I was browsing the selection of books in my local charity shop recently when I encountered something wonderful: a microwave cookbook from the early 1980s. It included all the greatest hits you might expect from such a text. There were “recipes” that involve decanting a tin of soup into a bowl and heating it for three minutes, several cheery injunctions to microwave fish, and the hair-raising suggestion that putting an entire leg of lamb in to “roast” will somehow not result in something poisonously raw. I enjoyed flicking through the book, putting it back on the shelf and then immediately forgetting about it.

Except I didn’t really forget about it. One aspect of it stuck with me, and it was this: the author truly seemed to believe that this one device — the microwave — was the answer to every culinary conundrum. Everything in that book was predicated on that underlying principle. Never mind if most kitchens already contain at least one device that is better suited for toasting bread than a microwave. You technically can dry out bread in a microwave, and so you should. And then poach a whole salmon in it too. The versatility of the device is its entire attraction. It isn’t truly good at any of these actions, but it can sort of do them all.

This idea lingered with me because it gave me an explanation for some recent purchases I’ve made and habits I’ve been cultivating. I didn’t realise it until I read the microwave cookbook, but all of these actions were aimed at taking functions away from my phone — another apparently endlessly multifunctional device that I am beginning to suspect is best used mostly as… a phone. A tool for communicating with other people, in all the various forms that takes.

The first step wasn’t even taken by me. My husband takes a lot of photographs of documents when he visits archives and was constantly running out of space on his phone as a result. So he bought a digital camera, the kind that my mother had in the 2000s. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket but uses external storage cards you can swap out so you never run out of space. The resolution or zoom is nothing to write home about, but it is decent enough for very amateur purposes. It just takes photos, nothing else.

Soon he was bringing it with him on walks and to family events. I’ve come to really enjoy opening up his emails with the link to download the best photos from whatever we’ve done recently. I certainly like that we can experience things and have pictures to keep without having to go through everything with our phones glued to our hands. Of course, it’s still handy to be able to snap and send a quick picture when I want to, but I can now do so with no expectation that this is the only way I have to record an experience.

After that I got a digital reading device, a Supernote A5X. I much prefer to read physical books, but when ebooks were unavoidable I used to read them on my phone and feel irritated the entire time. Like the camera, the Supernote really only allows you to perform one category of action — it displays digital text and lets you annotate it. You can’t check WhatsApp or reply to emails because it just doesn’t have that capability. It’s a well designed, single purpose device.

The same could be said of the cheap MP3 player that I now keep on me most of the time. It’s tiny, barely bigger than a USB drive, but it connects easily to my bluetooth headphones and stores many days of music, podcasts and audiobooks. When I was browsing reviews before making my choice, I found one in which the purchaser had complained that this particular device had an annoying animation of a padlock closing that displayed whenever it was locked, and that this took up valuable seconds. I remembered a line from one of my favourite podcast episodes, in which Jack Antonoff sings the praises of a vintage emulator he has that, when you switch programme, pauses for about 45 seconds and displays the message “this will take a minute”. I bought the MP3 player that likewise takes its time and it is serving me well.

I should be clear: I’m not at all suggesting that phones are inherently terrible or that we should all head for the woods and write articles about it. I do, however, think that the companies that make phones and the software that runs on them have a vested financial interest in monetising our attention, and that a big part of that is convincing me that my phone is the answer to every question I ask. And once I open it to perform one task, their every effort goes into keeping me there… to do what? Scroll material with ads served in between.

There has to be a space in between cutting myself off from technology entirely and the opposite extreme of “my phone is currently both filing my taxes and testing my blood for vitamin deficiencies”, I think. So far, for me, that has taken the form of returning my phone to its core purpose as a device for communication, and seeking better solutions for its other functions.

I’m essentially recreating my personal technology situation from about 2007, when I had a phone that could make calls, receive texts and take blurry pictures and little else. I checked my email when I was at my computer and never thought about it when I wasn’t. Perhaps this is just nostalgia, but the way I remember it, it felt like the devices served me rather than the other way around. That’s what I’m trying to get back to.

For the most part. If they invent a microwave app for my phone, I can’t promise that I won’t be tempted to use it to make toast.

What I’ve been doing and reading since I last wrote to you

— I’m deep into the “zero draft” of my new book, and it’s taken me to some strange places in the last couple of weeks. These include watching an entire performance of a Molière play in French (a language I do not speak at all well) and falling down a deep rabbit hole of academic papers about Paracelsus. I could not have guessed when I first came up with the idea of writing a history of hypochondria that I would have to become an expert in 16th alchemy but here we are.

— There is very little that I miss about Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but I did used to like the occasional “view from your window” photographs he posted from readers. I’ve now found the artistic equivalent of this in the “View from the Easel” series at Hyperallergic and I highly recommend it.

— I made a podcast about queer theory and detective fiction.

— I reviewed the books I read in September in detail over on my Instagram; among other things, I returned to Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird and found it very helpful with the above book-writing process.

