I love this sort of thing. It’s exactly the Midsomer Murders brand of village activity that makes me tick, along with church bric-a-brac sales and whole community al fresco carol services outside the local pub.

The Scarecrow Trail is an even more elite type of rural event because it involves a) a printed paper map and b) the opportunity to peer into the gardens and windows of all the houses you want to stick your nose into.

There are few things I’d rather spend my Sunday morning doing than wandering about with a little village map and casting a professional eye* over all of the Scarecrow entries.

*subjective

What a lark. Throw in a cake tent and some craft stalls selling gingerbread man tree decorations and I’m in my absolute element.

Here are a selection of the Feckenham Scarecrows: can you guess which I liked best?

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Well I just had an absolutely charming thing happen, as I sat merrily typing away at my laptop, sipping a mug of hot chocolate (OK, I admit defeat, autumn has started): I got verbally abused. In my own home!

WHILST WEARING CASHMERE!

Not sure why wearing cashmere makes the whole thing seem worse; I suppose what I’m trying to convey is that I was very comfortably in my safe space. Cocooned. Warm and fuzzy and looking forward to a morning of light admin and online pottering before my midday Zoom meeting.

Anyway, my phone rang and the display showed No Caller ID. And yes I know we’re not supposed to pick those up, the unidentified ones, but I was expecting a call about a refund on a bench from a relatively large company and so it seemed perfectly feasible that this would be they.

Bit of context: I am plagued by scam callers on my mobile phone. It’s a real issue. At least four or five calls a day. I don’t know whether any of you are too, but if you are then you will know how badly it interrupts your flow. Even if you do the thing where you stay silent when you pick up, and wait for the other person to speak, even if you quickly realise it’s a scam and shut it down within ten seconds, even if you give them no response at all to go by, it still somehow takes a little chunk out of your day. Injects a tiny dose of annoyance and negativity into your life.

So I know I shouldn’t have answered, that it was against protocol, but what I did do right was to stay silent once I’d picked up the call. This is so (apparently) AI can’t clone your voice and then use it for evil deeds, but I have to say that it is quite difficult to stay quiet when you’ve spent forty-five years giving an immediate greeting.

I’m almost desperate to speak. I managed four seconds of silence but then the bloody Bird Clock that we have on the kitchen wall started hooting like an owl, because it it had turned noon, and the hooting was so loud that I felt suddenly ridiculous holding the phone and not saying anything.

“Hello?” I said, with some degree of relief.

Now. I knew this man wasn’t from American Express as soon as he started talking - not because he sounded too relaxed, though that was part of it (he sounded like he was lying down!) but because he didn’t ask forty-thousand security questions before proceeding with the call. Nobody can talk about anything on the phone, these days, without taking you through a series of security questions.

(Which I also object to, by the way, because how do you know you’re giving your security question answers to a legitimate person? It’s an absolute bloody minefield!)

Anyway, here was his opening gambit:

“We’ve had some activity on your American Express card in the Manchester area, at PC World, and need to check the payments.”

Talk about showing your hand too early! Where was the sense of mystique, where was his attempt to set the scene and reel me in with an elaborately thought-out ruse? It was so blindingly, unbelievably fake.

After a little pause (because I was trying to rack my brains as to whether I might, in fact, have some kind of AMEX card hidden away somewhere, frozen in an ice block or hidden behind a wobbly brick in the back wall, and I didn’t want to completely shoot myself in the foot if he did happen to be from American Express, probability 4.5 out of 100, but still, not nothing) I asked him for his direct number so that I could call him back.

Personally, I thought that this was quite a polite way of dealing with the situation: if he was from American Express, which wasn’t at all likely, I wouldn’t have been overly snippy with him and wouldn’t have to apologise for my terrible manners and if he wasn’t from American Express then, well, I was generously giving him a graceful exit. He could have just made up a number and hung up and we could have both gone on with our days.

Instead he said

“F*ck you, you c*nt b*tch.”

EXCUSEZ MOI?

If I was the sort of person who asked to speak to the manager then I would absolutely have asked to speak to the manager. If phone scammers even have a manager. “Put me onto your Scammer Boss!” Chief Scammer. King of the Rats. Slightly better bluetooth headset than everyone else and more vape breaks.

Honestly, though! It was the phone call equivalent of a slap! I felt completely violated. I haven’t been called that since I moved someone’s towels off an illegally reserved sunlounger at Ikos. (Joke.) I couldn’t believe it! But then, on the other hand, why was I even surprised? I mean this person’s one objective is to deceive, steal and essentially financially ruin an innocent person’s day/week/year/life. Why would they be above swearing?

For some reason, phone scammers have always gotten off quite lightly in my mind; if I were to draw a rudimentary “pyramid of criminals” with rapists and murderers and so on right at the tip, then the people in the phone scamming industry would be bumbling around at the base of the pyramid, carrying clipboards and wearing really disheartened expressions.

I suppose that mentally I’d mixed them up with people who work in call centres, which is a ridiculous error, but also explains why I had let them off so lightly. Because I also worked in a call centre (car insurance!) for a good few years (1996-2001) and it could be very dull and unrewarding at times.

Not so dull and unrewarding, though, that I signed off my unsuccessful sales calls with “f*ck you, c*nt!” I usually gave a disappointed sigh and went for a Marlboro Light out of the fire exit.

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God it’s grim, isn’t it. The whole scamming thing. Especially if you’re a trusting person, as I am, who doesn’t like confrontation, and who has so many crazy online things going on that virtually any fabricated story seems vaguely feasible.

“You’re ringing about the seventy cans of Mutti chopped tomatoes that were ordered on a credit card? Well now that you mention it, yes that was me!”

“There’s been unusual activity, someone ordered three different wizard outfits? Sounds about right.”

I know two people who have recently almost come a cropper to huge scams involving money transfers and VAT bills, and these are quite savvy, business-minded people who are not elderly and have the digital know-how to be able to cross-check things and sense something amiss. Imagine how easily you could be scammed if you didn’t really know how to use a computer? Or online banking?

Ugh.

But I have found an answer to these scam calls interrupting my day and it is this:

How To Stop Scam Calls on Your iPhone

(You will have to Google to see if there is an Android equivalent, if you’re Android, because I have no idea how to use anything that isn’t Mac. I have only ever used ios operating systems which is why when my Mum asks me how to retrieve a photo on her Samsung phone she may as well ask me to draw the Stations of the Cross using hieroglyphics. And a quill.)

On iPhone, go into SETTINGS.

Then scroll all the way down to APPS. (Important, that - don’t go into Mobile Settings or Carrier Settings or what have you, it’s not in there.)

Scroll through the seventeen thousand apps in the list, including all the ones you downloaded on a frenzy in 2021 that have never been opened again - I have an app that’s a spirit level! never used! - all the way to PHONE.

In PHONE, go down until you see a section called Screen Unknown Calls. There are three options: Never, Ask Reason for Calling, or Silence.

If you have Never ticked, which is the default setting, then all calls, whatever they are, will come through to your phone and your phone will ring. If you answer it, and it’s a scam call, you’ll have to deal with getting rid of them.

If you tick Silence, then any calls from an unknown number or with Caller ID withheld will get sent straight to voicemail. This is not a bad option, really - a great interim setting if you don’t want to go the whole hog, below. If it’s a scam, the chances are they won’t leave a message and if they do then you’ll probably pick up on the fact it’s a scam. If it’s someone genuine who needs to get hold of you then they will leave a message and a number for you to call them back.

Good, isn’t it? You don’t have to pay for this service, by the way - I was paying an extra £2 per month to EE on top of my contract for a scanning system that tells you when it suspects spam, but the problem I found with this was that I could see the number on the screen and part of my brain always thought “but what if it’s the fabric shop/school/dentist’s/car service department?” And then it still took a chunk out of my day, albeit tiny, because I’d be wondering whether I recognised the number.

(The scanning is pretty accurate, I think - it does it in real time apparently, so it’s fast at picking up and logging new scam numbers.)

So that didn’t work for me. I cancelled it. What did work (until I took it off because I was expecting a few important calls and didn’t want to miss them, but then forgot to turn the setting back on, duh!) was the iPhone Screen Unknown Calls options.

There’s a final one called Ask Reason for Calling. This is the most extreme and sets up a sort of free concierge in your phone that asks any callers not in your contacts list their name and reason for calling. This information then appears as text on your screen - the caller is still on the line, it’s all very quick - and you can decide whether to answer or not.

I have to say that when it was on, I found the whole “phone ringing and text appearing at the same time” really quite panicky and stressful, a bit l was in an action movie and tasked with hot-wiring a car whilst making a decision on a million dollar crypto deal. Although it’s the most impressive option, as it puts a nice layer between you and the potential scam caller, it’s also the most busy. There’s something comforting about Silence in that it takes it all out of your hands, diverts it directly to voicemail (only if it isn’t a known contact, by the way, anyone else gets through!) and basically deals with all of your problems efficiently and quietly without you even being aware of it.

I imagine it’s what it’s like being J-Lo or someone, where you have staff who are paid to deal with the chaos around you so that you can just stroll around in a relaxed manner. Two metres to the side there’s a guy with a life-size cut-out of you where the hands and feet have been cut off and the eyes are routed out and he’s spraying in your direction with a water pistol filled with his own blood, but you and your cream leather Hermes Birkin are sauntering along, none the wiser.

Personally, I think it’s a great free function on the iPhone. The reason I turned my setting back off again was that I became paranoid about missing urgent calls, but honestly if someone you don’t know is trying to get hold of you and it’s that important, they will absolutely leave a voicemail saying CALL ME BACK IT’S YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER AND I’M ABOUT TO THROW YOUR NEW DISHWASHER OVER THE GAAAAAATE! and if it’s even more important than that, say a hospital appointment or similar, then they will email too.

I wish I’d never reverted back to default. I’d have had a lovely, relaxing day today, rather than being called a “c*nt bitch”. The worst thing about it was he promptly hung up - I didn’t even have right to reply!

God damn him. The Scam Caller Who Verbally Abused Me. Sounds like the next Bond movie! Bit like The Spy Who Loved Me, but with a man lying down next to a table of burner phones, instead of Roger Moore in a suit.

When I told Rich about it he said, “there must be a way of tracing the call,” and we both spent a while trying to find out, though Rich’s mission was to report the number for abusive behaviour, whereas mine was to call it back and have the final word.

“BASTARD!” is what I would have shouted, for what it’s worth. Very old school.

The roof terrace outside of our bedroom is one of the very best things about where we live. a) the views are just brilliant, it’s like being in a film, b) it’s a total sun trap and at least five degrees hotter (how?! why?!) than being in the garden below it and c) the kids sort of forget that it is there and so don’t come looking for me.

Here’s a brief lookabout on my roof terrace:

So yes, I got distracted. I had to dig out the shorts that I had packed away in one of those horrendous plastic storage things that are half bag, half box, and I had to spritz myself with the remains of the holiday suntan lotion (was actually very satisfying, using up the dregs) because the heat was all such a lovely surprise, but I had a few completely blissful hours of feeling the warmth creep into my very bones.

I did at one point lie down on the tiles, cushion beneath head but otherwise unpadded, and have a little sleep. I couldn’t be bothered to go and get the sunlounger cushions because these had already been stowed away, and reading in the sun had sent me into such a completely soporific state that I just lay right down on the tiles and had a forty minute nap!

I’m going to pay for that, I tell you. I can already feel that my neck has sort of seized to my shoulders, if that is possible. I can add the new pains to my existing ones: muscle pains in places I didn’t even know I had muscles, thanks to the Sculpt 30 exercise classes I’ve been doing. I mentioned these classes in my last post (they are on the Peloton app) but didn’t go into too much detail at the time: they are a cross between Pilates and Barre and quite often they activate teeny, tiny muscles that are a complete surprise.

After the paywall: haunted houses and the £500 calendar I can’t find an unbiased review on…

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Well guess who was in her winter coat by Monday, kicking through piles of fallen leaves and wondering whether it was time to pop the heating on?

Last Thursday’s post did not age well. Although, to be fair, when I wrote it I was referring to the month of September as a whole, and how I’d started to see content for “the cosy season” popping up almost the minute I got off the plane from my summer holidays at the end of August: the sentiment was there, my timing was just unfortunate.

I also complained about people starting to get excited about Christmas too early, but I stand by that one. Every year I get complaints about my helpful Christmas gift advice because, apparently, it comes far too late - mid-November - when most people have done all of their shopping, have wrapped the presents, pre-cooked the food and pretty much pre-lived the entire holiday season before it has even happened.

The problem with this approach, in my opinion - with being too much of an early bird - is that you run out of steam. It becomes overwhelming and tedious. I’ve met people who are so bored of Christmas by the time it’s Christmas that they take the tree down on Boxing Day! But they’ve had the tree up since October!

I might be mis-remembering this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but in the eighties didn’t we start Christmas excitement on the 1st December, which was when we opened the first door on the advent calendar? I just don’t recall there being such a massive build-up.

Eighties Christmas went something like this: open first door on the advent calendar on day one; at some point in the first week go to local park with a hacksaw to nick a Christmas tree, bring it back on a sledge (because, festive); week two start making list for Santa, practice recorder songs for school nativity; week three admire the hazardous outdoor light display on the house one road over, which uses a myriad of extension cables and wires and bulbs that absolutely do not look suited to outdoor light displays, evidenced by the way they have sparks flying from them and there’s a long scorch mark up the end wall of the house where one cable has caught fire but luckily has been doused out by the driving rain; end of week three start absolutely wetting yourself with excitement at the idea of Christmas, but to the point where you almost cannot control yourself, especially when you see that someone has bought a Yule Log and hidden it behind the bread bin, WAH! and that Granny has sent a Christmas Cake with little plastic green spiky Christmas trees stuck into the snowy top, you don’t even like Christmas cake but IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!; 23rd December put yourself virtually into a coma from over-excitement and the fact you went to someone’s house and they had the red cherry-flavoured Panda Pop and you were allowed two cups of it and all the (possibly now-banned) food colourings in it sent you doolally; 24th December food shopping, The Snowman, midnight mass.

Have I got that more or less correct? I mean, set it all to a background of Benson & Hedges cigarette smoke and Wham’s Last Christmas played on repeat, but we’re pretty much there, are we not? Oh my God, the absolute THRILL of there being more things on the telly than usual. Films! The Box of Delights! That was a terrifying old series, wasn’t it, considering it was aimed at kids!

See? Genuine excitement. Less was more. And everyone still managed to get a present, and have the turkey ready (no baths for a day beforehand because the bird was defrosting in the tub) and the shops didn’t run out of sprouts. Or not that I remember. Bring back the 80s Christmas, that’s what I say.

Anyway, it’s far too early to be talking about Christmas, but I have started to make my little content plans and lists. It takes me at least six weeks to get my act together and film something once I’ve hatched a plan and so it’s very important that I begin to mull things over with enough time to spare.

I also have to read a lot, in this six week prepping period, because I have to select my book picks for the annual Books and Chocs feature, which is where I create the ultimate “thoughtful, stylish gift that won’t break the bank” by pairing together amazing books with snazzy bars of chocolate.

(You can read last year’s here, to see what an earth I’m on about. It’s not something to miss, I can tell you that. All of your presents sorted, even for your most discerning of friends: you’ll look very trendy and kind - and also wise - for very little effort and expense.)

But to get to the entire point of this post, because so far we’ve time travelled back to the eighties, covered off unsafe electrical installations and touched upon the complexities of turkey defrosting: when I was drafting some of my Christmas content lists, I realised that there were a few excellent things that kept popping up again and again when I was thinking about best buys and what to recommend. Here, just for you, are five of them. They’re not at all Christmassy, really, which is why I’m posting them now and not on December 19th.

Lexon Flip Alarm Clock

I bought this to stop me from scrolling on my iPhone for hours, last thing at night and first thing in the morning. The phone goes in a different room, the alarm clock wakes me up. Simple but surprisingly effective at freeing up a bit of time that would otherwise be pointlessly spent.

The satisfying thing about this clock - and it’s a design icon, apparently - is that you flip it over to set the alarm and back again to turn the alarm off. Don’t be alarmed (lol) by the little rattling noise inside, it’s part of the mechanism. So old-school.

I love mine. I especially love the way it looks with its brushed gold metal casing. It has been worth every penny.

Online here.

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Soft Ribbed Crop from Boody

For the times you want to be bra-less but also not. This is so soft, this bra top, it just gives very light support to stop the old wangers from swinging about all over the shop, but you could sleep in it if you so desired. It’s part of my “at home” uniform now, along with slippers, cashmere jogging bottoms and a big fluffy cardigan. (One step up from a dressing gown.) I’ve just bought one in another colour.

Online here.

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Archies Flip Flops

I am evangelical about these flip flops. They have a contoured sole that has a sort of “hill” where the arch of the foot is, so gives support and makes the whole experience far comfier than it strictly should be. Not only is the foot more supported, it somehow keeps the flip flop in place so that it doesn’t slide about and because you’re not scrunching your toes, or constantly pushing your foot forward to keep the strap on, the toe post doesn’t dig in.

I haven’t been able to wear normal flip flops for years (something about them being just a flat piece of rubber precariously attached to your person via a strip of uncomfortable plastic) but wore these for the entire summer. I have them on now, because I’ve just been to collect a parcel from my gate. Which sounds like an easy task, but to get to my gate I have to descend a long set of steps and then pick my way down a moss-covered driveway that has the same approximate gradient as an indoor climbing wall, ie vertical, all whilst shouting out “I’m on my way! I’m here! Don’t drive off!”

