protect against Covid, and then went for my last brunch the next morning. I miss brunch.
— Emma

Went to see King Creosote at the Barbican.
— Annabelle

I was working from home on 17th March while I wait for the car to be repaired. My parents were visiting to play with their granddaughter. An emergency work meeting was called to say they were closing the site. I sheepishly headed downstairs to ask my dad to drive me to the office to get my chair, monitor and peripherals home. He spent the journey teasing me for fussing. I was expecting a few weeks of this though and wanted to be comfortable.
— Paul

I went minigolfing with ten (!) friends. We were laughing. Corona felt too far fetched a concept to be real.
— Noemi

I found it really moving to read through all of that and imagine you all doing your last things. I’ll be back with a regular newsletter next week, and in the meantime, don’t forget that if you ever want to talk to me about something you read here, you can just hit reply on the email and it come straight to my inbox.

Until next time,

Caroline

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: get my article and podcast recommendations in The Browser, listen to my murder mystery podcast Shedunnit, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.