When we were plotting building the Hut in the garden a couple of years ago, I spoke to a friend who had managed to create one out of reclaimed materials, ingenuity and YouTube tutorials. This continues to amaze me to this day (I called in the builder to install a stair gate) but I remember her vouch for having a shed to work in better than I do the details of its construction. “There’s nothing like being tucked up in there on a rainy day and hearing the rain patter on the roof”.

It’s been a wet old month, in a wet warm year, and it is raining while I am writing this. My tinnitus is particularly bad at the moment, I swear it gets worse over the colder seasons, but the sounds of the wind and the rain are giving the constant high-pitched whine inside my head a run for the free rent it lives there for. We built the Hut in the garden because we had a baby and now the room I used to work in is filled with tiny little socks and more Miffy paraphernalia than you’d think an 18-month-old would need (he is, truly, fanatical about Miffy). If I try to write at the kitchen table I end up with a very clean kitchen and an unruly biscuit bill.

And so here I am, feeling lucky every single day I open up the Hut door and walk into a space filled with books and words and, increasingly, spiders and dust. A space with walls so thin that I can, temporarily, forget that I am next to a housing estate in Brixton and instead pretend that I am ensconced in a moor somewhere, where there are only mountains and lakes around.

It’s been a minute (a whole season!) since the last proper savourites - although last month’s featured the giveaway of all of the books I loved over the summer (it’s the kind of perk paying subscribers get) - and as a result I’m removing the paywall on this one. Paying subscribers, thank you, you’re the best, feel free to pass this on to someone who might like it. People who are here for the occasional freebie, these are the kind of notes on the delicious things in life that lurk behind the paywall. If you like it, you know which button to press.

Right, other good things this month:

tasty morsels

cheeseboard side

September felt somewhat lacking in the back-to-school energy that I feel I am almost 60% fuelled by, and this was largely due to not being here very much. A couple of weeks ago I travelled with my beloved podcast producer to Provence, where we sat in unfathomably beautiful gardens and little town squares and did some work that will be revealed in the new year. One evening we had dinner at our hotel and were talked through a menu that we were told was traditional to the region. We ordered all of the sides possible that involved vegetables (a tomato salad, some roasted vegetables) and then were left to choose from no fewer than four different cheese-based options, meaning we ended up sharing a steak with a cheeseboard as a side. We left our phones in the room, because why would we need them, but my only regret is not taking a photo because the whole situation was a thing of beauty.

family breakfast

C hates a high chair. Has done for a good while; it’s boring and messy and the fact he is of a particular appetite doesn’t help. Anyway, for the past few months he’s sat at his own miniature table and chair in the corner of the kitchen like a tiny breakfast executive, which has been vaguely acceptable. A few weeks back the coveted Stokke Tripp-Trapp chair came into our lives thanks to a parenting WhatsApp group and we now have him sat at our height at the big table, which is still a novelty. After so long of meals being a kind of exhausting shift pattern, we now have one we can eat all together. C’s table conversation extends to singing Wind the Bobbin Up and Wheels on the Bus but it’s a start.

northern lights

I was in Norway for a few days in the middle of September, flung far into Helgeland - the last bit of Norway before you bump into the Arctic Circle, a land of mountains and glaciers and tiny little planes that ferry people about. I was there to speak about nurture at a symposium about Arctic food, and I still can’t entirely believe it happened. For four days I was able to exist just as myself, among dozens of strangers, most of whom either lived in a remote part of the Arctic Circle or had worked at Noma, or both. I learned that food could be spoken about in ways I’d never encountered and what people do on an island of six people where whole seasons pass with less than two hours of daylight a day. And I saw the Aurora Borealis! It interrupted the final course of a tasting menu dinner, and all of us southerners ran out to gaze up at the green-tinged skies from a boat jetty on a fjord, passing around a bottle of cava. I’ve thought about the northern lights a lot over the past couple of years due to work on my forthcoming book, Hark; it felt like such an arrival to see them.

hark cover

Speaking of Hark, we finally revealed the cover! It is utterly beautiful, featuring photography from Nick Knight and the prettiest endpapers ever conjured. I can boast about it like this because I had nothing to do with it. You can pre-order it here.

dog show

Our local park hosted a dog show in early September and it was a ruddy delight. Dogs dressed as celebrities (Andy Warhol! James Bond! Tina Turner!); surreally repetitive commentary from Levi Roots, creator of Reggae-Reggae Sauce; meeting some really well-named dogs; getting to see all the different people who love our park as much as we do, delighting in it all.

to eat

cherry focaccia

We had friends for dinner on Saturday and they insisted on bringing dessert, which was ironic and brilliant because I’m usually firmly of the “get seasonal fruit from the nice grocer, dress with something, put on a good plate” school of puddings and this time I had bought the ingredients to make a frangipane tart. Anyway, they arrived with a pizza box and inside was a pleasingly enormous cherry focaccia, which had the added benefit of being leftover for my hangover to snack on the next day.

pies

I ate a lot of new things in Norway, but the thing I remember most was the D-I-Pie buffet created by Anna and Sam Luntley, two chefs and bakers from two.eight.seven bakery in Southside, Glasgow. The pie casings and their fillings were laid out on two long trestle tables in a garden and featured beautiful and careful creation (“toasted yeast mayo: because ruby, because aaron, because bakery, because no fatty meat juice”; “potatoes: cooked in the buttermilk b. culture aged beer vinegar, nori seaweed, because crips”). I was surrounded by chefs, and therefore felt as conscious of correctly constructing my pie as I did my breakfast from the hotel buffet every morning, but it was a heavenly meal. two.eight.seven is closing in November; if you are remotely close enough to queue for their offerings on a Saturday morning, I strongly recommend it.

to see

now you see us

There is one week left of this quietly extraordinary exhibition at Tate Britain and I urge you to go, ideally without a toddler reluctantly strapped to your chest. Even in this context I went and sunk into some extraordinary paintings, by artists including Mary Beale and Laura Knight. So much power and energy and persistence on these canvases; I felt quite moved to realise how few of them I was familiar with.

to watch

selling sunset

We discussed this.

to read

intermezzo

I turned up to a publishing event on the release date of Sally Rooney’s new one plugged under my arm entirely by accident but it proved the perfect conversation-starter, in all honesty. I’ll be taking that approach again. I’m only midway through, so thoughts are to come, and there are endless reviews and thinkpieces on it anyway, but after a month of stark little narratives about anonymous women it’s really fun to be back in the throes of sex and grief and a narrative voice that only ever seems to get stronger.

leftovers

pomelo

Alice Vincent

·

January 10, 2024

“Pomelo!” M said, glee painted across his face. I shrugged, squeezed it into one of the four tote bags we were using to carry everything, made sure the baby didn’t fall backwards.

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