I rounded off last week with a trip to Edinburgh. I have returned to London all the better for it and with a desire to spend more time immersed in nature and outdoor activities.
It’s been a much slower week for reading. I picked up Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, but am only two chapters in. It’s a coming-of-age and coming out story that follows Lucy in her teenage years growing up in 1990s rural Ireland. A setting and plot richly packed with socio-cultural significance. Howarth captures love and lust in all its unfiltered beauty. There’s a moment when Lucy can’t stop thinking about Susannah’s chewing and her teeth. It’s exactly this strangely specific detail that haunts you when you have a secret crush.
I’m still making my way through These Precious Days by Ann Patchett, though I’ve stalled on a chapter that’s over two hours long, and I’m trying to plan for the right moment to listen in one go while undistracted.
A few other links:
Upstate by Emma Cline
- An introvert’s guide to travelling
It’s exactly a month until I touch down and arrive in Colombia. I’ve been avoiding that demonic little Duolingo bird, but I should have started learning some Spanish yesterday. So this week, I’m putting time into creating a Notion page with a cheat sheet of useful phrases and making notes of differences in local dialect. In Spain, the double ‘ll’ in a word is pronounced with a ‘y’ sound, but in Colombia, it’s more of a soft “j”. It’s a start.
A girl wearing Heelys whizzed past me at the weekend. They were a shoe I was always desperate for as a child but never had. I know deep down it all would’ve ended in disaster. I have no balance, I can’t rollerblade or ice skate, and I sometimes lose my footing on flat ground. Still, it was nice to see someone living out my dream and confirm that Heelys are just as desirable as they were twenty years ago.
When I was on the tube last week, I saw more people in my carriage reading than were on their phones! It’s a depressingly small win, but a win nonetheless. Naturally, I pulled my phone out to make a note, ruining the moment.
I am incredibly bored of live-action remakes. I haven’t mustered the energy to watch Snow White, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll watch the new Lilo & Stitch. On Saturday, I watched the original at the weekend and it was perfect as ever. The budget (or lack of) meant the animation was all two-dimensional. Backgrounds were also watercolour painted, and it feels like one of the last ‘old Disney’ movies. If the purpose of the Lilo & Stitch live-action remake was to renew interest in the original, then I would call that a success.
I was in Edinburgh this weekend and took a boat trip out to the Isle of May. We saw puffins, gannets, guillemots, kittiwakes, razorbills, shags and even some seals playing in the water too. The Isle of May has three lighthouses in total, the oldest of which has been operating since 1635. When the original beacon was set to be demolished ahead of a new construction, the Scottish novelist and poet Walter Scott played an influential role in its salvation. I spent some time looking at a few of his poems and found a line I enjoyed from Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"
It’s often mistaken as a quote from Shakespeare. But it made me think about Penelope in The Odyssey with her loom, unpicking the stitches every evening to delay the suitors from forcing her to remarry.