So yeah. I put these Archies through their paces, let me tell you. I also jogged in them. Not on purpose, as in, went jogging and decided they’d be the most appropriate footwear choice, but accidentally jogged. When I realised I’d left my iPhone on the seat of my car in the car park and had visions of someone immediately smashing my car window with a brick to get it which would have been a right pain. I didn’t just jog, I jogged enthusiastically. And the Archies stayed on.

I sized up to a UK7 from a UK6/6.5.

Online here.

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World’s Best Earplugs

Every year I try out some new earplugs, because I like to stay on top of things when it comes to the earplug market (niche area of expertise, that!) and every year I end up re-purchasing my diehard favourites, the Sleep Deep from Alpine. I think I’ve tried just about every type going, from Loop ones to the type that you shape out of wax, from industrial strength safety ones to little silicone buds with stalks on.

The thing is, I want to deaden some noise - snoring, dog coughing, pheasants making a racket at 6am - but I don’t want that sensory deprivation effect where all you can hear is your own mortality. Where the ear plugs are so strong they form a sort of vacuum inside your own head.

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The Alpine Sleep Deep are very soft, block out exactly the noises I want to block, but leave me just about able to hear my alarm in the morning and anything massively urgent that might otherwise crop up. I’ve never had a comfier fit and they are easy to insert and remove.

How many times have I bought these? Countless. They last me about half a year of nightly use before they just seem a bit minging and/or the dog eats them and I happily replace them each time.

I am hugely noise intolerant, especially when it comes to inconsiderate sounds, like people playing videos through their phone speakers etc, and so I often wear these on public transport or if I’m trying to write and need total concentration. Get the multipack of earplugs with two different sizes and see which fits you best - I used to only use the small size, but I actually found that the medium gives me slightly better noise blocking!

Online here.

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Peleton Barre and Sculpt 30 Classes

This is a recurring purchase - I’ve been paying for my Peloton membership for six years now, and I don’t even want to calculate what that adds up to - but in the past six months or so it has really come into its own.

I mentioned a while back that I’d had knee issues, and I really need to get a proper post written because it might be a helpful one, but for the moment suffice to say I had to change my exercise routine. Routine makes it sound as though I take my fitness very seriously: nothing could be further than the truth. In fact, the whole reason I started with Peloton in the first place was because I could do twenty minutes intense exercise on a spin bike, in my own home, and then forget about it for 48 hours. I liked the fact it required no extra effort other than the exercise itself: no practical or logistical hurdles, like driving to a gym or not being able to find my trainers or sports bra, all of those things that would absolutely put me right off and give me an excuse not to do anything at all.

And so for five and a bit years, I did high intensity cycling every 48 hours - one day on, one day off - with no other kind of exercise at all, other than walking. No strength training, no squats, no yoga, no nothing. As it turned out this was not great for my knees. I managed to over-develop a very specific set of muscles (they would have rivalled Hulk Hogan’s) but then the rest of my leg muscles by comparison were like weak little saplings, and by the start of this year my knees (right knee especially) were so bad that I was having to climb stairs sideways, like a crab.

Went to see a physio, got some exercises to do, which helped enormously, but at the same time I thought it might be a good idea to go easy on the cycling and find some classes that used all of the muscles rather than just a few. (My legs had basically turned into pistons.) And this is where the Peloton app came into its own. I had never used it before, outside of the Peloton bike, where it is ever-present on the large attached screen.

If you’ve never delved in before, Peloton have thousands of classes (and add loads each day, you can join in live or just take the classes on demand) and there’s a real continuity to them, in the way that they’re filmed and the formats that they use, everything down to the lighting and the equipment. It’s very well done and makes you feel as though you’re part of an exciting mega-gym, when in fact you haven’t left home. You become very familiar with your favourite instructors, and it’s all just so easy. I have no bad words to say about it other than their search function and search filters can be abysmal, and that the entry price of the bikes and treadmills are steep.

(Though I would say that my bike has more than paid for itself compared to a proper gym membership and then there’s also the fact that I’ve actually used it multiple times a week for that many years. Not like the two year gym membership at London Liverpool Street Virgin Active I had, when I went twice. In two years. There’s no competition.)

Anyway, I discovered Barre classes on the Peloton app. I access it on my laptop and perch the laptop on the sofa in the kitchen, then I roll out my mat and get to it. Total commute “to class”, twenty seconds.

I have loved doing the Barre classes. They’re toning and conditioning classes that vaguely use ballet moves, and they make your legs burn and your arse muscles feel as though someone has set fire to them and when you do the core section you do briefly feel as though you’d like to disappear from the earth immediately just to make the pain disappear.

It’s short and intense - I do the thirty minute classes with Hannah Corbin - but I have never toned up so quickly. I mean, I haven’t actually tried to tone up since approx 2006, but this was a welcome little side-effect of me trying to stay fit and not further knacker up my knees. Lots of my physio exercises were the exact moves used in Barre (clamshells, curtsey lunges, etc) and the class was much more fun than just standing there on my own, in silence, doing sumo squats.

My new-new discovery is Sculpt 30, a cross between Barre and Pilates - it’s like Barre but supercharged. I find it quite difficult and often scream. But so satisfying! And half an hour later, you’re done!

I have tummy muscles again! And I can lunge up a hill, so long as nobody is watching. (Did this the other day in Dorset, thinking I was alone, but actually had a spectator and it was mortifying.)

So the Peloton membership has been one of my best purchases of the year. Recurring. Not a new purchase, an ongoing one, but never has it been more appreciated.

If you have the Peloton app and want to try a Sculpt 30 class, I just did this one here. It was killer. If you want membership, and don’t have a Peloton bike or treadmill, then I think it starts at about £12 a month. They have everything from yoga to proper weight lifting classes to HIIT classes, pilates classes and running. Meditation, light weights classes for arms, all sorts of stuff.

I’m a fan, obviously - my Peloton bike has been one of my best life investments, despite my knee thing. But the knee thing’s on me. I should have noticed when my quads grew bigger than tree trunks!

The Peloton membership options are here.

This week it’s desks.

Not the functional type, with a slide-out drawer for your computer keyboard and those lockable file cupboards built into the pedestals; we’re doing the aesthetic types, rickety-legged rustic numbers that look incredible in photographs but are only good for working at if your job involves a lot of staring into space thinking about stuff and isn’t so heavy on the…work…element.

Is this a great idea for a series? I have no idea. Maybe it will be incredibly useful, so that you too can find the creme de la creme of whatever it is you’re searching for. At a minimum, it'll give you access to the inner workings of my mind and demonstrate just how seriously I take my job as a “tester and researcher of things”.

So, desks. This particular desk needs to go beneath the side window in the bedroom at The Dorset Nest, which is the cute-as-a-button thatched cottage we’re nearly ready to open bookings on (I reckon a month?).

Really it needs to serve as a dressing table and “pondering space” more than traditional desk, because it looks out over the little cottage garden, gets beautiful light and is the perfect spot for a) doing your makeup (if indeed you can be arsed with such a thing when you’re on holiday!) and b) lightly penning some romantic poetry or scribbling notes about your bestselling novel idea or writing postcards home.

Here are all the desks I shortlisted, almost bought and then - for various reasons, some of them quite pedantic - changed my mind.

FYI, my search terms for this were “writing table” or “writing desk” (if you add “writing” then the desk tends to be smaller in size and have legs rather than pedestals, which is what I wanted) and the desk needed to be characterful, traditional or rustic in style, but not shabby, solid wood and with clean, classic lines. Here’s what I came up with:

John Lewis Faithful Friend Desk

My Numero Uno option in this situation was this oak desk from John Lewis, the Hemingway. I almost bought it. I got to the credit card page. It was the perfect size, as in you couldn’t have built the thing any closer to the size of the space it needed to slot into. Wonderful. And I love, love, loved the detailing on it, the simplicity of it, the colour of the oak…

But then I saw that it wasn’t solid wood - 30% MDF construction. For £799? I just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it! The problem is, I buy a lot of antique and vintage stuff, and so I know what I can get for a bit less money that will be solid wood and beautifully handmade. That’s not even taking into account the sense of history, the charming patina (if you get the right piece, obviously, there’s a fine line between “vintage” and “absolutely fit for the tip” sometimes) and the fact that you can get something that looks infinitely more interesting and lovely.

This desk was always on the back-burner in case I couldn’t find “the one” second-hand. Buying second-hand is a lengthy, lengthy process. It’s very rare that the perfect thing just pops up straight away; it took me a month to find the chest of drawers, three months to find the desk that I have in my work cabin at home. I don’t mind the wait, usually, but when you’re trying to furnish a place to a vague deadline then it all becomes a bit panicky!

And so the John Lewis was my faithful back-up friend.

(The desk is here.)

Rowen & Wren Desk of Dreams

Now this is solid oak, and what an absolute beauty. It made me go entirely weak at the knees. I hadn’t known about Rowen & Wren until my sister-in-law bought an armchair from them and it is a thing to behold. The shape of it, the quality of the fabric, it’s just fabulous. (They also do various ticking stripe fabrics, which I am a big fan of.)

The issue with this one was that it was just over 10cm too deep for the space under the window, so the edge would have stuck out into the room, past the chimney breast. My right eyebrow was twitching at the thought of it.

I love this desk so much that I would almost consider doing a third holiday cottage just so it would fit somewhere. Of course, I would have to carry it into place on my own because my husband would have divorced me and moved to the other side of the world the moment I uttered the words “shall we do up another holiday cottage”, but I think it would probably be manageable. I’ve been lifting some light weights, recently, it can’t be that hard.

(The desk is here.)

Wayfair Franken-desk

I very, very fleetingly looked a this one from Wayfair because it came up in a reverse Google image search. At first glance, I thought it was an absolute bargain and really very pretty, but I began to worry that in real life it would look mass-produced, a cheap imitation of a vintage desk. It’s the shine on the legs and the fact they are slightly darker in tone, it had me instantly worried. (Why are they completely different? The more I look at it, the more it looks like two desks mixed-and-matched!)

BUT! A mere fraction of the price of the others, and solid wood again. I’d say it’s more console table than desk, but worth a mental note if you ever need a solid wood table that looks old for £250 and don’t mind it being a Franken-desk.

It’s here.

The Multiple Desks of Vinterior

This is where I spent the majority of my research time: my second home, the Vinterior website. I have bought countless vintage and antique items from here, including huge mid century glass ceiling lights and brass coffee tables for my house, rustic tables and bentwood chairs for The Dorset Nook, garden furnishings, cherub-embellished 18th century over-mantle mirrors (we lived in a Georgian country house before this one!) and everything else from antique ladders to stone planters.

Vinterior is nothing like Vinted, by the way, despite sounding similar. They are not even remotely connected. Vinterior is a platform for vintage/antique dealers, who upload their pieces to the website, and everything is vetted for quality and you don’t tend to get much stuff on there that’s crappy. It’s as though someone has gone through all of the eBay vintage listings and taken out 90% of the rubbish, re-photographed it all on a white background so that you can actually see what you’re buying properly and then made the payment/delivery process standardised and seamless.

I’m a fan, as you can probably tell.

I found at least five desks I loved over the course of around four months, but they were all just slightly too expensive, or slightly too small, or they were perfect but sold before I’d even had a chance to mull them over…

A particularly low moment was when I saw this cheeky little desk in my favourites folder and felt a huge wave of disappointment when I realised it was sold already…

…only realising about five minutes later that it sold to me, a year ago, when I bought it for my cabin and that I was at that moment sat at the very desk I was feeling sorry about.

(Do you think there’s a defining moment in your life when you suddenly realise that you’re completely barking mad or is it just a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing?)

In the end, the desk I found was on eBay, DRUMROLL PLEASE:

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For God’s sake. It’s almost like a fetish, this “cosying up for Autumn” thing. It’s still twenty-two degrees outside! If you’re in front of a roaring fire wearing cashmere bedsocks and clasping a mug of cocoa then you are completely deranged.

It’s too early. I realise that it is officially autumn, according to the calendar, but there should be some sort of transitional period that September sits into - Late Summer, for example. Or Summer End, would sound quite romantic. Why do we have to start thinking about the next thing all of the time, like this crazed conveyor belt, NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT! My eleven year-old came home from the supermarket with chocolate reindeer as her weekend treat of choice! Reindeer! I still have a tan! I’m still wearing flip flops!

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Sorry, I feel passionately about this. Seeing C****tmas stuff in September* just makes me feel slightly panicked. It’s also making me angsty because I need to get down to The Dorset Nook and film a load of beautiful autumn/winter content and I simply cannot see any sort of hole in my diary. (Or in the bookings, which is great news for any holiday cottage business owner, but it does make my content plan trickier!)

In other holiday cottage news, because I know you signed up to my blog to constantly hear all about my alter ego life as a holiday cottage-runner, I have bought an excellent new bench for the bedroom to replace the chair that was only ever supposed to be there as a temporary fix. I have comped together some before and after pictures and am wondering, is this sort of interiors stuff, the “problem fixing” side, of any interest to you? Would you like to know how I decide on interiors when it’s a business and also being done from a distance? If so, leave me a comment and I’ll do a post. I spend 80% of my days faffing with room designs and fabric swatches and planning what I’m going to force Rich to do next, so would love to write about this more…

(*I have to admit that I have featured a beauty advent calendar, but I managed to not use the c-word at all, didn’t put any magical jingly music on the content, and it had to go up now because otherwise it would sell out before I could let people know about it. But I wish all these brands would just release them mid-November and then it would actually be exciting, and festive.)

Anyway, let’s do the favourites. Picture me throwing piles of dried autumnal leaves into the air and smiling like an eejit, wearing a scarf and gloves even though it’s the same temperature as a cool-ish Sicilian evening in June.

Autumn, “yay”.

Ad-info: this post contains a sponsored section with Stripe & Stare and outgoing links may be affiliate links.

My Next Skirt

Last year I saw a model called Chrissie Teigen on Instagram wearing a superb outfit, this midi-length black denim skirt and black chunky jumper and black boots ensemble and instantly knew that this was precisely the sort of outfit I could consider wearing myself. No gusset annoyances, good warmth level, flexible in terms of footwear.

Can I now find the video? No I cannot. I don’t even follow this lady so have no idea where it popped up, but on investigation I have found out that she is my age-ish (bit younger), my height-ish (bit taller) (FFS!) and so it all starts to make sense that I was drawn to this practical yet supremely sassy outfit.

I had the boots, (my Arket kitten-heel ones) and I had the jumpers (80,000 of them approx) so I just needed the skirt. Could I find a long black denim skirt, pencil-shaped, anywhere? No! Until last week, when I thought I’d have a delve on the Next app whilst also looking at rechargeable table lamps and there it was. The ideal skirt.

Alas I haven’t taken a good photo of me in it so you’ll have to survive with this video:

I just went to find the link and it’s half price! I’m in a UK12. It’s at Next here.

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My En-Masse Picture Framing Orgy

Getting pictures framed is one of those tasks that just gets pushed down the line year after year. It doesn’t help that it can be astonishingly expensive, depending on the size and the type of frame and glass, but you have to lug all the pictures to the framers and then sit there deciding on the mounting and the frame (which I quite enjoy) and then you have to wait a couple of months (with my framers, anyway!) and then go and lug them all home again.

So by the time I went to get all of the pictures framed that I’d been saving for ages, there were loads. It was like a framing orgy when I stepped into the framer’s with all of my various art folders and bubble-wrapped packages. It was necessity that sent me in the end - I need a load of them for the new cottage, The Dorset Nest, and the deadline for finishing that zoomed past us months ago so I had to pull my socks up with it all.

I don’t know whether you like voiceover videos but I have one here, showing you all of the pictures I had framed and where they’re from. Once I have them all hung on the various walls in various places I shall take beautiful photos of them and then do a gigantic, picture-heavy blog post for you, but until then we are going to be thoroughly modern and sit through a little video. Like when you’re in a museum and there’s the room with the bench and you have to perch there awkwardly whilst a film about screeching birds flickers on the opposite wall.

Budge up:

Stripe & Stare’s Amazing Sale and New Ad

I am treating you to all sorts of multimedia today, aren’t I? I just thought that this Stripe & Stare ad was so good though, it’s just so… on-brand. Optimistic, joyful, beautifully filmed and with a touch of tongue-in-cheek humour.

If you don’t know who Stripe & Stare are then do be advised that they make the softest, most comfortable knickers you will ever have the pleasure of wearing. We’re talking soft as, I don’t know, clouds? Ridiculous.

They make them in all of these hundreds of different patterns and colours, some with contrasting trim, some with lace (I don’t know how they’ve made lace soft, it’s a kind of alchemy if you ask me) and it just feels lovely opening up the underwear drawer to see all of these colour clashes.

But it’s the comfort of them that really matters: even if you have them all in plain black, it’s the cosseting feel of the fabric, the fact that the knickers are designed not to ride up. Bloody marvellous.

They have a huge 50% off sale at the moment, if you’re quick about it - their sales are epic. I wear a size medium, 10-12 and they fit me perfectly and comfortably with no digging in. (I am a UK 10-12, so I’d say they are true to size?)

The sale is here. My top recommendations would be the original briefs, the brazilians (which I love) and absolutely anything from the pyjama section.

If you’re ever buying full price, you can get 20% off your Stripe & Stare order with my code RUTHC20.

Stripe & Stare

Look What You Made Me Do

I include a book of the month for the Youtube viewer’s really, because it’s the only time I talk about books on there, whereas on the blog I yak on about books all the time! So I apologise that I am repeating myself here, but I really massively enjoyed John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, so much so that I am picking it out as my favourite of the bunch from the recent reads.