— I recently discovered the spy novels of Sarah Gainham and am about to start her non-fiction collection Habsburg Twilight: Tales from Vienna. If anyone with any power in publishing is reading this, please consider reissuing her — the price of secondhand Gainhams is getting ridiculous.

It wasn’t until midway through August that I realised what was happening: unlike the past fifteen years, I was having a summer. The days were long, the sea was warm, and I had unconsciously moulded myself around it all, making the most of it because it wouldn’t last forever. Work was still getting done, of course — perhaps one day I will be able to “summer” in the rich person sense, I certainly can’t now — but it had to fit around everything else. Like swimming or gardening or eating cake under the linden tree with old friends.

This state of affairs was partly created by two lengthy relocations. Taking advantage of the fact that my academic husband gets a long vacation away from his campus and that I can write anywhere, we agreed to do two stints of housesitting many hours’ drive away from where we live. The process of packing up two humans, their books, a dog and all of his accessories for a month or more felt momentous, as if when we eventually returned nothing would be quite the same again. I kept thinking about the various staff magazine jobs I have had over the past decade. As a person without children, taking leave during the school summer break was nigh-on impossible. Now, I am grateful that I no longer have to jostle for space on the leave calendar and limit myself to time away in May and November only.

There are disadvantages to working the way I do, to be sure. When friends in conventional salaried employment suggest doing something fun on a public holiday, my initial reaction is not pleasure but a stab of guilt that if I don’t work, I won’t be paid. Or when I try to work through a migraine because for the self-employed, there is no such thing as sick leave. Covid and a general terror of being destitute have prevented me from appreciating the other side of this coin, though. The one where I can work only early in the morning and late at night if I so choose, leaving a great stretch of the day free for whatever activity best suits weather and mood.

I didn’t spend two and a half months lying on a sun lounger; far from it. I’m not sure I could. Part of the reason for the housesitting was to be close to the various archives I need to consult for the book I’m working on, and I spent long afternoons in non-air conditioned libraries poring over some tedious texts. I found the various heat waves stressful and frightening, in part because trying to keep my dog’s sleeping-towel at the correct level of cool dampness required constant monitoring. A family member needed emergency surgery. Our car’s handbrake stopped working, and we had to walk several miles across Cornish fields to get it mended. I fell off a wall along the way, hit some barbed wire on the way down and bled all over my shoes.

Life continued to be as it is, in other words, but it also had space for glorious things that are only possible when it stays light past 9pm. Quite by accident, I stopped using social media completely. I was too busy doing to be documenting. (“Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history,” Rosamond Lehmann once wrote.)

It was that line from Lorde’s “Writer in the Dark” that helped me untangle these feelings about my summer. “I let the seasons change my mind,” she sings, and I realised that that’s what I had done too. The pandemic held us in a never-changing state of anxiety and inactivity, unable to adjust to the world outside because of our fear of sickness and our fear of having our hopes dashed. Planning to be different during an upcoming season felt too much like tempting fate. Even before 2020, I largely ignored the year’s shifts, scared of losing my job, of trying something else, of what might happen if I altered the rhythm for a while.

The autumn equinox takes place tomorrow in the northern hemisphere. The sun crosses the equator, heading south, marking the end of summer and anticipating the colder days ahead. We sat down with our diaries the other night, checking our various upcoming commitments and making logistical plans for the autumn. It felt like a different season of life was taking over, which would have its pleasures and pitfalls too, the contrast only possible and indeed noticeable because of what had gone before.

Having a summer; I recommend it.

What I’ve been up to since I last wrote to you

— The American publisher for my next book was announced— I’m working with Ecco Books at Harpercollins US

— Two editions of my quarterly column in the New Humanist magazine were published, one about apocalyptic TV dramas and the other assessing recent attempts to parse the MeToo movement on screen

— I was on the Media Podcast, the Standard Issue podcast and the All About Agatha podcast (and my own podcast, Shedunnit, which is also now available through the BBC Sounds app in the UK)

— Five Books interviewed me about my favourite summer mysteries

What I’ve been reading

Too many books to list here, but a lot of Cadfael and Pride and Prejudice sequels for holiday enjoyment. Non-holiday highlights have included Emilie Pine’s Note to Self and Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite.

I’ve been slowly catching up on everything I’ve read on my Instagram. Visit the “What I’m Reading” highlight on my profile to page through it all and see my thoughts on each title.

Recently, I made a trip back in time. I returned to a place that I have some very ​mixed feelings about. I braced myself to encounter the version of myself that existed there and to realise once more that she is not me and also still me. In other words: I visited the place where I went to university.

Everyone has a place like this, I think. Somewhere that they lived through formative years and now can’t bear to think too hard about. I made mine more fraught by writing about it in a book, so that when I go back there I’m not only in company with my 18 year old self having those experiences for the first time, but also the 30 year old self who painstakingly moulded them into prose for strangers to read.

