My August Favourites (including some amazing tea towels, you heard me)

Sorry about the emergency exit but I'm back now. With a brilliant beauty buy, slinky shorts and some amazing tea towels. You heard me.

Honey, I’m home! Phew. Sorry about the emergency exit, halfway through August. I rarely lose the plot entirely during the school holidays but everything got too busy with work and life and I started doing things like leaving my phone into the fridge and being startled by my own shadow and going into the cupboard under the stairs to rock back and forth in the foetal position.

Anyway, I’m back. And I don’t think it’s too late to quickly run through the August favourites. Is it? Especially if they include retro running shorts and the best ever striped tea towels! I mean, come on.

Best Striped Tea Towels

The reason I even thought about the tea towels is that I was doing some online research about towels of the bathroom type, trying to find out who made the best, fluffy, luxurious ones. (At the moment M&S 600GSM ones are coming out on top, in terms of quality v value.) And then I started searching striped towels on the Marks website and - lo! - my favourite tea towels popped up.

Is it strange to have a favourite type of tea towel? Why am I like this? I just take such pleasure in nice design. And I’ll tell you what, it’s quite tricky to find a good tea towel that suits a mid century style house, with warm woods and clean lines - if you have a little country cottage then the world is your tea towel oyster. (Equally if you’re simply not bothered about how your tea towels look then you can knock yourself out. There are millions. I happen to be anal about it because I like to hang the folded tea towels over the handle of the oven and I need them to look graphic and nice otherwise I get a twitch in the vein beneath my left eye.)

[Ad info: no paid or sponsored content. Contains affiliate links.]

So, these M&S striped tea towels: they are thick, they wash amazingly well (I mean we’re probably on wash fifty? sixty? still like new!) and the stripes on them are, I feel, très chic. A vintage ticking stripe vibe.

I think I mentioned these tea towels in last year’s Books n Chocs content - they look ace wrapped around a really good cook book in a little parcel! If you don’t want to do chocolate with your book pick. Or indeed if you want to give them two extra things! You generous sod!

You can find the tea towels online here - I have the dark red ones in my kitchen and they look cool af. No visitor has ever particularly mentioned how cool they look but that’s OK. I know it in my heart.

Retro Silky Running Shorts

Honestly these are the sort of shorts you just shouldn’t leave the house in unless you are genuinely going running, and going running after using a time machine to transport yourself back to 1971.

Yet here I am, typing away wearing them. The Adidas Originals 3 Stripe Sprinter Shorts. Do they bulge unattractively when you sit down, so that it looks like you have a big willy? Yes. (Why do I still worry about this? People thinking I have a big willy when my clothing bulges out in the wrong area? I’m almost FORTY-FIVE for Pete’s sake!) Does the “silky” fabric feel more on the flammable side than the luxurious one? A resounding YES. But I just can’t help throwing them on with a big sweatshirt or - on a hot day - a little vest top, and pretending I’m from a different era/I’m much younger than I am (delete as applicable).

I have them in the black and also in the cream with the maroon piping. The first have been relegated to Peleton use, mostly, but the cream have been seeing massive action.

They’re £33 here. If you like your shorts to be roomy in the crotch, if you prefer your shorts to respect your gynaecological boundaries, then you’ll love them. They also give a sexy little flash of side thigh, if you do any actual movement in them, like a stride or a lunge or a fast walk. Ooh la la.

A Luxurious Best-Buy Cleansing Balm

This Weleda cleansing balm is one of my top beauty finds of the whole entire year. Rarely do I get so excited on first use, rarely do I make an actual animal noise of pleasure as I rub something into my face. (Steady on.) If you’re a fan of Weleda Skin Food moisturiser then you’ll know that it a) smells exquisite b) nourishes the skin unlike almost anything else and c) is really very excellent value, considering the quality.

Well the cleansing balm completely follows suit. It’s - and I keep overusing this word but I’m going to plough on - exemplary. I have not a bad word about it. For those who have wanted to try a cleansing balm, which is a type of solid cleanser that you melt and massage into the skin, you could not find a better place to start. It feels so luxurious. It removes every scrap of makeup and dirt and grime. It comes in a handy lightweight tube. It leaves your skin feeling moisturised, not stripped. All of this and they manage to bring it in at just over a tenner. (It’s currently on sale here, too.)

Just a brilliant buy. If I was going to do some sort of 2025 “best buys” then this would absolutely be on it. Or just best beauty buys in general.

Easy Summer Read

I cannot wait to update you on my summer reading list and which books I loved the most. There haven’t been any real disappointments but there were two or three discoveries that totally blew me away. I actually took photos of multiple pages so that I wouldn’t forget the best bits. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

But before I compile my reading report: a fun and easy read for you. It made me feel like I used to feel when I watched Doc Martin - cosy, safe, amused, satisfied. All the good stuff. The book equivalent of a hot chocolate with marshmallows. It’s called Welcome to Glorious Tuga and it’s about a tortoise expert who goes to live on a remote (but inhabited) island for a year to study and track some rare tortoises. There was something about the island’s closed-off nature and the fact that the setting and characters didn’t (couldn’t!) change that made it all feel very engaging. There was a bit of a love story, some tiny sadnesses, but overall the story just jogged along happily in the sunshine. It was the perfect sunlounger read when I wasn’t looking for anything gritty or pulse-raising or overly complicated!

It’s online here

Cool Antiques and Interiors Website

Whilst searching for an apothecary cabinet, I stumbled upon this amazingly stylish and cool interiors and antiques website called Praise the Hoard - I was instantly hooked. They have the most brilliant selection of miniature houses, amongst other wondrous things. These houses are sort of like dolls houses but more focused on the exterior - almost like an architectural model. Except that they’re not! Architectural models! They’re better than that! Regardez:

Scale model of an English church! (Page is here.)

Folk art model of an Amsterdam tobacco warehouse!!!!! (here)

There are more. And I want them all. I don’t know where they’d go, but I feel as though my life is missing a scale model of a Dutch tobacco factory.

And Praise the Hoard aren’t just sellers of tiny houses, they have loads of well-curated stuff. And they shoot it all with this moody lighting which, to be quite frank, makes it all completely irresistible.

Praise the Hoard

I’ll leave you on that note, before you think I’ve totally lost my marbles. Here’s the full video for August Favourites, so that you can reacquaint yourselves with my dulcet tones.