It’s just so….nasty. Unapologetically so. Mean, twisted people intent on revenge. Is the fact that I found this a fun read a weird reflection on my personality? I hope not! I’ve just had it to the gills with overly-sweet thought novels about how wonderful life is at the moment, because NO ELIZABETH IT IS NOT! There are horrendous things afoot! And it’s all very well having a little escapism, and learning about the lives of some people in their sixties in a quiet New England town, but you can get a bit overfed on it, can’t you?

Give me a vengeful TV script-writer who tries to destroy the life of a couple of middle class Londoners but then finds herself on the flipside and yes I will tear through that book like there’s a prize for the fastest reader. Oh, they’re just so awful, the lot of them, I thoroughly loved it: the brutal satire, the clever weaving of the different stories.

Have a feeling it’ll be a bit Marmite, this book, but you have to take a risk now and then. It’s here online.

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Widow’s Bay

Another culture recommendation that may divide us: Widow’s Bay. Have you seen this yet? It’s on Apple TV, so no ad breaks, which I hugely appreciate. When did this thing become the norm that you pay for a TV subscription and then they STILL give you ad breaks unless you pay them the ransom of the even higher subscription? What in the world is that about?

Widow’s Bay, though: now this is the sort of TV I want. Could not possibly be written by anyone but a human because it’s so bloody daft, once you get into it. You think it’s going to be the creepiest show ever, because it’s about a curse on a remote island off the coast of the USA that has clapboard houses and creaky hotels and a well and so on, and then there are horrible shots of a basement with what looks like a torture chair in it and you think ABSOLUTELY NOT. NO WAY AM I WATCHING THIS.

But you have to persevere. Because Matthew Ryhs is a comic genius (we knew this before, but it’s so subtle here, his performance, that you just want to keep applauding him) and the whole storyline turns out to be completely bonkers, and the supporting cast are so good that you can’t wait for them to have more time on screen, each and every one of them.

Brace for the very ending, because personally I thought it was slightly weak, but then I can’t remember the last time I watched the ending to something that wasn’t. Does everyone simply run out of steam? Out of budget? I don’t get it! Surely when you start writing the plot out you have some idea of how you might want the finale to look?

Anyway, a top watch, this was. Burnt through my stash of Mint Magnums, chomping away as I hid behind a cushion, it was so good. I also enjoyed the first of the new season of Slow Horses, though that’s a weekly drip-feed so not as gratifying!

Right, here’s the Youtube video of the favourites - please do, as usual, press the heart button and leave a comment and, if you haven’t already, drop your email into the box to subscribe so that every post gets to you in a timely manner:

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I’m down to the essentials because my makeup bag is so teeny, and my makeup bag is so teeny because when I was packing for Greece (did I mention we went on a family holiday?) I suddenly realised that we had a laughably small luggage allowance. We had to fit absolutely everything we needed for the week into hand luggage.

Which would be fine if it was normal person packing: flip flops, sun cream, a few changes of clothes, but no. This was family holiday packing. Pool inflatables. Beach tennis sets. Granted my voluminous kaftan had to come too, which even when rolled up tightly takes up an entire half of a carry-on suitcase, but it was the rest of the paraphernalia. Baby Yoda. Dolly. Whole selections of oversized hoodies that would never be worn but absolutely must be taken.

So I really had to do a stern edit on my beauty stuff, especially the skincare. Usually I like to pack for every eventuality - what if I suddenly develop severe acne? dermatitis? what if it feels like exactly the right moment to try out the glass skin trend? - but I realised, this year, that it’s the one time in twelve months when I can absolutely guarantee I’ll be doing exactly the same thing every single day. Sleeping in the sun, like a cat, and then reading in the shade. Out for something to eat in the evening, which is when I spend precisely four and a half minutes putting on a face (does anyone else think that their bare face actually looks worse when they’re on holiday? I always feel it should look glowing and bronzed and the like, when in reality I look like a pallid, sweaty potato!) and then wash it all off before bed.

Seven days, seven nights, repeat to fade. Or repeat until departure, anyway.

So anyway, I packed light, without any alternatives for anything, and it all sufficed an absolute treat. Especially the makeup items, which are all so good they’re in Hall of Fame kind of realm.

You might be wondering why the hell I’m still using this teeny weeny makeup bag with only the essentials in it when I’ve been back from holiday for weeks. Well, I can’t remember whether I filled you in on this, but the day we got home we decided to do a bit of a Changing Rooms and knock a big hole in the wall of my in-house beauty room/office so that we could join it to the spare room, thus making a larger and far more exciting bedroom for my son, who is nine, and likes things like secret doors that are hidden behind pictures (which is exactly what will be inside the big hole once we finish renovating a cottage that’s one and a half hours away and all the other essential stuff that is on the to-do list) and pull-down steps and all that sort of stuff.

So his room, which is wallpapered in a very cool retro dinosaur paper (tempted to keep it) will be my new in-house beauty room/office, but not until Sir’s new duplex executive suite is ready and everything has been moved across, which could be quite some time. Meanwhile, most of my skincare products and makeup items are stacked up in cardboard boxes and I simply do not have the emotional energy to start looking through them. The room that was my room (affectionately known as the “dumping ground”) now has ladders in it and is covered in dust and I cannot be arsed to clean it and unpack everything only to have to pack it all up again, it feels like a fruitless task.

So the compact makeup bag and the capsule edit within are here to stay. Here’s what I grabbed to go on holiday with and ended up keeping as my everyday look:

Ad-info: no paid or sponsored content. Contains press samples with no obligation to feature and links are affiliate links, which means I get a small percentage of a sale if someone buys a product. I have worked with L’Oreal in the past six months.

Foundation

Bare Minerals Skin Tint Stick in shade “Suede” (online here). This seriously hydrating tint stick is too sheer to label as a foundation, really, but if you love a very barely-there look (I do) and like to spend no more than about thirty seconds doing your face base (also yes) then you will probably love this.

It’s the scribbly-on toddler crayon application that I actually like so much - no dispensing liquid onto the back of your hand and then blending blending blending, you just draw on your face like you’re slightly demented and then bosh over with a brush to lightly buff it all in.

It has to be the quickest type of face base, a foundation stick, and they do come in various types and coverage levels (people rate the Dior, I still need to try it!) but I find a lot of them to be a bit cakey and stodgy if the formula isn’t dewy and moisturising enough. So personally, I feel as though the sheerer versions work a little better than anything high coverage or matte.

Bronzer

Clarins Ever Bronze bronzing powder in shade 02 medium, here.

I feel as though a cream bronzer would slide a bit on the Bare Minerals Tint Stick base, so usually go for a powder bronzer. This one from Clarins isn’t too dark on me, so I can be enthusiastic and completely slapdash with my application, which is just the way I like it…

This brush from Jones Road is one of the best bronzer brushes I’ve had.

Blusher

NARS Multiple in Bad Habit, here. NARS Multiples are phenomenal. I don’t think another brand has quite nailed cream blushes the way they have - I think it’s because it so quickly works and feels like a powder. But it never settles or looks dry. All of the staying power and diffused colour, but with that beautiful, comfortable glide that a cream product gives you. Supreme! There are a few really excellent shades, including a frosty pale pink that feels distinctly retro…

Again, the Jones Road smaller blush brush does a great job here. I think they’re well worth the investment, these brushes.

Eyeshadow

Vieve Eye Wand in Mahogany, here, and ByTerry Ombre Blackstar in shade 4, here. Who needs to cart a huge palette around when you have these easy on-the-go shadow sticks?

The thing about them is, you can scribble onto the lids and under the lower lashline and blend with fingertips if you forget your brushes or don’t want to lug them about, something you absolutely cannot do with powders in a palette, much as I love powders in a palette.

The Vieve eye wand is a matte finish, great for adding a quick bit of shape to the eye and lifting the corners (WATCH THE VIDEO!) and the ByTerry stick has the most beautiful, slidey texture that’s so easy to blend. Shade 4 is a pale, shimmery bronze. I chose it because I thought it would make me look like a sexy bronzed bombshell in Greece, and then mostly forgot to use it.

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Mascara

L’Oreal Telescopic Mascara, online here. My most-purchased beauty product of all time, in my whole life. I don’t really know who will manage to make a mascara to top it, really, because it ticks all of my requirements boxes: separates, lengthens, adds a bit of volume to my rubbish flat lashes, but more importantly it stays on all day and is easy to get back off!

I know it’ll sound like I’m biased because I just did a huge campaign for this very product, and my face was all over Boots, humble brag, but the campaign came about because I had been so vocal about my love for this mascara, over so many years.

It has a very fine, flexible rubbery wand (lol) that gets right to the base of the lashes without leaving loads of product on the lids. I find that a lot of large mascara brushes actually hurt my eyes, do you? Or is that just a weird quirk of mine? (One of many.)

I usually pick mine up at Amazon when they’re six or seven quid, which happens regularly.

Brow Gel

Rare Beauty Brow Gel, here. You might think brow gel isn’t a necessity, but it’s the sort of product you don’t get until you use it. When I comb my brows slightly upwards, like little feathers, and set them in place with a gel, they increase the space between my eye and my eyebrow by at least 25% and I instantly look more awake and sprightly.

Takes seconds, foolproof (I nearly always use a clear one, though have had great results with the slightly tinted ones, they make me look Parisian and angry) and an instant freshen-up that lasts all day. I have tried a lot. This is my current trial. It’s very good, nothing to moan about, but I would say that if you have a lot of base on and it gets mixed with the brow gel when you comb upwards, you will get weird fleshy-coloured bobbles in your brows, so be careful.

Lipliner

KOSAS Hotliner in Mega, here. Another product you don’t realise is totally brilliant until you use it properly: lipliner. Lipline pigmentation fades a bit as you get older, so there’s less definition at the edges and lips look thinner. Trace the line back in using a natural colour close to your own - no need to go batshit crazy drawing in dark lines two centimetres outside your actual mouth - and you will see an instant plumping effect before you’ve even put your lip gloss on.

I don’t really use lip gloss much, I’m a balm or tinted balm kind of guy, but if you like that ultra sheeny shiny look then go ahead. I tend to use a dab of long-lasting lip balm - the three best I’ve found for serious longevity and a comfortable, non-sticky sheen are Glossier’s Balm-dot-com here, Lanolips Coconutter here (random! But so good!) or Elizabeth Arden 8 Hour Cream here.

All of them give low-key shine that, most importantly, lasts for ages with no reapplication and doesn’t lock you into that terrible circle of lip balm addiction where it actually dries your lips out horribly so you have to keep faffing with your tube every half an hour, making you look like a twelve year old who has just discovered makeup.

I’m going to tell you another thing: Elizabeth Arden’s original 8 Hour Cream orange gloop in the tube, now called “Skin Protectant”, is the best lip balm in their whole range, better than the sticks and the pots.

(This is only my humble opinion, obviously, but I did model for twelve years and that is all that makeup artists used ever in those days and so I have some experience, but OK listen to everyone else, that’s fine.)

The other thing is, you get enough of the gloop in there to last you half a lifetime. Seriously, it’s difficult to use it up. But use it up you will, my friends, if you also have it as an emergency rough heel cream and knee softener and emergency nostril barrier cream for when you’re flying and don’t want to catch everyone else’s diseases. Thank me later. Big tube, £14 here.

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It’s almost time for you to watch the video and see it all in action (honestly, it’s a great way to spend quarter of an hour whilst you file your expenses or peel potatoes or just drink a cup of tea with your feet up).

I have to first very quickly tell you about two additions I’ve made to the holiday makeup bag, additions that were only necessary because I had to get back to filming and needed more oomph to my face base. The BareMinerals stick doesn’t quite cut it on camera, for me, there’s just not enough coverage. I like to look more flawless and juicy and polished when I’m committing myself for eternity to the pages of the internet. And so I use:

Glow Primer

Charlotte Tilbury Flawless Filter shade 4, here. My God this stuff is actual luminising dynamite. If you don’t put foundation on top of it you look like an android. Comes in lots of shades, because it does have a tint to it, despite the tint being very subtle. You wodge it on weirdly with a spongey applicator that always feels slightly too small for the job and then blend before applying face base on top. Prepare to glow like a bloody beacon, it’s ridiculous stuff. Never fails to make me feel tip-top and glam.

And then:

Foundation

Lancome Teint Idole Care & Glow - I use shade 220 - here. Another “if I could only buy one product in X category for the rest of my life” winner: this foundation has been my favourite, through thick and thin, since launch. (A re-post of my original review is here.)

I’m sure I was still living in London when it launched so I’ve loved this for a long time and, considering how many bases I test almost continuously, it speaks volumes that it’s still my number one. It’s a longwear foundation so stays in place really well, but this is Lancome’s Care & Glow version, so it’s fresher and lighter-looking than the original Teint Idole. I find the coverage to be just right for my needs: covers everything, makes me look like I have bionic skin, but never too heavy or claggy.

Often it’s in the sale (at time of writing the link above is for a discount event) but I will repurchase it full price (£41) without flinching because for me, it’s irreplaceable.

See it in action in the video - any questions, drop them into the comments and please make sure you press the heart button on your way out…

I have feared wasps for almost four decades. The first five or so years of my life were fear-free, but then, at a still-tender age, I was stung on a buttock whilst squatting down in the rockery to retrieve my Flower Fairies Enchanted Fragrance Mushroom - ironically because I didn’t want the wasps landing in the little open-lidded pots of perfume balm - and after that, I was understandably very wary of them.

(Can we just take a nostalgic moment: did anyone else collect Flower Fairies? The toys were so much better in the eighties! Do you remember the pixies came with little felt suits on, carrying a garden tool? And the fairies had beautiful dresses and the wings that popped on and off? The little Fragrance Mushroom and its pots of perfume was one of my most treasured possessions and I can still recall every scent. If anyone ever sees this set for sale, boxed, please let me know immediately! Why did I ever let it go? Fool!)

Anyway, I paid the price for rescuing my mushroom and was incensed that the wasp sting hurt so much, after everyone always saying

“don’t be scared of them, they don’t want to sting you!”

or

“just ignore them, you don’t need to be scared!”

I obviously did need to be bloody scared, my arse hurt for about two days! And here I find myself, almost forty years later, nursing the same sort of pain but within my ear canal. Honestly, I cannot thank my ear plugs enough - imagine if I hadn’t been wearing them to sleep that night!

But rewind. You need to hear the full tale and suffer along with me.

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This is hopefully an approach that benefits whoever is reading, but it does make me worry that I’ll sound ungrateful, or tone deaf - “millions of people would love that holiday!” - even though actually what I’m trying to do, as with all the other things I test and mull over and review, is to decide whether that particular holiday is really worth the time, money and effort.

In a world of travel reviews that are frequently - let’s face it - severely biased, because the reviewer has quite often gone for free, I like to think that I’m offering a more realistic viewpoint with these unbiased family holiday reviews. But it does keep me awake at night*, wondering how it’ll all come across.

*for at least seven minutes.

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The other reason it takes me so long to review my holidays (I mean we still haven’t had the Center Parcs write-up and I went there last December!) is that they necessarily involve talking about kids, and the fact that holidays with kids are never as relaxing or good value as holidays without kids. Again, I fret that this will come across as ungrateful - “cherish every moment!” “blink and they will have left home!” - (my God, I bet loads of parents wish they could blink and their grown-up kids would leave home, hohoho!) but holidaying with kids is a very specific extreme sport and it needs to be addressed in an honest way.

Now I know that a lot of people manage incredible holidays abroad with their kids, where they camp out on remote Spanish beaches cooking freshly caught fish on an old car radiator, or hire a crumbling old Portuguese townhouse and spend their days pootling around food markets and encouraging their kids to try local, delicacies. A lot of people seem to manage these holidays really well, wherever they go, and report back with great enthusiasm.

Gite in the middle of nowhere in Provence, plagued by wasps and serviced only by a three hundred year-old water well and two small solar panels? We had the most amazing time! they write. So wholesome! We made jam - or should I say “confiture!” - and the boys loved splashing in the lake until sundown, when we would sit by candlelight drinking red wine and playing Uno.

What the actual. Who are these people? Why do they like spending their downtime making jam? How are they able to play Uno by candlelight without one or more of their kids having a total breakdown because they’re up too late/overexcited by their proximity to real fire/sensing you’re relaxing with red wine therefore need to do something to obliterate your downtime?

WHY DO THESE PEOPLE NOT MENTION THE WASPS?

Full disclaimer: I love my kids as much as the next man. More, if the next man is Michael Owen. They are my world centre, they occupy the majority of my thoughts throughout the day, they bring me the most intense joy and when I make any plans for the future, no matter how small, they are the most-considered factor. I would lie on a train track for them. I would (and you know what a sacrifice this would be) squeeze myself into a tight underground tunnel for them. (Caveat: would require sedation, most likely, and would also want some sort of hinged lid on the top side of the tunnel, like an escape door, that would be immediately flung open by a capable tunnelling pro-expert if I knocked upon it three times.)

And I do love going away with them. It’s brilliant! Their little faces when they see new things, when they get excited by big boats or things going on at the airport, or ask me loads of anxiety-inducing questions about aeronautical engineering when we’re in the boarding queue. But I swear you are fibbing if you tell me that holidays with kids are as relaxing and enjoyable as they were before you had them.

There’s no comparison, surely? In the one scenario you’re fighting the same battles you fight at home: finding things for them to eat at the local Mini Mart, spending half an hour slathering them in sun cream as they try to wriggle away, worrying that the pool inflatables aren’t fit for purpose and that they will disappear off across the completely flat, motionless, life-guarded sea riding a glittery lilac unicorn despite the fact that you’re standing there holding onto its muzzle. Negotiating every single element of the day including how much they can play Mario Karts and whether or not they can use your phone to look up how much a rare Beyblade L-Drago Guardian costs, checking that they are putting their used toilet roll pieces into the small pedal bin next to the toilet and not into the toilet, which is a new type of hell in itself, trying to download a new Audiobook to get them to sleep when it’s already 11pm and you’ve forgotten the password to your Audible account and the email address it’s registered to is only linked to your laptop.