The intensity of the time travel was compounded this time because of why I was there. Oxford is, it turns out, a convenient geographic mid point for various members of my immediate family — it’s about three hours’ drive from home for all of us. And so, when my parents set a date for their departure on a months-long sailing voyage, this was where we met to bid them farewell.

It was a delightful occasion. We ate, we laughed, we walked around the meadow making fun of my dog who kept jumping in the river and alarming the punters. I enjoyed myself enormously. I also couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that kept looking for differences in the way familiar gates opened or how bus routes worked. I kept seeing shadows at the edge of my vision: this is where I once jumped in the river; this is where a friend fell in while punting and lost his glasses to the muddy bottom; I think I once cried in this bathroom. It was unnerving, to be so happy in the present while past sadnesses brushed past me.

The purpose of the gathering had this same tug of pleasure-pain about it. My parents are very competent sailors — the aforementioned book will fill in more details about this if you are curious — but the idea of them crossing the Atlantic in a small sailing boat at their age does still make me anxious.

With the post-lunch coffee, my father proudly explained to my sister and I that he had invested in fancy new personal emergency beacons that, if they end up in the water, will automatically call our mobile numbers to let us know. His excitement at the cleverness of this technology temporarily obscured my understanding that in this scenario, the beacon would be attached to a parent who would be in the water as well, thousands of miles out to sea. That revelation trickled in much later when I was trying to sleep. Quite what I am supposed to do upon receiving this phone call eludes me. Call the coastguard, I suppose.

My first book is dedicated to my parents. Their lifelong habit of slipping over the horizon under sail at every chance they get is in part the reason that I write the way I do: by setting out to cover new territory that I am afraid of but try to traverse anyway.

I recently completed a grant application for the new book that I’m currently working on and it required a statement about the potential pitfalls of the project. The biggest one I could come up with was that I have no published track record in the subject matter, and thus no built-in audience for the book. It’s a risk, a much greater one than writing about something I am already known for would be. This didn’t occur to me while pitching the idea. It seemed like the obvious and only thing to do, just as my father has always been politely baffled that more people don’t sail alone across oceans for recreation.

I remembered this as I watched him demonstrate with his hands how the beacon comes to life upon contact with the water and I thought: of course I will write about this.

Although I graduated into the aftermath of the 2008 recession, I kept hold of what felt like an unobtainable dream about what work should be. I categorised everything I could do into two sets: things I enjoyed and things I was good enough at to do professionally. At the intersection of these two sets resided my dream job, I thought. Aged 21, I thought all my preferences and skills had attained their final form, you see. How wrong I was.

A decade and a half later, that vision of the overlap between what I like and what I can do has been on my mind again. I have made a version of it come true: I love to read, to over-analyse books, articles and TV shows, and to write about them. These are the things that I now get paid to do. I’m extremely lucky that this is the case. The consequence of this, though — unforeseen by baby graduate me — is that by professionalising the things you love, you change your relationship to them, sometimes for the worse.

I spend a large proportion of my work days now reading: about illness for my hypochondria book, longform journalism for The Browser newsletter, and murder mysteries for my podcast Shedunnit. Reading is what I used to sneak away from my parents to do as a child, to sink into deliciously as a teenager knowing that there was nothing else I had to do but turn pages. Now it happens on a schedule, in exchange for money. Sometimes I reach the end of the day and my “reading for fun” time and just… don’t want to do it. It feels like work. And even when you love your work, you can’t fill every waking minute with it.

It feels highly spoiled to even admit this, when so many people have to do things they don’t like or that actively harm them in order to make ends meet. I don’t think this is a real problem in the grand scheme of things. But I do think it’s worth demystifying the idea that turning your most treasured recreation into your job is the ideal end point of every career. Phrases like “side hustle” and “passion project” obscure this truth. They suggest that if you can only work out how turn your “side” hustle into your “main” hustle, you will achieve happiness and success.

But what if not everything had to be maximised for profit? I have had to learn to recognise and check the capitalist impulses I’ve imbibed from the world around me. There’s no need for my every idea and hobby to become part of some fundamental transaction. I don’t need an Etsy store to sell what I knit, or an ad- supported podcast dedicated to the obscure facts about saints that I collect. Some of what I do can go undocumented, without a price attached.

Long time readers will know that social media usage is a topic I return to often. It impinges on this too, as a more subtle intrusion of the market on our days. Perhaps I reject the obvious hustle and don’t put my craft projects up for sale on Etsy, but if I post about them on Instagram for friends and acquaintances to see, am I monetising them? A company is running ads against that content, even if I don’t see a cut of it. A financial value is still being assigned to what I’ve made.

I’m yet to work out what this means for what I read. I don’t know how to throw up that wall in my head between the murder mysteries I read because writing about them is my job, and the murder mysteries I read because I love the genre. I think that love is what makes me good at writing about them, but it’s also what keeps pulling me in these two contradictory directions. Sometimes it can feel like work has stolen all my hobbies. This is the best I’ve come up with: do what you love, but be aware that it might be painful one day.

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.

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.