The 1st of September falling on a Monday is a perfect alignment. The muscle memory of a new school year beginning is a welcome wave of renewed hope and excitement for the last four months of the year. I dare not even say I’ve been enjoying some cosy evenings and the sun setting a bit earlier this past week. I shall come to disbelieve I ever uttered the sentence, looking back with hindsight in the miserable depths of another perpetually long grey winter.
Perhaps I have just been enjoying the stillness and the slower pace after a summer packed with travel and hopping about. I know that I need time for solitude and recuperation. I am an introvert and get my energy from slow, quiet, contemplative activities, which I have willfully revelled in this week. Consider me recharged and ready to go again.
I picked up Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I so desperately wanted to enjoy it, but I’m not. Booker Prize winners and nominees often break the moulds of traditional literary fiction in structure, genre, and technique. It can be difficult to know what to expect. Has anyone else read it - if so, what were your thoughts?
Other reads:
The Burning Man orgy dome was destroyed by a storm
The Summer I Turned Pretty is my TV obsession
An interview with Jade Thirlwall
Being the ‘low maintenance friend’ made me lonelier than ever
Brain rot and the lure of the Labubu
"Divine Feminine" advice on TikTok is part of the Alt-Right pipeline
How sweet are the covers of the Penguin Archive collection? They were released earlier this year - a selection of ninety classic titles to celebrate 90 years of Penguin Books. I saw them for the first time on Sunday, sitting in the Barbican gift shop. Naturally, I bought two. A Dill Pickle by Katherine Mansfield and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. Both are very short reads that I’m excited to pick up from my ever-growing TBR pile.
In fairness, I remember the mortification of my phone (a silver Motorola Razr V3, big flex) going off (playing Heartbroken by T2 ft. Jodie) in my RE lesson a mere two weeks after starting big school in year seven. If that’s not a sentence that would send a Victorian child into a coma, I don’t know what would.
Joe & Seph’s milk chocolate popcorn bites are the most perfectly indulgent little pieces of heaven. I am quite addicted. The ratio of chocolate to popcorn is, as Goldilocks would say, just right. And the popcorn still retains its crunch for pure satisfaction. It’s always great to discover a new snack and hyperfixate on it until you eat so much of it that one day you’re suddenly repulsed by it. I’m getting flashbacks to my discovery of Werther’s Original popcorn - which I have yet to try.
I got into a bit of a rabbit hole on their website and am equally disgusted and intrigued by some of their flavour combinations. Espresso martini, anyone?
Where do you cut your toenails? Every viable option still, somehow, feels wrong. I think the only sort of okay place is at a nail salon. Still, the idea of toenail clippings flying about all over the floor gives me the heebie jeebies. At home, I’ve tried hovering over bins, doing gymnastics to reach the sink (why?) and have settled on the bath as the best option. Anywhere but public transport, I suppose.
In truth, I lurched when I saw the copy of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night at the Barbican. It’s the poem my brother stood up and read in front of everyone at my dad’s funeral. Most think Thomas wrote it for his father, though some dispute this because his father didn’t die until five years after the poem was written.
Either way, the narrator implores someone who is approaching death not to die, despite acknowledging the inevitability of the end. They’re asked instead to fight for their life. Passively accepting death is not an option when being alive is something so precious, fragile, and invaluable. This is the first stanza.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