Gah.

In the other scenario, in which you are totally free from all and any responsibility, you lie on a lounger for nine uninterrupted hours, maybe getting up for lunch but maybe not, because it’s not as though you need to fuel any activity with food, and then you float to some form of dinner, which might just be fries and mayonnaise and rosé, and then you fall into bed and dream about what sort of business idea would allow you to retire at 48 so that you can live permanently on holiday.

Tell me they’re the same thing! Go on! Tell me!

So anyway, all of this flies around my brain when I’m wondering how to present my holiday write-up. I wish I could just do two lists and say “this was shit” and “this was good” and then people could try and use their critical thinking skills to work out whether our holiday philosophies, holiday budgets and holiday goals vaguely align; but we all know that the internet is now devoid of any nuance and so all content must be over-explained and plastered in disclaimers.

With that in mind, here’s a review of my family holiday to Paros. I should say at this point that one of the primary objectives of booking this particular holiday (self-catering, not a buffet in sight) was to compare it to the holiday we had at Ikos the year before. Because for all of Ikos Olivia’s faults (mainly being just far too expensive, in my opinion, for what you actually get, the review is here), I have to admit that when I was there I was completely relaxed.

I mean, apart from having constant heartburn due to the fact I’d spent three times as much on the holiday as I would ever have normally spent, and feeling a searing sense of anger every time the food was sub par (which was often) and wanting to cry with sad, ironic laughter every time we queued to go to the buffet - THE BUFFET! - in this so luxurious, so exclusive resort, and apart from the fact my blood boiled each time someone in our “bungalow” block closed a door because it shook our entire headboard and made me feel as though I was in some weird concrete holiday prison cell… Apart from all this I was completely relaxed.

I didn’t have to make any decisions, I didn’t have to go to a supermarket and have the entire queue stare at me because I hadn’t had my nectarines weighed and would therefore have to do the walk of shame back to the woman with the weighing scales while everyone waited, I didn’t have to decide where we would go for dinner or get into a car to go to dinner or look at a map to get us to where we were going for dinner and, if the dinner was a bit mediocre (which it often was) I didn’t then have to pay a bill for it.

(Yes I know it was actually all paid for, royally, twice over, but that’s the joy of all inclusive - you can kid yourself that all the food is for free because you just get up and leave at the end of the meal.)

So the brief for this year’s holiday was this: find a holiday with the same sense of luxury and convenience as Ikos, but with more privacy, more living space and better food.

But readers, guess what? I booked late. I started looking at the end of May, to go in August. And I soon realised that replicating the convenience of a luxury all-inclusive resort was going to be nigh on impossible. There were no villas, pretty much anywhere in Greece, that were within an hour of an airport but that were also within an easy walk of restaurants and a beach. We would need to hire a car. (First inconvenience, because we all know what a palaver hiring a car abroad is.)

The villas that I did find that more or less fit the bill were so expensive that Ikos began to look positively thrifty. It felt like a lose-lose situation: more than I wanted to ever spend, but without any of the carefree conveniences of Ikos. The transfers, the luggage-taken-to-room, the “free” ice creams and drinks and lunches and post-dinner cocktails.

The villas that didn’t fit the bill at all in terms of convenience were much more purse-pleasing and so, in the interests of research, I booked a villa that required a flight, a taxi journey, a ferry and then a car journey along a stretch of unmade road that contained potholes so big you could live in them to get to it. Did the villa have any places to eat nearby? No it did not. Could we walk to a shop? Negative. Would we have an eighteen hour journey on the way home, due to the ferry/flight timings and needing to leave enough time for potential ferry delays? Not something to worry about. Eighteen hours? Where’s the inconvenience in that.

I have to say though: Paros. You do get a superb quality of Greek island when you need to take a ferry to get to it. I don’t want to sound snobby, because I love a direct flight destination as much as the rest of us, but it doesn’t half cut out a lot of touristy hell when you go to somewhere that requires that extra bit of effort to reach. Just that one ferry journey!

And I realise that Paros is probably massively touristy compared with some of the other smaller Greek islands (and definitely with a lot of the places in mainland Greece that I’ve visited) but if you’ve ever been to Santorini, or to Mykonos, then you will know the “touristy hell” of which I speak.

Paros just felt positively lovely, even the areas that were heaving with visitors, like the ferry port in Parikia and the whole of Naousa. I can’t imagine it’ll be long before Paros airport expands and direct flights come in and then you get an Ikos or a Grecotel popping up on there, because isn’t this the way of the world, but for now it just feels…nice. Like the tourist spots of yore. A few popular towns and villages and then the rest of the island left relatively undeveloped and bare. Head into the mountains to Lefkes and it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, it’s like going back in time. Pop to Aliki for lunch and yes, it’s thrumming with groups of people but it feels properly pleasant. Wholesome.

We went for seven days and the villa we rented was this one with Pretty Greek Villas. When Rich gets back from Sainsbury’s I’ll ask him what he rated it out of ten. He didn’t care that it wasn’t near any shops or restaurants: he absolutely loved the view. We looked over Parikia and he spent most days watching the ferries and cruise ships and mega-expensive billionaire yachts coming and going out of the port. There was a pool for the kids to splash about in and a small beach around 100 metres or so away. Had we wanted to, we could have turned left and walked all the way along a bigger stretch of beach to a place called Crios, which was a fancy restaurant and bar playing the sort of trendy chill-out music you get in expensive bars in Ibiza in the daytime.

You could hire loungers there and order food to your lounger, but it was something like eighty euros for the loungers and then a minimum food spend and Rich refused on principal and because he hates places like that with a passion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Possibly the best part of the holiday, for me, was the adventure of the whole thing. I do think that’s what you miss out on with a package holiday. In a way, when you do a package holiday to a resort, what are you actually going away for? The heat? Because you don’t see much of the surroundings, you don’t explore any of the place you’ve flown to, you just go airport - taxi - resort - taxi - airport. I really enjoyed the ferry journeys, though getting on and off them was completely chaotic and everyone almost died of sunstroke waiting in the queue to get on.

We took the huge car ferry, which takes 3.5 hours from Santorini and I thought that it was so exciting, passing dozens of rocky islands that all look like the sort of islands from the Greek myths and legends where demi-Gods have been left to be pecked to death by crows, etc. When we stopped in at Naxos to let people off, it was like being on a mini cruise. I imagine. I am the least likely person to go on a cruise, because I watched Titanic in 1997 and the sinking scenes seared into my brain, and then I saw a video online about how you escape a cruise ship in an emergency if the lifeboats can’t be lowered and that just about did it for me.

Greek Ferries though: I’m in. So I loved the ferry bit and I loved - loved - exploring the old towns in Parikia and Naousa. Both Naousa and Parikia old towns are beautiful; tiny cobbled streets between white sugar cube buildings, cute little tavernas with tables so close to the sea they’re almost falling into it, sexy-looking bars hidden away in dark corners, it’s all a travel marketer’s dream. I really liked it, the whole place, though I’m going to be probably slightly controversial and say that I thought Parikia was actually a bit more interesting than Naousa, which is the “front of the postcard” place. The functional seafront and the noisy, chaotic port would lead you think that this was just the place where you get off the ferry and hire a car, but hidden behind these roads are the most gorgeous little lanes and passageways, you could write a brilliant book set there!

I would absolutely say that Paros is worth the extra bit of travel. Would I particularly go there with kids? Possibly not. I think that other places in Greece have better beaches and a bit more to do, but for swanking around as adults, it’s gorgeous.

In terms of cost, the villa was £3700 for the week (slept six, so if you were sharing with other adults in would be infinitely better value, or indeed if you didn’t go in August when it would be approx a third of the price!) and we spent around £400 on car hire and about £130-£150 a day on food, drink and ice creams for the four of us. (When I say “drink”, Rich probably had two small beers a night, I had one or two small glasses of wine, so we weren’t tearing it up!)

Total cost, so that we can compare with the Ikos holiday? Around £5100, without flights. Ikos (*cries*) came in at £9792, which I think was €11,000. And I am fully aware that even the lower cost holiday is hugely expensive. The Ikos holiday was the most I had ever spent on a holiday, by a long way, and would never ever spend this again. (Could never spend this again!)

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Pros of the self-catered holiday: we all had our own room, more space in general, our own pool with incredible views and a sense of total privacy. We explored, got a real feel for the place we’d travelled to, and we enjoyed the adventures we went on in the absolutely brutal heat that always felt very ill-advised, like we could die of thirst or spontaneous-combustion at any moment. Exciting! We could choose where to eat, and the local tavernas and restaurants were way, way better than anything we had at Ikos. (Don’t want to keep singling Ikos out here, maybe we got a dud one, but I have no other family resort experience to compare it with!)

Cons of the self-catered holiday: the adventures required planning and getting into a car. We had to do at least one supermarket trip, which is my absolute holiday turn-off, and the kids could only amuse themselves so much in one small pool before they started to get twitchy for something else to do. Everything at a resort is completely convenient, and almost everything when you self-cater is the opposite.

The question is, what price do you put on convenience? Is it worth double? I honestly still haven’t worked this one out, so answers in the comments. Because yes, a resort is convenient, but you’re still all squashed into one room (unless you have the funds of Jeff Bezos) which is positively un-luxurious in my books, and you’re still mostly eating food that is, let’s face it, cooked en masse by caterers. It’s never going to have the same care put into it as an age-old seafront Taverna that’s been serving the same list of specials for over a hundred years, etc etc, play traditional background music.

Is it really worth the money, to shell out twice as much for a resort but then feel overwhelmed with absolutely blinding rage when you see people reserving sun loungers around the pool, spreading out their beach bags and towels? To all be queueing for the breakfast buffet - A BUFFET! At that price! - where you’ll then sit shoulder to shoulder with people who are conducting full-volume Facetime conversations with relatives back home?

I’m dumping my thoughts, now, but I do think I’m slowly coming around to Rich’s philosophy when it comes to family holidays, which is this: accept that the holiday should be for the kids - happy kids, happy family - and don’t set the bar too high in terms of expectations. Keep travel plans simple and unstressful. Maybe he’s onto something. After all, both kids have listed “the trip to Yorkshire” (2023) as one of their best holidays ever! I think it’s because they went pony trekking, which they loved, and we visited two castles (also a big hit) and ate in loads of old dark pubs that did good chips and pies.

Could it be that holidays in the UK will be the way forward for us? I’ll keep you informed. I have to say that the flights to and from Greece that so depleted me at the time now feel like a distant memory, and I’m being bombarded online with content about Mallorca, and my neighbours go all the time to Mallorca, so now - in typical me style - I’m wondering why we’ve never been to Mallorca and whether that could be the place that finally gives us a stress-free, convenient, family-pleasing holiday!

Watch this space. Rich had better not read this, he might weep in despair…

Hit the heart button, if you can summon up the energy - it helps send the post to people who have yet to be introduced to my particular brand of thought chaos. Oh, also, let me know in the comments where you stand when it comes to resort holidays vs self-catering and also if you have any intel regarding Mallorca. Merci beaucoup!

I know it’s the safest form of travel. I know that you have to think of turbulence as just like being on a bumpy road. I am perfectly au fait with the various failsafes and emergency protocols that airlines employ to ensure that an accident is very, very, very, very unlikely, but forgive me if hurtling through the air at 30,000 feet in what amounts to a tin can with wings doesn’t fill me with absolute confidence.

Do you know what, as well, it’s the safety briefing that freaks me out. I should just not listen to it, really, but I am both a people-pleaser and a law-abiding citizen and so when I am told to pay attention by someone wearing a tabard, lanyard or any sort of official-looking uniform then I give them my full gaze.

The shitty little life jacket! I mean honestly, what would this do in an emergency? You’re not even allowed to inflate it until you’re outside of the aeroplane, until you’re hurtling down a yellow blow-up slide into the pitch black, freezing cold Atlantic: at what stage are you really going to be able to get your shit together to find that little toggle and give it a firm tug? I’d have trouble locating it if it was directly beneath my in-seat reading light!

And then the whistle and the torch. It all feels so futile, and what it says to me is, subliminally, “if we land on water then you are absolutely f*cked.”

I’m sorry, it does.

So I am not great with flying, really, despite being incredibly well-practised, and I have to do my own little very quiet sort of meditation to get through it. I read once that all of the bad plane things happen in the first thirty seconds, and so as soon as the plane begins careering down the runway, making that hellish racket that sounds as though you’re trying to make your Dad’s 1984 Ford Cortina do sixty miles an hour in second gear (me, summer of 1998), I begin a very slow count.

Five counts breathing in, five counts holding the breath, five counts out. Thirty times. Which amounts to way more than thirty seconds, but I find comfort in that. I keep my eyes closed, I gently clasp my hands together and I imagine - don’t laugh - that the world is ending from a Zombie apocalypse/nuclear disaster and that I’m on the last plane out of Dodge.

Somehow, this mentally reinforces that being on the plane is actually the safest place for me to be. Safer than the bus that ferried me across the tarmac. Safer than the dodgy Uber driver who dropped me at the airport, who looked at his Whatsapp messages every thirty seconds even when he was doing eighty-five down the motorway. Safer than the Gatwick Express!

I have somehow managed, in this way, with my little methods, to keep my fear under control and not let my dislike of flying interfere with my work or my life. But here’s the problem: when I’m flying with the kids, all of my little methods go completely out of the window. Or not out of the window, because that doesn’t open (hopefully!) but you know what I mean. I simply cannot call upon my usual coping strategies.

My daughter, eleven, is absolutely fine - she gets travel sick, but is otherwise non-fazed by the whole process of airport, flying, landing, airport - but my son, who is nine, has an almost infinite number of questions about aeroplanes, pilots, and flying as soon as we begin queueing up in the line for boarding.

And it would be OK if these questions were about, I don’t know, where they store all of the sandwiches, or what happens if you want to take your dog on a plane, or whether they sometimes get all of the suitcases mixed up and send them to the wrong country. I could cope with that, but his questions are both complex and morbid, tending to focus on aeronautical engineering failures and potential fatal mid-air disasters:

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Lying out in the sun with a massive hat on and a lightweight towel draped over the top of my head for extra shade? Reading. Lounging in a hammock under a tree with cicadas dropping into my lap every few minutes (downside of that particular scenario): reading. Belted securely into my aeroplane seat? You’ve guessed it.

But if I’m on holiday, and I’m not supposed to be on my laptop, and I feel guilty for doing admin on my phone, then what else is there to do?

Spend time with the family?! Pah!

I jest, of course: that’s the whole point of a holiday, isn’t it, to spend time with each other. But there’s always a major flaw in my holiday plans, which is that I tend to book holidays to places that are hotter than the actual surface of the sun, and also I book them IN AUGUST, when the pavements melt and the water comes out from the taps already boiling. And so it is always too hot for the kids to be outside until the late afternoon comes around. They usually spend half the day hiding inside, watching TV and doing all the stuff we’re on holiday to get away from.

I have no idea why I book the same eye-burningly hot locations every time - for the past five years it’s been Greece, Greece, Turkey, Greece, Greece. Always teetering on the brink of 40 degrees, always ridiculously brutal from around 11am until 4pm, to the point where you can’t walk barefoot on the sand, or potter around the shops.

It’s like a weird compulsion, that I must have a holiday somewhere so hot that the trees spontaneously burst into flames as you look at them, otherwise it hasn’t truly been a holiday. Is it because everyone was so obsessed with “getting some sun” in the eighties?

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We’ll return to this subject soon. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching over the past few weeks and I might well have come up with a handy checklist for any parents who are at a loss as to what makes the perfect family holiday. I know I wrote about this briefly earlier in the year, but I totally ignored my own advice, didn’t I (stay in the UK, go somewhere familiar, keep expectations low) and so I have reviewed and revised my guidelines and now have a really solid set of rules to follow. Yes, they’re decidedly pessimistic and yes they also cast parenting in a slightly grim light, almost to the point where you could show them to people as a mild form of contraception, but boy will they save you some money over the years!

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Back to the books. I read eight of them in nine days, which Rich doesn’t believe is possible but when you think that we spent seven whole hours at Santorini airport waiting for our flight home and that an 80,000 word book takes the average reader around 6.5 hours to get through… Of course I ploughed through an entire stash of them. Two flights, two ferry journeys (we went to Paros), countless hours when the kids were inside the little villa watching Is It Cake? and playing Mario Karts, more countless hours when I couldn’t sleep at night, because the bed mattress had only marginally more flex than an iron girder…

Here’s what I finished, what I abandoned and which books I’d recommend:

Look What You Made Me Do, John Lanchester

Massively enjoyed this, tore through it! Oh, I forgot to mention: all of the books I read were ones I downloaded to my new Kindle. So my choices were very much guided by which books were in the 99p sale or, even better, included in the Kindle Unlimited section, which meant that I could borrow them for free.

(I had a three month subscription to Kindle Unlimited thrown in for free when I bought my device recently.)

This one, though, Look What You Made Me Do, I bought for 99p before I left. It had been popping up in my recommended things for weeks and I actually had the paper version in my “saved for later” basket so I was thrilled to get it for a penny shy of a quid.

Good cover, very graphic and bold and fully representative of the middle-class content within, and an excellent, snappy, sharp-witted opening chapter. One of the things I first noticed about the book was that I disliked nearly every character, but once the story got going, with all of its twists and turns, I began to realise that this was sort of the whole point.

The story opens with what seems to be the perfect long-term “cosmopolitan” marriage. Decades long, this marriage, but still lively and full and packed with all of the little secrets and nicknames and shared memories that couples collect together over time. A successful, late-middle-aged couple, no kids, living in an affluent street in West London, going to Ottolenghi-themed dinner parties and having intelligent conversations about politics and so on, which feels a million light years away from my life now but I can totally envisage. Especially as it’s drawn so brilliantly well here. More than a hint of smugness to it.

But - and not to spoil things - the whole idyll is shattered almost immediately. And then there’s a horrible, sickening dark twist. And then we meet a new set of characters and there’s another sickening twist, and as it all goes un-merrily along, the storylines become entwined and the characters become more and more unlikeable and it’s just very well executed.

A strong start to the holiday reading, I must say. The writing was sharp and practical and modern, no flowery descriptions, no meandering passages of self-reflection. And yes, a set of characters who all maybe did or maybe didn’t realise how utterly gross they were.

I downloaded it here

North Woods, Daniel Mason

This was a completely different kettle of fish: intricate, dense with history, the story of one piece of land in America and the people who inhabited it over generations. There’s a lot about apples in it, and it did make me want to taste the specific apple they grew in the orchard that was planted on the land, all trees grown from the pip of an apple core that was in the stomach of one of three soldiers who had attacked the first woman who had lived in a cabin on the land, but then who had either got an axe in his head or shot with an arrow, I can’t now remember, but you now see why I say that the book is dense with history: but honestly I can’t believe that this special apple could be better than a Pink Lady from the Co-op.

I don’t use the Co-op often, I don’t think there even is one in Bath, but there’s one in Bridport, not too far from The Dorset Nook and The Dorset Nest (holiday cottages I own and run, one open, one about to be) and let me tell you that their Pink Lady apples are a cut above anyone else’s. Just the right balance of sweetness and crisp, delicious tartness, oh my God. I struggle to believe that the apples described in North Woods, that are so central to the story and to the conflicts between characters in the story, can be as good as the ones at the Co-op.

I say this as an authority on Pink Ladies, as I have tried them from every single supermarket and I always take note of the particular orchard or “farm” they have come from. Although I didn’t for the Co-op ones and so I will have to get more, check that they’re the same and then tell you the specific name. Protect this orchard at all costs!

Anyway the book is good. The last couple of chapters annoyed me and when you read it you will probably see why - a weak ending, I thought, but it didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment. A great, interesting passage-through-the-ages sort of book that has stayed with me.

I bought it here

Nesting, Roisin O'Donnell

A difficult read. Big trigger warning for domestic abuse, and the way this is written feels very immediate and urgent, altogether very stressful. But at the same time, you’re rooting for the central character so intensely, completely invested in all of the highs and lows, and when the highs come, you find yourself loudly cheering.

I actually think that this is a hugely important read; it shows that abuse can come in all shapes and forms and that being under the threat of violence, or being gradually, quietly controlled by someone, can be utterly life-ruining and terrifying.

I borrowed it from Kindle Unlimited here

The Correspondent, Virginia Evans

I enjoyed this book immensely but also sobbed quite loudly and alarmingly before I’d even reached the halfway point. I surprised myself, and also the two little resident Greek kittens who liked to bask underneath my sunlounger while I was reading. Out they shot, off down the garden!

Premise of this one, if I had to shove it unceremoniously into a nutshell: woman in her seventies, is a writer of letters and has been since her teens, gradually reveals her backstory and thus the events that have shaped her life through a series of letters.

Oh it’s a tear-jerker. I found her very rude, at first, Sybil Van Antwerp - too direct - but that is obviously a deliberate strategy, because it makes what she reveals and her growing vulnerability all the harder to take. The hard exterior gradually cracks and it’s heartbreaking.

One thing: the cover for this book makes it look like an airport novel, some generic story about love letters or whatnot, “woman with cupcake shop meets complicated bearded lumberjack with a shady past”, which is why I avoided reading it for so long. The cover doesn’t do it justice! It’s completely unsuitable. I can only think that there’s some sort of thing going on with publishers where they make book covers bright and simple so that they are more universally appealing. It feels like the Great Dumbing Down of Book Covers, 2026.

Not that there’s anything wrong with stories about cupcake shop owners and lumberjacks, but when the cover doesn’t match the quality of the writing inside, it’s like entering a Burger King shop front only to find an award-winning bistro within. Admittedly a brilliant surprise, but I love a good book cover.

I was similarly disappointed with the cover of The Names, one of my books of the year, if I was forced to choose some; thought that it was a story about a holiday romance from the cover art. Couldn’t have been further from the reality. Very jarring.

I downloaded The Correspondent here.

Theo of Golden, Allen Levi

I had to abandon this one I’m afraid. The main character irritated me before I’d even reached page four, with his exaggerated attentiveness to every single detail on the street and in the cafe and his sickly do-goody goody-two-shoes charade. I had to flick ahead to see if he (hopefully) turned out to be some sort of serial killer or deviant but he just got more and more virtue signally.

Disclaimer: I did have rampant PMT when I tried to read this. But come on! He goes into a coffee shop and it’s filled with pencil portraits (as in drawn in pencil, not portraits of pencils, that would be bizarre and boring, wouldn’t it?) and he tracks down the people in the portraits and buys them their picture.

Ugh.

The first recipient, honestly, you should hear the amount of discussion that goes on between her and her husband about whether they should go and meet the old man (who is called Mr Theo, which also enraged me for reasons I can’t quite work out) and get the portrait from him. You’d think they were deciding whether to sell their car as collateral to go all in on a roulette wheel.

Not for me, I’m afraid. It was free on Kindle Unlimited.

Summerwater, Sarah Moss

Tore through this clever, short-ish novel by Sarah Moss, author of Ripeness, a book I recommended a little while ago. Summerwater is set in Scotland, at some holiday cabins on a lakeside, and it jumps in and out of the lives of the families staying in them. From a judgemental old GP and his wife, whose mind and memory is clearly starting to fail her, to a couple of very disgruntled teens who would rather be anywhere than in a tiny damp cabin with their parents, it tells you so much about them through their actions and interactions without really needing anything dramatic to happen at all.

(Although something does happen, don’t worry.)

I really enjoyed it. It was like a series of character studies and all of the characters’ traits and failings and guilty secrets are so familiar, so bloody pedestrian! Slightly depressing in some ways, but you know when you read a book and it suddenly makes you realise how many people are just on the same old treadmill of life? Experiencing the same feelings, making the same sorts of compromises… I think Sarah Moss is really clever at drawing these sorts of studies.

There is a grand finale in terms of “action” but honestly I felt as though the storyline played massively second fiddle to the brilliant observations of modern life.

Ooh! Just realised I borrowed this one for free on Kindle Unlimited - it’s here.

This Other Eden, Paul Harding

For Pete’s sake, I was only supposed to be writing two sentences for each book! It was supposed to be a filler post before my proper holiday debriefs! OK, this one I actually started years ago but, for some reason, abandoned.

When I restarted it I remembered why I had abandoned it; it’s not the ideal holiday read. Mind you, neither is Nesting, if you’re after a light-hearted sun-lounger romp. But it is a novel of pure brilliance, and it’s not until right at the end that you realise quite how brilliant it is.

It’s about the lives of a tiny community on an island called Apple Island and how - a century after the island was discovered and inhabited - officials on the mainland decide that the inhabitants need to be evicted. It’s a clever depiction of the world’s intolerance towards people who wish to live differently, or who simply do live differently, who have no other choice, and the ending, where the “other Eden” is placed in sharp contrast with the rest of the world, is shattering.

I bought it here

Heartburn, Nora Ephron

I know, I know: how am I only just getting into Nora Ephron? Hugely enjoyed this short and spiky book about selfish people, life choices and deciding when enough is enough: it could have been a tragic tome but Nora Ephron kills the sadness with humour and I’m always appreciative of that.

My favourite part was the foreword, though, when she talks about how the story in the novel is mostly true and she’s barely disguised any of the characters, and how they were all really annoyed with her because she didn’t go to enough lengths to disguise them. And she writes very cleverly about how the term “thinly veiled” is weaponised against female writers, and how really if her ex-husband hadn’t wanted to be in her book as a cheater then he shouldn’t have cheated. Along those lines, anyway. Had I not wanted to scare the kittens away again I would have clapped, loudly.

Bought it here

Night Swimmers, Roisin Maguire

Another free book on the Kindle Unlimited thing - didn’t I do well? I enjoyed this book, set in the 2020 lockdown in a little coastal village in Northern Ireland. A man, a “townie” is separating from his wife after a terrible tragedy and he rents the holiday cottage from a woman, Grace, who has lived there on the coast for all of her life. She’s very blunt, used to living alone and does badass things like rowing out to sea to catch her own fish, swimming naked in the freezing water at night and rescuing badger-baiting dogs. That sort of stuff.

Grace and the Townie’s lives criss-cross over each other and clash - his grief and her stubborn independence - and the book is a lovely reminder of how people can bend towards one another even in the most unlikely of situations.

Two things that annoyed me though: firstly Grace is supposed to be fifty but she has been written as though she’s eighty-five. This is a fit woman who swims daily but it’s “ooh my knees” this and “ouch my back” that and it just didn’t ring true for me. Maybe I just know a lot of fit fifty year-olds, but I don’t think so. It didn’t tally with her general badass-edness. Second thing: the Townie character. I couldn’t get him straight in my imagination. I know he’s grieving but he was very insipid and it was hard to form a picture of him and what he was about.

Regardless, I stormed through this during my eighteen hour journey home from Paros and found it greatly enjoyable.

Free on Kindle Unlimited here

Well that was the longest eight paragraph post I’ve ever written! Sorry. I’ll make the next post just pictures, shall I? I have lots of holiday snaps! Please do tap on the heart button on your way out so that people think crikey, that post has a lot of likes, I had better just have a little look and see what all the fuss is about, and then wonder what the hell they’ve stumbled upon when I start chuntering on about apples and the Co-op in Bridport and whatever else I digressed towards…

Last year I worked with Latest in Beauty to create an amazing box containing my favourite and most-used beauty products; it sold out within days, and by the time I posted about it here on Substack, it was completely gone.

Rather than making the same mistake again, I am slipping this unscheduled post into the mix, before the onslaught of holiday posts about Paros and about hot weather makeup and about all of the books I tore through on my Kindle, to tell you about my brand new beauty box: The Beauty Reset.

This box is packed full of firm favourites, new discoveries and some extra-special treats that I know you will love, and is worth £318. It’s on sale with Latest in Beauty for (and wait until you see what’s in it!) £68, but if you’re reading this then you get an extra 12% off and free UK delivery with the code RUTHSENTME.

SHOP HERE

That’s £59.84 in total.

Fourteen products.

Should be £318.

I know!

Want to know what’s inside? Then let us proceed!

SKINCARE

Cleanse:

Weleda Skin Food Cleansing Balm 75ml, worth £13.50. One of my top discoveries of the year, this cleansing balm. I challenge you not to fall in love with it. Smells amazing, does a brilliant job of getting off all makeup and sunscreen, leaves no greasy residue behind. It’s a triumph and all at an amazing price-point, so once you do fall in love without you won’t think twice about repurchasing.

Vitamin C:

Gatineau Radiance Enhancing Vitamin C Serum 30ml, worth £52.00. Almost justifies the cost of the entire beauty box in one fell swoop, this fancy Vitamin C serum. This has a gorgeously lightweight, silky texture and is properly effective at brightening, helping to even out skintone and leaving your face with a megawatt glow.

Moisturiser:

Alpha-H Firming Collagen Repair Cream 15ml, worth £15.99. I’m a very long-term fan of Alpha-H, they make so many of my favourites, and this plumptious face cream is another 10/10 from me. Leaves my skin feeling bouncy and juicy but without any of the heaviness or greasiness that some richer creams leave.

Sunscreen:

Ultra Violette Queen Screen SPF 50+ Luminising Skinscreen 75ml, worth £42.00. If you’ve never had the pleasure of testing this, let me tell you it’s the best-smelling sunscreen I’ve ever used. It smells and feels like some kind of swanky spa serum! Slips on beautifully, leaves a luminous glow that seems to make any foundation that sits on top look dewier and fresher, comes in this gigantor 75ml bottle. What’s not to love?

Retinol:

RoC Derm Correxion Firm + Sculpt Lifting Serum Stick 30g, worth £39.99. I love these RoC serum sticks; you can use all over your face, neck and chest for your retinol hit but they work particularly well just under the chin where you usually miss when you’re applying product. (Or I do, anyway.) It’s just the perfect fit. I use mine every single day and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of my routine.

Neck and Dec:

PRAI Beauty Ageless Throat & Decolletage Creme - Intensive Gold+, 30ml worth £24.00. PRAI have long been the Queens of Neck Stuff, with incredible user testimonials and rave reviews. This potent cream feels gorgeous to apply and doesn’t leave the neck area feeling tacky or sticky, which is one of my pet peeves with neck products. Easy to incorporate into your routine before applying your sunscreen, or you can keep it beside the bed and apply it last thing at night.

Mask:

Emma Hardie Vitamin C Brightening Hydrogel Facial Mask, 1 Mask worth £15.00. Well this is a fancy treat. A one-use mask to brighten, tone and hugely hydrate, the next best thing to a facial, really, if time is of the essence and you need to look the part. Which is a polite way of saying, “if you’re hungover/knackered and need to pull yourself together for the wedding you’re a bridesmaid at, that starts in five hours’ time”. This has so much serum in the mask and the pouch it comes in that you can actually do your arms and legs, too, which is today’s top tip! I also put the face mask onto my chest once I’d finished with it, and kept it on whilst I did my makeup. I like to make the most of these luxury buys!

Brow & Lash Serum:

Brow Aid The S.O.S Advanced Brow & Lash Recovery Mask 5g, worth £23.00. I seem to have reactions to most lash serums: not this one! Hurrah! It’s prostaglandin-free (I think maybe it’s the prostaglandin I usually have an issue with?) and a cinch to apply - just comb through the brows and use the applicator tip to apply to the roots of the lashes - and helps to support growth as well as optimise brow and lash health. This is a new discovery for me, but I have tested loads of Brow Aid products and all have been superb.

BUY BEAUTY RESET BOX

HAIRCARE

Treatment:

Philip Kingsley Elasticizer Deep-Conditioning Treatment 75ml, worth £22.00. This is just a classic. You apply before your shampoo and conditioner and it helps to completely restore the elasticity and strength to your hair - a very necessary maintenance step if you colour or heat-treat your hair and a great treat even if you don’t. I apply a few hours before my hair wash and put a shower cap over it to really let it get to work. As a life-long hair-bleacher, I dread to think what my hair would be like if I didn’t use this!

Shampoo + Conditioner:

Living Proof Full Shampoo and Conditioner DUO 2 x 30ml, worth £14.00. This little duo will present you with a new haircare obsession; they really do help to give you extra lift and bounce, especially if you have fine, flat hair. If I use Living Proof Full Shampoo and Conditioner and then my heated rollers, the volume is actually borderline ridiculous!

Styling:

Hair by Sam McKnight Happy Endings Nourishing Balm 30ml Mini, worth £22.00. This is my styling saviour. Instantly defrizzes and smooths split ends and gives my hair that cool, tousled sort of separation I can’t get any other way. It’s particularly great because it works so well on fine, flat hair too - it’s hugely effective without being heavy or greasy or weighing the ends of my hair down. I use on both damp hair pre-styling and as a finisher on my dried hair. An essential.

Dry Shampoo:

REHAB Mini Essential Dry Shampoo 25g, worth £15.00. I really like that in some ways Rehab have gone quite old-school with their products. This is a puff-in-and-rub powder that does away with the aerosol and some of the associated ingredients that can sometimes irritate your scalp. It’s just very simple and gentle. Puffing it in takes a tiny bit of practice, but if you normally tear through whole cans of dry shampoo at a time then this is, in many ways, a more concentrated way of doing things.

BODY

Gatineau Golden Glow Gradual Tan 75ml, worth £20.00. One body product and, incidentally, the only one you really need, what with the end of the summer and the colder, bleaker weather days ahead. This foolproof gradual tanner gives a sunkissed glow with the same effort level as simply rubbing on a body lotion. I use a mitt to apply, out of habit, but if you remember to thoroughly wash your hands afterwards, there’s no peril of tan lines or streaks with this brilliant product. Even one application a week will maintain the sort of bronzage that you might have picked up over a long weekend in Ibiza. Perfecto!

So. All of this, with a grand total of £318 in value, all packed into the Beauty Reset box and yours* for £59.84 with the code RUTHSENTME. Over 80% off. This sold out so quickly last year, so that’s why I’m sitting here amid piles of holiday washing, typing away, making sure I tell you about it with enough time to spare!

BUY HERE

I hope you love it - many thanks to the excellent brands involved and to the team at Latest in Beauty who work so hard to bring it all together!

*Apologies to those outside of the UK, distribution is UK only with Latest in Beauty,

Peter and Olivia have left for their beach house, now, but tomorrow Mama arrives and she is bringing with her the new dog. And, with any luck, a ham and a pork pie and some fat old cucumbers. I would so much like a picnic.

Alas we only have one hammock and it is rusting away in the shed. And I don’t know a Peter and Olivia with a beach house. But you get the gist. Slow and sultry, that is what I wanted. Instead my month was like being thrown into a chaotic wok.

Here are my favourites, including the skincare I keep coming back to, the very best solution to wall lights if you don’t have the wiring for it and my book of the month…

AD: this post contains a paid collaboration with Renew & Me, a brand I have faithfully used (including as a paying customer) for years. Some outbound links are affiliate links.

Renew + Me

You need only look in my “empties” box to see how much of a fan I am of Renew + Me. This is a personalised skincare brand that, after an online consultation, tailors a (very, very) highly potent skin cream for you to use nightly. The fact that the cream is tailored to your specific needs is what’s important here, because it means that the product should be well-tolerated by your skin and provide you with precisely what your skin requires. No guessing, no trawling through Reddit threads or standing in the skincare aisle feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the thousands of products laid out around you.

(I have an exclusive offer from Renew + Me below, so stay with me!)

I’ve been using Renew + Me since launch, which - if I remember rightly - was over two years ago. Before that, I used the personalised cream from their sister brand, Skin + Me, for another few years, so I can safely say that I have tested it to its absolute fullest.

And I can tell you that it is not great to love a singular product this much, not when a large proportion of your job involves testing out a variety of skincare products from different brands! When you keep coming back to the same thing again and again, month after month, year after year, it kind of limits what else you can try out on your face.

I have tested other high-strength products containing retinoids, but my Nightly Active Treatment contains gold standard actives that are up to twenty times stronger than high street retinol and - more importantly - it has been formulated with my particular skin in mind. It has been personalised.

I think that it’s testament to the Renew + Me product that it’s the one I always return to. My base camp. My skin never feels more balanced, more evenly-toned or more smooth than when I’m using it.

I feel as though we’re all pretty well-versed on the retinoids side of things at this point - there’s pretty much nothing they won’t tackle, including fine lines, lack of firmness, unevenness of tone and even spots - but I need to tell you about a couple of other ingredients that are in my Nightly Active Treatment from Renew + Me, because I hadn’t paid much attention to them before this summer. More fool me.

Wind your brain back, if you will, to when I talked about my outbreak of summer-related spots. I wrote about them here. Well, when that happened - and this is the third year in a row that this Hot Skin Fallout has occurred - I decided to look a bit more into the ingredients I could use to support my skin barrier, calm the redness and fade the marks that the spot outbreak had left behind. The ones that came up again and again as being powerhouses for this task were niacinamide and azelaic acid and, me being me, I immediately set about purchasing three or four different serums that rate highly for these ingredients.

Guess who already owned three or four (at least) other serums with these ingredients in? Yes, me. (I could now set myself up as a niacinamide and azelaic acid dealer from my work cabin, I have so much of it.)

And also, more importantly, guess who already owned an amazing product that not only contained these ingredients, the hallowed niacinamide and azelaic acid, but combined them with her potent-as-anything retinoid, and also formulated all of these things into a beautiful rich and nourishing base cream that acts as a protective shield?

ALSO ME.

And yes, I am talking about my Renew + Me Nightly-Active-Treatment, obviously. It has taken on a whole new level of brilliance, in my eyes - I loved it before, but I have a renewed appreciation of just how clever this product is. Tackling everything from fine lines to dullness to lack of firmness but also supporting the skin barrier at the same time, helping with clarity, calming redness and fading out marks and imperfections?

Bloody hell!

In a final stroke of utter genius, the personalised Nightly Active Treatment is supplied in a special click-and-twist doser that dispenses precisely the right amount of product each night at strengths my skin can tolerate. No waste, minimal packaging (which is an absolute breath of fresh air, isn’t it, these days?) and no-double guessing the amount of product I need to apply.

So, despite me being a total Beauty Magpie and always wanting to try the newest thing, and despite me actually needing to be always trying the newest thing because I write about beauty and it’s sort of part and parcel of that particular job, I have spent an inordinate amount of time using Renew + Me as my sole nightly product. That should say it all, really.

If you’d like to give Renew + Me a try, they have given me a special code - RUTHSAVE - that gets you your first month of Nightly Active Treatment for just £6.99. That’s over 75% off. Just click here to get started! They’re so confident you’ll see results that they offer a money back guarantee if you haven’t seen any by week twelve.

The process for getting your dermatologist designed Nightly-Active-Treatment is quick and straightforward (I actually really enjoy the questions part, they’ve made it very streamlined!) and you are fully supported by the dermatology team throughout.

I think that it very much replaces guesswork, having a cream personalised to your exact needs, and stops you from having to buy a load of different things that may or may not be right, may or may not be working… A sound investment, in my opinion.

Renew + Me

Kindle Paperwhite

My old Kindle Paperwhite (circa 2013) had a small split in the screen and every time I read a book on there I was heavily distracted by this intense pinpoint of light that was bursting forth towards my retinas. (Retinae?) I put up with it for around ten years but this month, after loading it with books for my holiday, I thought enough is enough! and treated myself to a new one.

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I only really use a Kindle on holiday, which is why I put up with a damaged screen for a decade, but when I do use it on holiday, boy do I use it! And I must say that thirteen years is very, very good going for a tech product - had the screen not had this small dink in it I imagine it would have kept going for another thirteen. When you look at how quickly iPhones become outdated, or how often the screens crack or what have you, the Kindle seems such good value.

Good old Kindle. What I actually want to say, though, is that there is (I think) a huge difference between the entry, base-level Kindle and the Paperwhite version. I ordered the cheaper one for a hundred quid because I thought that it would still be miles better than my old Paperwhite, being new and all, but actually the screen on my Paperwhite (minus chink of holy light beaming through) was far better.

The base Kindle screen looked like a photograph of the Paperwhite screen, if that makes any sense. A Paperwhite screen looks very much like an actual sheet of paper. It really, really does. The whole effect has been brilliantly executed.

But I couldn’t handle the normal, base level Kindle screen at all, it felt stressful to my eyes. And so I returned that and upgraded to the new Paperwhite, which is a slight improvement to the old one but hardly discernable.

(If you have an old Paperwhite and it functions perfectly, I would confidently say that you will have no reason to upgrade that baby for the next decade. I just can’t imagine how they would improve on it. Yes the screen is bigger, but it’s not a life-shattering difference.)

I bought my new Kindle Paperwhite here. I got a three month free subscription of something called Kindle Unlimited, which has so far let me download eight books for free, which would have cost me about eighty quid at the airport, so I am well chuffed with that. Has paid for half the Kindle, more or less…

Stylish Wall Lights: No Electrician Needed!

I think wall lights are my favourite type of light, in terms of the quality of illumination and the warmth of it and the flattering nature. Table lamps are all well and good, but a wall light is a) slightly higher up, so you can also actually see things in the room rather than feeling as though you’re at a seance and b) tucked out of the way, so that it’s not creating extra clutter or requiring its own little table and so on.

(Not that I think of table lamps as clutter, I LOVE table lamps, but you have to impose a limit on them otherwise you collect too many and end up looking like you’re running a lamp shop.)

But the problem with wall lights is that you need the wiring for them. And so many houses don’t have it. It seems that when many people re-do their houses, more often than not they stick eighty spotlights in the ceiling and NO wiring for anything else, because wall lights just aren’t in their orbit, and then you buy and move into said house and it’s just too much of a faff to rewire it so that you can have wall lights - the wiring has to be chased in, the room has to be re-plastered…

Anyway, there’s a solution to this problem, if you want beautiful wall lights but don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on an electrician and plasterer: plug-in wall lights. Apologies if I’m preaching to the converted here or stating the obvious, because you may well have seen plug-in wall lights before (I had one in my bedroom in the eighties) but they vary dramatically in quality and I feel as though I’ve found an amazing option.

I actually don’t want to share it with you, because I need to order four more for The Dorset Nest, but I’ll put my your needs before my own and tell you: it’s the Jim Lawrence plug-in wall lights, namely in the style “Brooke”. These come in black or antique brass and look absolutely gorgeous in any sort of traditional or cottage-y setting.

The beauty of them is, is that you buy the shade arm only and so can choose from an endless variety of lampshades and, depending on your vibe you can make a wall light that’s whismsical, or elegant, or traditional, or even one that looks like it’s been lifted out from a fairy’s cottage in a secret glade. The world is your oyster, when you start looking into lampshades.

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I go for a 20cm lampshade with this wall light and my favourites are from Pooky and from Next. The ones from Next are, for the price (twenty quid) absolutely brilliant. I love the frilled shade striped ones, but they have loads of different fabrics and designs.

The wall light arm itself is just under a hundred pounds, but Jim Lawrence things are worth every single penny in my experience. Exceptional quality and attention to detail that goes way, way beyond any cheaper imitation.

And the cord is braided! Very important detail, that, because the cord is essentially going to be trailing down your wall, to the plug, and if it’s a cheap shiny plastic thing then it will look awful.

So there: a beautiful wall light wherever you have a plug. No electrician, no plasterer, just add a lampshade (the fun bit) plug it in (I mean, some might get a thrill) and go.

Jim Lawrence Brooke Plug-In Wall Light - here

Pooky 20cm shades - I have bought two of these candy stripe ones

Next 20cm shades - here

Unearthed Spanish Tortilla

Why have I got serious deja vu all of a sudden? Have I written about this before? YES! Oh God, sorry. This just shows how much I’ve fallen in love with this particular foodstuff.

I’m going to paraphrase what I wrote the other week, because this lunch option is worth repeating. (Daily, in my case.) It’s so easy, full of protein and/or potato (reckon it’s probably more potato than protein but when was that ever a bad thing):

These ready-made Spanish tortillas are bloody amazing for people like me who want a quick lunch but don’t want to put any more effort into preparing it than simply opening the fridge.

Lunch is often my downfall: if I can’t immediately fathom what it is I’m going to have, then I take out a block of cheese and the butter and I spread the butter into a white roll, fill the roll with cheese, maybe some sliced tomato if I’m worrying for my general health, and then I stretch up to the cupboard that sits above the fridge, out of child-reach, and I get myself a packet of Walkers Salt & Vinegar crisps (the elite crisp and I won’t take other suggestions) to add texture, crunch and variety to the plate.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortilla saves me from myself. There it sits, all fresh and lovely and air-sealed, layers of cooked, salty potato trapped in the firm, eggy goodness. Perfectly seasoned. So much protein! Just slit open the lid with a knife and cut the tortilla in half and tip one half of it onto a plate with the aforementioned tomatoes that would have gone into your cheese roll, add some rocket dressed in good balsamic and extra virgin olive oil! A ten second wonder.

Find the Unearthed Tortillas here online. You will not regret. Unless you hate eggs. And potatoes. In which case I cannot help you.

The Artist

Book of the month? The Artist. If this is Lucy Steeds’ debut novel (it is) then I am so excited to see what she does next. And I never feel that way. Or rarely, anyway. This is the perfect late summer read, you need to get it in time for the last blasts of heatwave, if any more are coming our way!

Set in post-war Provence (and so beautifully, evocatively drawn), it’s about a reclusive painter - one of the world’s most famous - and his monstrous, unpredictable ways. When a young journalist comes from England to interview the painter, he becomes entwined into this heady, insular world with its temper flares and hot, airless rooms and plates of rotting food and sneaky cigarettes.

He also becomes entwined with something else but I won’t spoil it for you, it’s just such a good read - somewhat predictable, but it felt exactly the sort of smoothly-executed read I needed this month. The Artist is here online

(Edit: this was written before I’d read both Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I need time to mull these over a bit more, but they would both be contenders for the winning spot, I think. Choices, choices. So many good books, so little time.)

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So, a belated little Between Us post: not the intended lengthy essay on the intricacies and associated dangers of shaping your own eyebrows, thankfully (though that will no doubt be coming once I’ve edited it into something sensible) but a few unbelievably pretty little things that we can coo over together. Things with stripes and frills and then other things with sea views and flower-filled courtyards; things that are too good not to share, even though I’m kind of loath to share them in case they sell out/get too booked up, leaving me in the lurch. (This has happened before.)

Whimsical Lamp Shades

These brilliant lampshades will also be in my monthly favourites, but some of the sizes are already sold out and I feel as though I need you to be able to get them, if you so fancy, not all of the other people in the world I don’t even know! I feel very proprietorial over these lampshades because they are beautifully made, ridiculously whimsical and, for all of that, priced so reasonably that I’ve found myself buying an extra one even though I don’t have a clue where it might go. Yet.

It’s these, the pleated striped lampshades from Next. Twenty quid for a 20cm version (which is the perfect size for a wall lamp or a very petite table lamp, perhaps one that you’d pop on the kitchen worktop and use to read your recipe book, etc) and they are so plumphy with fabric and pleating and frills that they feel loads more expensive than they are.

The plain pleated shades that Next do are also lovely, but the stripes with the frilled edge win the show; it’s like the designer just threw absolutely everything at them, bar glitter. Top effort and much appreciated.

Lamp shades from Next are here.

Now for a brilliant holiday villa find, if you feel as though you’re always looking for something extra-special but also don’t have a million pounds to spend and/or the time to trawl through thousands of listings:

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(Also, it is very much not a given that I would be good at keeping an eye on my general health: lots of people don’t, especially when they are busy with work and kids and elderly parents and leaks in the roof and saving for a new boiler and of all the other things that life might entail. It’s hard to prioritise yourself when you perhaps have other people to care for and your days are jam-packed.)

Now I wouldn’t say I’m Simon Cowell-level good at keeping an eye on my general health, but that’s mainly because I don’t have a medical centre in my £1.6 million winnebago that comes with all the equipment necessary to monitor my vital statistics. Indeed, I don’t own a £1.6 million winnebago in which to install a medical centre in the first place. Or any winnebago. (Also, if I had constant access to my own medical centre, equipped with heart monitors, ear monitors and a special glove that can remotely detect heart attacks, I would get nothing else done.)

I just make sure I go to any screening appointments I’m summoned to, try to be familiar with what’s normal for my own body and attempt to keep a certain level of self-awareness that means I notice if there are any significant changes. That’s pretty much all any of us can do, surely, short of having one of those mega-MRI-scans I keep seeing advertised.

(Would you have an annual whole-body MRI scan if you could? If it was affordable? The more I see these services advertised the more I wonder whether we’re missing out and at a disadvantage if we don’t have one or, if people are relatively healthy to start with, scanning every tiny bit of the body is just unnecessary overkill? I suppose that it would always catch things early if there was anything amiss, which is an amazing thing, but would it also create lots more health anxiety? Thoughts in the comments…)

Anyway the point is, I’m usually pretty good at keeping an eye on my general health and wellbeing, so it makes what follows even more weird and surprising: because the fact is, I’ve had a number of bothersome health and wellness issues that until quite recently I had been completely ignoring. Just blatantly pretending not to notice!

No, worse than that, actually: issues that I’d noticed, but then decided to simply accept. Accept as being part and parcel of being alive, being 45, without even really questioning if I could do anything about them.

How defeatist of me.

I say the word bothersome, which sounds pretty cute and politely British, but some of these things were severely affecting my day. I thought I’d list them and tell you what I’ve finally started to do about them, because a) I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself and the level of proactiveness I’ve suddenly managed to conjure up and b) it might be helpful to anyone who has similar issues.

(Should have really written those the other way around, so that the charitable reason appears before the self-serving egotistical one but I like to keep things real.)

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My Thinning Hairline

First though: this post is very kindly sponsored by a brand I’ve had a beautifully long relationship due to the fact that their LED masks are the best in the business and have had a dramatic, visible effect on my skin. Yes, it’s CurrentBody.

You can find dozens and dozens of places where I’ve raved about their LED masks (I use both the Series 2 LED Face Mask and also the Neck and Decolletage mask) and I really would not be without them. They’re not “quick fix” solutions, these masks, they require commitment and consistency and patience, but I saw significant visible changes after a few months of use and am still using them religiously, years later.

(More info in this post, if you want to hear more.)

But we’re not talking skin here, we’re talking hair. Specifically my gradual thinning of, around the temples and hairline, and also my (hopefully temporary) Telogen Effluvium, which is when more hair than usual is pushed into the resting-and-shedding stage of the growth cycle.

Not the first item that was on my original “things I’ve been ignoring and now I need to take action on” list, but definitely something I’d have shunted down the line until later.

I have long been fascinated by the CurrentBody Skin LED Hair Growth Helmet; Rich started to use it last year, every night without fail, and within a few months I could definitely see new growth. He has fallen off that particular wagon because he’s been down in Dorset so much, doing stuff at the new cottage, but I was heartened and surprised by the results that he had, so much so that I am excited to try it for myself and see what happens.

What also excites me about the CurrentBody Hair Growth Helmet is that the clinical trials on home LED devices for hair loss seem so very promising. And not just clinical trials conducted by the brand, but much larger, peer-reviewed studies that show really good results. CurrentBody’s own clinical trials on a group of 31 people (who all had mild to moderate hair loss) showed a 123% increase in hair growth rate and 72% reduction in hair loss after just 12 weeks of using the Hair Helmet on a daily basis.

Incredibly impressive and I can’t wait to see what the difference might be for my own hair. Here are some before photos of the areas I’m going to concentrate on, namely the temples and front hairline, where I have had thinned patches since my pregnancies and also a constant halo of weird flimsy nothingy hairs:

The benefit of the Hair Helmet over surface treatments (serums, etc) is that the Helmet works below the surface, stimulating dormant hair follicles and encouraging them to re-enter the active growth phase faster. (I’m hoping this will support the Telogen Effluvium side of things as well as the thinning.)

The specific red light wavelengths from the LEDs also help to boost blood flow in the scalp and support repair, which in turn should have an effect on growth. And apparently the LEDs help to improve scalp inflammation and oiliness, though these changes are possibly harder to gauge if you’re not working under scientific test conditions!

CurrentBody promise visible results in 12 weeks, so I will be back to you with an update. I can’t imagine it’s going to be a very taxing trial period: I absolutely love wearing my CurrentBody masks, I find it very relaxing and imagine I’m lying on a beach! The Hair Helmet is even easier - the same 10 minutes a day, but just plonk it onto your clean head and relax. It even has build in Bluetooth speakers so that you can listen to True Crime podcasts and Death Metal or whatever it is you listen to in order to relax.

I have a 10% discount code for the Hair Growth Helmet, RUTHHAIR - it’s £649.99, so the code brings it down to £585. It’s obviously a very sizeable investment, so I think it’s well worth reading through all of the info on the website (and other sites) and looking at the before and after photos. I thought that these were particularly compelling:

Let me know if you’ve been trying the Hair Helmet - I see a lot of excellent videos and pictures online, where everyone looks like an extra from Tron, so do fill me in with your results so far if you have any.

The CurrentBody Hair Helmet is here online.

Onwards with my small catalogue of complaints:

My Exploding Knees

My knees started aching at the end of last year and gradually got worse and worse and by March this year they were so painful that I couldn’t do certain essential movements. Squatting down to get something from the floor, for example was absolutely out of the question and to climb up steps or stairs, I had to turn sideways and shuffle up them like a crab because the pain of climbing them normally was too much!

How long did it take me to seek help, once I’d got to this near-incapacitated state? Eight weeks. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time to seek help, I could have made the time: I just sort of accepted that I was going to have bad knees for the rest of my life and that they would probably get much worse. That it was my destiny.

Completely ridiculous. Luckily one of my school mum friends is a physiotherapist and also very no-nonsense and just looked at me when I started telling her about it and how long I’d been going sideways up the stairs and said, very sternly but with a slight look of exasperation, book an appointment.

I’m going to write a whole post about this, but it turns out that my five years of doing high intensity Peloton spin-cycling and no other type of exercise or strength training means that I’ve just been making my legs go round and round and round really fast using my muscles in one particular way and all of the other muscles have been screaming

“RUTH! What the actual fcuk! We’re wasting away down here while the knee muscles (or whatever they are called) are doing the equivalent of the Iron Man competition every week!”

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Dedicated post on knees is a-coming, but safe to say that the first physio appointment completely changed a) the way I thought about my knees and legs and muscles in general and b) the way I exercised. I’ve been doing strength training and Barre classes on my Peloton app to build up all of my leg and bum muscles and have been loving my workouts!

I can now squat, really quite proficiently, and am pleased to tell you that when I climb the stairs I do so in the traditional way. But more on this, as I say, later.

My Weak Wrists

Ditto the weak wrists. Except that I’ve had those, to the point where I can’t use my hands to push myself up off the floor, for ELEVEN YEARS. I first noticed the extreme weakness and pain when I had my first baby and I’d finished a year of breastfeeding where, let’s face it, you spend quite a proportion of your time holding a heavy item (the baby) in your arms with your hands at a weird stress-position angle.

Apparently it’s quite a common thing. Loose ligaments during/after pregnancy + holding a baby for long periods of time + (probably) also holding your iPhone whilst the baby is feeding and doom scrolling for hours on end. Recipe for disaster.

Anyway, I have exercises for my wrists to strengthen them and the muscles that work with them. The progress seems to be slower/negligible, if I’m honest, but I am not ignoring this matter again! Back I go to the physio, as soon as I have a moment and the back-to-school chaos is over…

My Fatigue

I was very, very tired all the time for quite a long while. And of course anytime I mentioned it, a million people screeched PERIMENOPAUSE, because that is apparently the answer to everything these days and no other causes of tiredness exist, but I personally do not buy into this new belief that absolutely everything is linked to perimenopause, or menopause itself and that other things can feasibly be going on to make people knackered.

Mine turned out to be low iron. I knew I had low iron, I’ve had low iron for years - probably since before kids, so over a decade - but when I had my bloods done it was even lower than usual.

I’d dallied with iron supplements in the past but none had really agreed with me; this time around I did quite a lot of Googling and (sorry) used Google AI to whittle down the many options to one that would be completely suited to me.

And, miraculously, the one it recommended was really suited to me. I have nothing bad to say about this iron - it’s the Solgar Gentle Iron 20mg - and my energy levels have steadily increased. Slowly but surely.

I mean I have two kids and about eighty thousand business ventures going on so I’m never going to feel massively perky, I don’t think, not in the near future, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did in March.

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My Annoying Piles

Well, we all know how this one turned out. How rude. You take action on something, something really quite demoralising and embarrassing, and then you go through a procedure that’s like the sort of thing they might do on a farmyard, to livestock, and then you have twenty-four hours of intense pain, and then it turns out the thing you thought was a pile wasn’t a pile at all and all the piles they did the procedure on were ones you were completely unaware of and could quite happily have lived with.

You can read all about that experience here. I won’t be messing about in that department again, if I can help it, mark my words!

Righty-ho, on that jolly note, you can now all get on with writing down any health or wellbeing issues that have been concerning you and promise yourselves you’ll take the time to look into them. I can’t tell you how glad I am that my knees were a fixable problem - I was sure it was my joints going, or arthritis, and that I’d have to build some sort of funicular to get me up and down my driveway.

(Although: not a bad idea!)

I did it with the towels I loved, also in case they stopped making them (spoiler alert, they did, it was back in 2009) and I even did it with a pair of Belstaff motorbike boots which were horrendously expensive even back in 2005.

Guess what?

I haven’t even worn the backup pair of Belstaffs. The first pair were so well made, it seems inconceivable that they will ever bite the dust. I’ve had to reheel them every few years (less now, because the heels are over an inch tall and so I don’t want to risk an A&E visit and three months in traction) but apart from that, and the obvious softening and creasing of the leather, they are fine and dandy.

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Do not get me started on my collection of “spare” crockery for the dinner sets I didn’t want to risk being incomplete if someone smashed a plate, or a cereal bowl. Gah.

Anyway, all this to say that the things I should have bought in duplicate, this year, I didn’t. In fact, because I have been trying to be a little more discerning about my purchases, one of the items I did actually buy in duplicate but then I had a word with myself and sent the second one back! What an idiot! All those plates (one set has seventeen plates, nineteen bowls, sixteen side plates, it is why I invite so many people at Christmas, just to feel slightly better about what is a ridiculous situation) yet I’m having to speed-wash my favourite crop-top bra thing because I only have one, I’m constantly sweating, and there’s never a back-up version in stock!

Here’s the bra in question, and another (slightly different) bra that I require in order to be able to wear my neon pink Autumn Cashmere vest top, and also a duplicate of one of the best, comfiest things I’ve bought in 2026. Let me save you the pain of spending on the wrong thing, and guide you towards the tried and tested…

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Yes please.

And it doesn’t have to be all rustic and gingham-y either; rattan can be beautifully sculptural, case in point my linen basket which we will come back to shortly.

Anyway, since I drafted this post on wicker and rattan, which was a mere few weeks ago, the online world has been turned upside down by a certain movie trailer that has been released. A film starring Olivia Coleman, Alexander Skarsgård and Peter Dinklage, in which a woman (Coleman) gets herself a husband magically made and when he turns up for the wedding he’s entirely fabricated in wicker! Yeah, all of him!

ALL OF HIM. Rattan cock and all! Woven balls! And if you think I’m being crass and immature, wait until you see the trailer! Embedded (bit like the woman who married the wicker man, fnar fnar) for your viewing pleasure here:

I tell you, from here on in I shall not accept an erection unless it is accompanied by that tremendous creaking sound, rising noisily to full mast like an ancient oak.

How gloriously silly, I am in my absolute element with it all and have watched the trailer five times. How is it that someone has finally conceived of a film plot that is as depraved and farcical as my own imaginings? It’s almost as though I thought this storyline up myself. I fear it will be one of my life’s greatest disappointments, that Wicker wasn’t my own mad creation…

But to get back to the interiors stuff, my point is is that I drafted the below post on wicker things before the trailer came out and now that I’m editing it almost everything I say sounds like a double entendre and I’m having to cut bits of it out here, there and everywhere. (Especially phrases like “bulbous wicker bottom”.)

Enough stalling. Let’s be having it.

Some Rustic Jute and Wicker-y Stuff That’ll Add Texture and Charm to Almost Any Room

Since I am now on my (counts on fingers) fifth home renovation/restoration/interiors project I thought I’d share a little trick with you, one that has worked in every setting from my mid-century-modern-house-on-stilts to the most recent, an ancient rural cottage. It’s a very easily executed trick and also relatively inexpensive and it adds instant warmth, texture and interest.

I’m talking about using rattan and jute. Stay with me. We don’t have to go full-on with this stuff, don’t short-circuit yourselves over it, I just feel that these are materials that get massively overlooked and then, when you add them into a room, you realise they were just what you were missing.

The honeyed hue, the intensely tactile nature of it, but the fact that at the same time it’s delicate and doesn’t add bulk… I think it can look so brilliantly chic.

Take those big IKEA shelves as an example - I think they are called Kallax: we’ve all had them, or have them still, the units that are made up of large square holes that are actually quite useless for holding books and objects, unless you stack the books in like a Tetris game or have square objects or only read coffee table hardbacks.

To use them for anything remotely normal you have to procure yourself some of IKEA’s purpose-made boxes that are exactly the right size for the holes. And if you’ve ever seen one of those units filled with the plain fabric or cardboard boxes then you’ll know that it’s not a hugely attractive sight.

But have you ever seen a Kallax unit filled with the rattan baskets they also make?

Instantly a million times better. I say this as someone who has owned multiple Kallax units with nearly every combo of box and basket known to man. (Kallax are excellent for storing beauty samples. These days I have a vintage haberdasher’s unit with dozens of tiny drawers for my beauty storage and it looks amazing, but as a functional piece I have to say that it is totally shit.)

There’s something about the rattan that is pleasing and gentle on the eye, even when mass-produced and slightly clinical-looking, like the IKEA stuff - Minecraft Rattan. It’s the warmth, the weave, the way it breaks up a surface so that your eye doesn’t hit a solid wall of material…

And I’m not saying to rattan the absolute bejeezus out of everything, I just think that the odd hint of it is a useful trick for adding an extra layer of beauty. Or, for when you need storage solutions, and the alternative is - for eg - a plastic set of boxes for your dressing table to hold all of your makeup items, or a wastepaper bin that looks like something from the set of Severance.

Here are some of my favourite wickery rattan jute bits:

Ferm Living Braided Laundry Basket.

This is one of my favourite household possessions. I like it so much that I have banned my kids from getting inside it for hide and seek, thus depriving them of one of childhood’s greatest activities. (We used to climb into my Mum’s linen basket and then tip it over from the inside, so that we rolled across the floor in it. Tell me a better game on a rainy day.)

The shape of this linen basket is exquisite and it took me weeks to find this exact shape. I was trying to find a copy of a vintage one I have from the sixties that I bought via Vinterior from a dealer, the one that Rich started using TO STORE KINDLING IN which is why he now has holes cut into the toes of all of his socks.

Neptune Jute Rug.

I have a Neptune woven rug in my work cabin (above) and it looks the absolute business. It was expensive, but I can now declare that I have massive experience in jute rugs because I bought two cheaper ones for other rooms and the quality is annoyingly bad. The cheaper ones shed all over the place and already have pulls in them, don’t have any backing on them and will undoubtedly have to be replaced in the next few years. The Neptune rug is perfect and beautiful. It was an absolute false economy trying out the cheaper ones and will have cost me more in the long run!

The Neptune rugs are here online

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Garden Trading Templecombe Chair.

What an absolute beauty this chair is. I have ordered one for The Dorset Nest, the thatched cottage we’re currently getting ready for holiday bookings. Because the cottage already has some beautiful, relaxed velvety armchairs in it (in the living room and in the ssshhh secret snug upstairs) I wanted a chair for the bedroom that was a bit different. Not so…upholstered. Not a mass of sumptuous fabric, because I’d already ticked that box.

RATTAN!

I mean the ticking stripe cushions are the cherry on the cake here, I can’t resist a bit of ticking stripe thrown in somewhere, but look at the frame! I’m excited about this chair even though I’ll very rarely get to actually sit in it.

Sometimes I think I run this holiday cottage business just so I can live out my interiors fantasies.

The chair is here online - they also do a plain cushion version.

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XL Rattan Lamp

Hurrah, something that doesn’t cost a billion pounds, you’re thinking. Yes I do think that this Habitat lamp is quite the steal, for a piece so large and striking. My concern is that it wouldn’t let out much light, but I love it for its sculptural appeal. It’s £80 here.

Hasthilp Rattan Mirror

I really really really really really love these Hasthilp rattan mirrors but they are, alas, outside of the current cottage reno budget. What craftsmanship! Superb. This, hung just above the most beautiful antique chest of drawers, a little jar of dried lavender off to the side, windows open, cottage curtains fluttering in the light breeze, sound of birds coming in from outside, a la Disney… ooph.

Hasthilp seem to be the king pins of luxury rattan stuff, by the way. I feel as though I could do a degree in wicker at this point.

Hatherley Antique Brass and Rattan Wall Light

I think that rattan mixed with metal looks very smart. Want a traditional-looking wall light but then with a softer, more rustic lean? Bingo. Neptune also do something similar (more pricey) and Pooky do their mix-and-match lamps with little rattan shades available, but I really like the simplicity of this wall light.

It’s here.

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Kallax Baskets

And finally, if you do have Kallax and fancy giving them a bit of a spruce and a prettify, the baskets they do to fit them are online here. At £15 each they’re more expensive than the cardboard ones, obviously, and also more expensive than the fabric ones, but not by much and the good thing about them is that they don’t break over time (the number of fabric ones that have died a death!) and you could use them without the Kallax, in the future, so I see them as more of a solid investment.

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Right, off to re-watch the Wicker trailer and plan my Wicker-viewing evening and also work on my masterplan to get invited to the Wicker premiere so that I can wear a dress made out of rattan and a matching rattan hat. Maybe one of the lampshades from Pooky would work well?

It has taken me a couple of weeks to prepare this highly scientific post about piles banding (haemorrhoid ligation, for those who prefer to use proper terms) because I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it.

One of my friends told me it might be a bit of a turn-off to write about haemorrhoids, that people might never look at me in the same way again:

‘A lot of your content is about beauty and fashion,’ she said, ‘I’d just be very, very careful about your tone if you do decide to talk about it.’

To which I say a) has this friend ever met me? and b) how does one be careful about one’s tone when they’re about to describe how a man in a surgical gown spent five full minutes firing tiny elastic bands at the inside walls of their rectum?

And that was just at the drinks party I went to the week before! Hohoho.

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Anyway, what my friend has missed is that I am mostly doing this post as an act of public service. Because millions and millions of people have piles, but they’re not really something that gets discussed in polite society.

(Possibly because what you’d be discussing would be the “swollen and inflamed blood vessels in and around your rectum and anus”, which has to be the least appetising ice-breaker known to humankind. Even if you’re on friendly terms, no ice-breaker needed, talking about the inside of your rectum has to be up there with the boldest of subjects. It’s the mental image it conjures up, isn’t it?)

It makes me wonder: how many people suffer with their piles and never do anything about them? How many women sit there wondering what solutions are on offer for getting rid of their little downstairs “friends” but are too embarrassed to go to the doctor?

And I am here to tell you, categorically, that unless your piles are causing you frequent stress and pain, unless you feel they are ruining your life in some way, you should absolutely just get used to them being there and/or popping them back in when they make the odd appearance in the outside world because oh my GOD I found the alternative so grim and painful and not in the least bit balanced out by the benefits, which for me have been nil, and which we will come onto in due course!

Now by all means go and get your arse checked out. It isn’t pleasant and feels ten times more undignified than having your vag prodded about, but if you are really inconvenienced by your haemorrhoids, or they are very painful, or they are massively affecting your life to the point where you’re unhappy, or you are having any other symptoms in relation to your bowels that could be serious, then please do go and discuss options. I am all for staying on top of things and knowing my normal and asking for help if things seem off.

But if you, like me, are more concerned with just the odd alarming piles episode, the infrequent appearance of multiple external piles that make it look and feel as though you are prolapsing your entire colon out into the toilet, but then the rest of the time the thing that bothers you the most is, erm, the aesthetics of the whole thing, I can with confidence say that the alternative - even the “entry level” procedure - was not worth the trauma.

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Due Diligence

I cannot believe that I didn’t do my due diligence on the whole situation, on the piles banding and the laser treatments and on the most dramatic of the solutions, the pro-level surgical option, the Haemorrhoidectomy; because if I had done a bit of online research then I would have noted that the common denominator in almost every comment thread and forum post for all types of piles treatment was…drumroll… pain.

When I was writhing around, fifteen hours post-ligation, an ice cube wedged point-first into my emergency exit and a hot water bottle between my legs, I felt so incredibly naive and silly not to have anticipated any pain. I mean, someone was going to go into my back end with a camera, fill my rectum with air and then snap tiny elastic bands around living, growing things that are on the inside of my body that would then be starved of bloodflow and gradually fall off leaving an open wound that poos would have to graze past on their farewell tour: what part of this did I think would be completely pain-free? Why would I ever, in a million years, not prepare myself mentally and physically for what would so obviously be a highly uncomfortable situation?

I’ll tell you why. The following is from the information that I was given to read beforehand. I’m cherry-picking, obviously, but for our purposes here I’m giving you the significant bits, the bits that jumped out at me and that told me, indirectly, the whole procedure was nothing to really worry about.

“You will not need an anaesthetic as there are no nerves that sense pain at the top of your anal canal.”

Marvellous.

“A silicon band will be placed onto the lining of your anal canal. The band should block the blood supply to the haemorrhoid, causing it to shrink back up your anal canal.”

Splendid. Seems straightforward.

“It should fall off itself after 7 to 14 days. MOST PEOPLE DO NOT NOTICE THIS. (MY CAPS.)”

I mean for the love of God, this sounds easier than a wisdom tooth removal, doesn’t it?

Other pertinent hard facts from the brochure: “pain is usually easily controlled with simple painkillers such as paracetamol” and my favourite, “you should be able to return to work the next day.”

Top Trumps of Orifice-Related Procedures

I want to give you a brief run down of the procedures I’ve had in other orifices: not to show off, this isn’t Top Trumps of undignified orifice explorations, but to try and describe to you where on the scale the pain and discomfort from the Sigmoidoscopy (the camera) and Banding (the piles-shrinking bit) seemed to sit.

Hysteroscopy without pain relief or sedation, circa 2011: camera through the cervix into the womb. Grim at the time but no pain afterwards, just felt I couldn’t speak to another human without crying for approx eight days and spent a fair while rocking back and forth hugging my knees in the bath.

Laparoscopy without pain relief or sedation, circa 2012: as above, but cried during the procedure because they left me in the room on my own, because it was a camera into the womb but then my womb and tubes were filled with dye and then I had a giant X-ray done, and I felt very alone as they all watched me through a protective window. Grim x2.

Colonoscopy without pain relief or sedation, Jan 12th 2012: excerpt from diary “had to go for my colonoscopy today and it was awful! Had an enema (WTF!) and had to wear a backless gown!” This is a camera up the bum (I used to have IBS type symptoms when I was a model, probably was the fact I lived on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights) but it goes much further up than the little one I had during the piles procedure. Pain: uncomfortable at the time, no pain at all afterwards.

Cystoscopy without sedation or pain relief, 2019: small thin tube up the urethra (wee hole) aka my actual worst nightmare, aka when I had to go again I paid to go privately and be put to sleep because I couldn’t handle the idea of being awake again. It was actually more psychological than acute pain, the pain was more of a weird discomfort, but I am FUNNY about anything in that area due to years of frequent UTIs (now thankfully not a thing) and it took me days and days to get over it.

Where did the banding pain sit?

In short, none of the above caused me actual pain beyond the time of the procedure. Because I wasn’t expecting the pain (mainly with the womb stuff) I think it was just a terrible shock in the moment but then I staggered home and cried, staring at a wall, and then carried on with my life. The difference with the flexible sigmoidoscopy (the camera I had before the piles were banded) and the piles banding (pipe put up that sucks the pile into the pipe and then shoots an elastic around the base of it) was that a) the pain seemed worse at the time, but was mostly from the air trapped inside me, but then b) the pain afterwards was excruciating. And I wasn’t expecting either.

The pain, I think, was a combo affair: pressure inside from the banding itself, which makes it feel as though you’re going to unconventionally give birth to a massive cactus, but then all the pain - which is intense! - from the trapped air, coupled with the fact you’ve had various implements in and out of your back passage for half an hour. I just found it unbearable, pretty much from the minute I got into recovery.

I had been told that I’d be able to drive myself home, which I think must have been another indicator to me that I needn’t worry about the procedure at all: thankfully Rich had dropped me off, taken the kids to the park, because I thought it was a 45 mins in and out job, taken the kids for lunch, taken the kids to the park again, taken the kids to B&M to buy pool noodles and then taken the the kids to the park again, and then there he was at the end to pick me up.

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Zombie Arsepocalypse

I walked out of the hospital like a zombie. I could barely stand up straight. I had almost fainted in recovery, where I had to beg for even a paracetamol, and my entire stomach felt as though it was trying to push its way out of my body. The pain just got worse and worse over the course of the following hours, making me think that something had gone seriously wrong because why would I be experiencing so much pain when it was, essentially, according to the literature, a relatively painless procedure?

When I called the hospital outpatients number the following morning, having not slept, I spoke to two different consultants who both said that - I quote - “your level of pain and discomfort is entirely normal.”

Excusez moi?

How can they say that pain is manageable with paracetamol in one breath but then describe that same pain, which was excruciating, as normal?

I decided to take a look online and do some pain research. Bit “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted” but I needed something to distract me from the fact that something the size of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket felt as though it was trying to launch its way out of my rectum.

Though some websites and online sources did seem to acknowledge the existence of significant pain after banding, lots appeared to base their patient pain expectations on the following statistic, which I managed to squirrel down to source and find in this National Library of Medicine guide to complications after banding, here, that at “1 wk, 75% of patients reported themselves as being pain-free.”

No shit! A week! Who measures things by a week? Of course things are going to be better after a week! You could probably get ravaged by a tiger and feel mildly better about it a week later!

‘Oh don’t worry Mr Beakers: we’re going to amputate your arm now, and we’ve actually run out of anaesthetic so you’re going to have to make do with this quarter of a bottle of vodka, but don’t worry! 80% of patients feel no pain at all five weeks after procedure, you’ll be absolutely fine! Maybe not to drive yourself home afterwards, but we expect you’ll be able to manage to get back to work tomorrow if you keep on top of the paracetamol. Just call us if you bleed more blood than can be collected in a wine bottle.’

The thing that some of these advice pamphlets and website sources miss out, is that the guide also says “pain was the most common symptom occurring in almost 90% of patients, with the pain scores higher 4h following the procedure.”

Thank you, yes, and I’d say increasing exponentially until approx 12-24 hours later when the only thing to do is pace deliriously and wait for the next round of paracetamol.

Gnarly

It just feels weird to me that so many outpatient procedures are so unbelievable gnarly - in this case someone literally shooting elastic bands inside your rectum, like a builder with a nail gun or something - yet you’re advised to just take paracetamol, drive home and go back to work the next day, and given no pain relief or sedation options at the time.

Oh bloody hell, I do feel like I’m moaning a bit now, but equally I am really trying to play it down because I found the whole thing quite awful and the memory has not faded with time. I think it’s all made worse because I’m cross with myself: had I researched properly, and not just read the stupid leaflet from the hospital, I would have seen that the majority of people talking about it online had been in lots of pain and not had a good experience and that for a whole load of them it hadn’t worked anyway (5 in 10 procedures don’t even work! HALF!) and I would have weighed this up against the minor inconvenience of my piles and thought

not on your absolute Nelly.

Of course had my piles been more painful, or much more inconvenient, or life-ruining, then I would have weighed it up differently as should you or anyone who is thinking about banding, but the thing is is that you can’t weigh up the facts if the facts you have are inaccurate!

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For Your Delectation…

And here’s the worst part for your morbid delectation: I had three piles banded, and as the consultant talked me through it I thought, HURRAH! Now I won’t have the equivalent of a bunch of muscat grapes launching out of my rubbish hatch every time I go to the toilet!, but as he collected his tools and whisked off the dust covers, my construction worker, I mean surgeon, said, “oh, by the way, the one on the outside is a skin tag.”

SAY WHAT?

I almost passed out with dismay. The “one on the outside” was the only one I knew about! That was the thing I’d gone to the GP about, the thing I’d said was really bothering me, that I felt was just unhygienic but also kind of embarrassing, never really painful but sometimes uncomfortable and guess what friends?

IT IS STILL THERE!

Could you even make this up? I could not. It’s the most ridiculous, annoying, upsetting twist in the tale. I didn’t even know the other three existed. I could have lived with them for a lifetime none the wiser. I almost feel sorry for them: living peacefully up there, harming no-one, staying in their lane, waving around like fronds of seaweed in the ocean (I imagine?), and then bam. Strangulated with rubber bands around their very necks. Slowly starved of life-force. Eyes bulging as they withered and died, falling off like spent barnacles.

And even they have a 50% chance of coming back to life.

Bloody hell.

Silver Lining

So basically, the only beneficial thing to have come from this experience is that I can tell you about it, so that if you, like me, were weighing up your options, you’d maybe take some time to do a little more research. The aim isn’t to discourage, but to demystify. If you feel as though you might read up a bit on it, ask around, see what options are available for better pain relief post-procedure, or perhaps sedation during, if you know you’ll find it distressing.

The other beneficial thing that has just occurred to me is that the whole farce has been a 9/10 on the comedy rating scale, mainly because I got to wear something called Modesty Shorts. I could barely contain my glee, quite honestly.

These bermuda-style shorts were made out of papery stuff that was slightly see-through, but that wasn’t the best bit: over the bum crease, there was a square door, a peekaboo flap, that was fastened on with velcro!

Oh, the joy. How many times during my one hour wait did I open and close that access hatch! I’ll tell you: eight. Which is why when it came to the actual procedure, the velcro had stopped working and the flap just hung open, like an invitation.

Shame, because I was looking forward to someone having to noisily rip it open at the start of the procedure, really dramatically, and then I’d be able to crack some kind of massively inappropriate joke, like, “ooh, everyone loves an easy access!” or similar.

Alas, I lay on my side on the operating table/pleather bed and it just flopped open behind me, revealing the bright side of the moon before anyone had even asked for it. Embarrassingly forward, borderline crass.

Mind you, the consultant was chatting away to his colleagues about his house renovation, and I’m not sure you really notice bare arses much if you spend the whole day looking at them?

I cannot write the word arse again, today: I’m starting to worry that my friend is right, and that I shouldn’t be telling you any of this at all, even though my archived post Accidental Penetration and the Fibreglass Cow is one of my most-read posts of all time and also Topple, Tipple, Grab my Nipple, both of which go in deep with overshare and inappropriate content. But anyway, in case she’s right this is where I stop, and I now open up the comments for all of your own piles-related anecdotes and private parts experiences.

What a time to be alive.

Hit the heart button on your way out and do share this with anyone who might find it useful, just preferably not any of my relatives, my husband, or people I have to deal with in a professional capacity in any way, shape or form.

Thanks in advance.

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Questions my kids asked me yesterday as I was trying to reverse park my car, which is approximately the same width as a cross channel ferry, between two concrete pillars:

“What’s the smallest sound a human can hear?” (9 year-old)

“Is air lighter?” (9 year-old)

“When they open the new Primark will they close the old Primark on the same day and then quickly move all the clothes across to the new Primark, or…?” (11 year-old)

I’m starting to find it hard to string a proper sentence together. This is not a complaint, just an observation. It happens every August, once my days begin to revolve solely around children and not around work. My cognitive tools go blunt, I become mentally flaccid. My brain feels like a little blimp that I’m gently leading around on a piece of pink ribbon, floating just to the side of my head but not quite connected.

It’s weird, when I think about it properly, because on a normal term-time day the kids are only at school from (let’s round it all up for ease) 9am-3pm: it’s a mere quarter of the twenty-four hour period. But those six hours are so precious, aren’t they? Not just for working and “getting things done” but for being able to do absolutely anything you want to do, on your own terms, knowing that someone else is completely responsible for your children. It’s a short period of relief, like someone else has taken the wheel on a particularly perilous mountain pass.

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On that note, some recommendations:

1. Giffords Circus

Have you been to Giffords Circus? Have you heard of it? Forget everything you think you know about circuses (circi?), especially if you last went to one in the eighties: wipe the slate clean, because Giffords is not what you’d expect. Think magical, whimsical musical crossed with the world’s best talent show crossed with a bit of very stylish cabaret and all heaped with a very special sort of sexy-glint-in-the-eye bohemian charm. Every year has a theme - this year it was the English countryside - and special acts are interspersed with music from the live band, dancing, acrobatics and the kind of clowning around that has kids of all ages in hysterics.

We went last year as a family and loved it so much that it was the kids’ number one top thing to do again this year. It’s not too long (forty minutes each half maybe?), there’s a good interval in the middle and loads of food and bar stalls that make it feel a bit like you’ve been to a mini festival.

Peak entertainment for me, this year, was watching the aerial performers gracefully twisting themselves around one another, high up in the air, as the band and lead singer did a brilliant rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Just excellent. So stylish, so cool.

Tickets costs from £14 each for children, £23 for adults and there are various locations around London, Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, though the remaining dates are all now in Wiltshire and near Stroud. A good one to bookmark for next year, too, as the shows start in the spring and it would be a lovely way to see in the warmer weather.

Giffords Circus

(I have attended both as a paying customer and a guest of Giffords. Whole family agrees it’s the best value for money of anything we do over the summer, and they’re hard to please!)

2. Unearthed Tortillas

Not a new discovery at all but I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to mention these delights and now seems like as good a time as any.

I don’t know why they’ve called this product Unearthed: I mean I get it, it’s a nod to how simple and wholesome the ingredients are, straight from the ground, potatoes still with the soil stuck to them, etc etc.

I just find it slightly off putting when we’re talking about a Spanish tortilla, a dampish sort of foodstuff that has eggs in it and so on: the idea of unearthing a moist egg-centric dish from the ground is borderline heinous. Imagine the state of it! Eggs need to be consumed immediately upon deliverance to the table, if you ask me: no type of cooked egg ever got better with time and burying it in the ground to then be unearthed is just lunacy.

Name aside, these ready-made Spanish tortillas are bloody amazing for people like me who want a quick lunch but don’t want to put any more effort into preparing it than simply opening the fridge.

Lunch is often my downfall: if I can’t immediately fathom what it is I’m going to have, then I take out a block of cheese and the butter and I spread the butter into a white roll, fill the roll with cheese, maybe some sliced tomato if I’m worrying for my general health, and then I stretch up to the cupboard that sits above the fridge, out of child-reach, and I get myself a packet of Walkers Salt & Vinegar crisps (the elite crisp and I won’t take other suggestions) to add texture, crunch and variety to the plate.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortilla saves me from myself. There it sits, all fresh and lovely and air-sealed, layers of cooked, salty potato trapped in the firm, eggy goodness. Perfectly seasoned. So much protein! Just slit open the lid with a knife and cut the tortilla in half and tip one half of it onto a plate with the aforementioned tomatoes that would have gone into your cheese roll, add some rocket dressed in good balsamic and extra virgin olive oil! A ten second wonder.

Yes I know how “easy” it is to make a Spanish Tortilla from scratch and save money, it’s also easy enough to wash dishes by hand, or to open a road atlas and read a map. What I want at lunchtime is convenience.

The last time I got shot down for a food recommendation it was McCain’s ready-made frozen jacket potatoes and I’m still reeling - though people had a fair point. Even Rich couldn’t believe my laziness.

“It takes me barely ten minutes longer to cook one from scratch,” he said, “and I can buy the potato for 25p.”

I stand by them, the frozen jackets - absolutely genius idea. Because having to microwave a potato on one plate and then transfer it somewhere else to finish cooking, it’s just too much to think about when I’m mid work-flow. I’m trying to solve world problems such as how to make a curl last longer on mid-length hair, I don’t have mental capacity for potato cooking times in the middle part of the day.

So, the ready-made Spanish Tortilla. They do a plain one and they do one with spinach. Both are juicy, tasty and feel so wholesome and good that you have to find something really processed to nibble on afterwards. I just ate a mini bag of Haribo Tangfastics, balanced it all out nicely.

Do not buy the tiny 250g tortillas, even if you’re just feeding yourself and thinking the other half of the big one will go to waste. The 250g is almost the same price as the 500g. And I can guarantee you’ll eat the other half of the big one for lunch the next day…

In fact, I don’t know how filling you like your lunches! Maybe you’d eat the 500g tortilla in one go - I tend to err light on my lunches because I like to have a stop gap at about 4pm and line up some cream crackers with cheddar to see me through to dinner time (I think I’m probably classified as a grazer), but I have gone in for the whole thing in one sitting and it felt hard going. Proceed with caution.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortillas are here - I get them from Sainsburys and they are frequently on special offer there.

Edit: have just seen this Guardian article about the best supermarket Spanish tortillas: Sainsburys own comes out on top! I haven’t even seen the Sainsburys own! Will try and report back.

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3. Child Master Photograper Competition™

Full disclaimer: this idea is a Crilly Original and I only thought it up yesterday, but it was so successful I needed to immediately tell you about it. I was at my friend Harriet’s house and all of the kids were under our feet in the kitchen, wanting various things and needing constant inspiration despite there being a huge garden with hiding areas, laser quest guns and a semi-lethal tree swing whose natural trajectory sends the swinger straight through a holly bush and into the sturdy, wide trunk of an ancient oak.

I am useless at thinking up activities for my own kids but I seem to have some weird brain wiring that makes me the most creative parent on earth when other people’s kids are around. Honestly, the stories I think up! The games I invent! My own kids look at me when this happens as though they are witnessing one of the world’s greatest betrayals. It must be as though they don’t even recognise me as a person.

Anyway, yesterday, on the spur of the moment, I invented this thing called the Child Master Photographer Competition™, where they all had to take the iPhone out and capture the very best photo they possibly could of a set subject. The subject this time being chicken/s. I’ve never seen kids disappear so fast! The best photo wins.

The cynical among you are thinking that they disappeared with my iPhone and hid behind a hedge Googling words like “bum” and “boobies” but my phone was locked, they could only take pictures. And they were gone for a good half an hour. My eleven year-old, bless her, was gone indefinitely because by the time she got her turn with the camera the hens had all hidden in the bushes, traumatised by their enthusiastic up-close portrait sessions. I went out to find her cross-legged on the grass, waiting patiently for one of them to come out.

I didn’t even have to judge the Child Master Photographer Competition™, just look at the various entries and say all of the encouraging things that we as modern parents are supposed to. “Goodness that one is fantastic! Really professional!” (Blurred red beak and a large, shiny eye, widened in terror, whole iPhone reflected in its surface.)

I think I might do more of these comps. “Find me the fastest snail!” “Get the most interesting twig!” “See who can sort this bag of recycling the fastest - glass into the green bin, cardboard into the bag!”

Well there we are, three recommendations. I don’t have a je ne recommendez pas this week, only a long rant about customer services and my missing sports bra, but it’s a rant I need to sit on for a couple of days so that I’m not speaking in anger…