It's My Birthday!

Books+Bits turns ONE. Also today: traitors, travesties and Van Gogh

This Saturday marks one calendar year of Books+Bits. I can’t believe it’s been one year of this newsletter/ I can’t believe it’s only been a year. It’s grown so much bigger than I imagined which is both a blessing (thanks for having me!) and a curse (I have to maintain a weekly newsletter!)

I started this newsletter when I was 7 months pregnant (I make weird decisions like that) and tiring of Instagram, which I used to share all my recommendations - books, journalism, podcasts, vintage finds, etc - but which I found addling to use. (Previous to that, I’d shared reccs in my column in The Sunday Times, or via my podcast The High Low or even, once upon a time, on a Wordpress blog. The platform changes - I doubt I’ll be on Substack forever - but the reccs don’t.)

Thanks to some ardent early adoption of the app, I have quite a few followers over on Instagram and I never know at what point in my career those followers arrived (if they came during the fashion era, then they might not like the books; and if they came for the podcasts, they might not like that I keep pausing them to have babies) but the freeing thing about this newsletter is that you’re all brand new because this newsletter is, relatively speaking, also brand new. And the funky little pie chart in the back-end (oi oi) tells me that most of you hail from outside the UK. (From 156 countries, to be precise!)

This newsletter aims to do exactly what it says on the tin. It is books. And it is bits. (It’s also some vintage and indie stuff because we (me) spend too long fetishising new shit that exists readily and in multiple and it’s good to create some friction in our shopping journeys.) I won’t fuck with this formula. Namely because I think USP is everything!! But also because now that my youngest baby is almost 10 months old, I’m heading back into my ‘proper work’ - longform writing and podcast creating and interviewing authors and creatives of note on stage - and I don’t have the brain space to get all loosey goosey on the offering.

Many of my Substack colleagues are moving all their content before paywalls (which I get), but this newsletter, like all my work, will remain free. Paid subs, however - and thank you for making the existence of this newsletter possible - will always receive an additional letter on Fridays.

There is no essay today: this is it. It feels like enough just to enjoy that it’s been a year. It was pretty hellish keeping this going with a newborn baby, but I’m so, so glad I did. And now there’s almost 35,000 of you! So cheers to you. And thank you.❤️

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BITS

Journalism, pods, telly, movies, memes & a goose

Last newsletter I asked for cookbook reccs and the comment section is now replete with tasty reads. The one that came up the most was Tenderheart by Hetty Lui McKinnon and when I saw it in a bookshop last weekend, I excitedly pointed it out to my friend who is a cook and she bought it, based on your reccs. (It’s also gone onto my birthday list.) The recipe for cashew celery looks unique and delish.

To celebrate 30 years since they zig-ah-zig-ah’d their way into public consciousness, Royal Mail have released a series of commemorative Spice Girls stamps. Sadly no longer have my stamp albums, but purchasing regardless.

Speaking of Royal Mail, I’m yet to watch ITV’s drama about the Post Office Scandal - my best friend says it’s incredible - but I listened to a programme on Nicky Campbell’s show on BBC5 Live (who were covering it every single day that week) and if, like me, you knew what happened in 2006 to be a travesty but didn’t, perhaps, know the full extent of that travesty, then I encourage you to listen to this show with the sub-postmasters and the family of the sub-postmasters speaking about their experiences - sent to prison for a crime they did not commit, their children traumatised by their parents own trauma, people driven out of their small communities by locals who never trusted them again, many left bankrupt, some dying by suicide - as it’s an hour of devastating, brilliant, radio journalism.

Seventeen years later and they are still awaiting compensation. “It ricochets - it has a domino effect. It goes right through the family” said one former sub-postmistress. I cried along with Nicky Campbell who broke down in the broadcast, saying - I’m paraphrasing - “Of all my years in broadcasting, I will never, ever forget this last hour.” I’m planning to watch the drama at the weekend.

On a lighter note, I’ve been gambolling through The Traitors, and think it might be even better than last season. CBA with the tasks - just want them all round the table, all the time. My husband said he’d love the treachery of being a traitor; I said that even considering it hypothetically makes me want to wet myself. Claudia Winkleman, naturally, is in her element.

The baby and I also caught a bit of American Nightmare during a sleep regression (his not mine) which, for the unfamiliar, has been billed “the real life Gone Girl” and is made by the female duo behind the brilliant Tinder Swindler. Googling the story afterwards, I came across this piece by Leila Latif on “true crime brain” - which isn’t a new concept, but this paragraph struck me:

“The plethora of podcasts, documentaries and bingeable TV series has led to swathes of the global population being infected by a condition known as true-crime brain. So many tales of white suburban women’s abduction and annihilation have fuelled both content and extreme paranoia (although queer, Black and Indigenous women have far more reason to feel at risk than the women who feature here).”

It goes hand in hand with Missing White Women Syndrome, which refers to stories of missing white women being covered in the media and given much more police attn than missing people who aren’t white and/or female. We made an episode of The Missing once on this and you can read more about it on Missing People’s website. Pause for thought, perhaps, as we inhale our way through the genre’s many, many offerings.

I’ve been meaning to dip into Russell Tovey and Robert Diament’s podcast Talk Art for ages and I started with a goodie: this interview with Marina Abramović. In her 77th year, the Serbian performance artist is utterly captivating - she may use her body for art, but she also has a voice for radio - on why yellow is the colour of bullshit and asking Richard Branson for a one way ticket to space. (He refused.) “We all die anyway. So why not at least in that way?”

Abramović with her former partner for ‘The Artist is Present’ at MOMA in 2010

Abramović’s favourite piece of artwork is' ‘Starry Night’ by Van Gogh, which brings me neatly to the immersive exhibition of his work in Spitalfields which I visited at the weekend. (Having stuff like this on your doorstep is the thing I love most about living in London - and I like to think all the colour and scale stimulates something in tiny brains, even if the thing they remember the most is… the donut afterwards.) Despite being yanked through the exhibit at record speed (in other circs the film at the end would be so calming) I gleaned: that ‘Sunflowers’ refers to not one painting but a dozen, that Van Gogh had a massive fight with Gaugin before he cut off part of his own ear, and that he was just 37 when he died. (As 36, that… shook me.) I especially liked the recreation of ‘Bedroom in Arles’, as did my tiny pirate.

This is just great. ‘The Birth of My Daughter, The Death of My Marriage’ (what a title!) by Leslie Jamieson for The New Yorker. How have I never read any of her books?? Remedying that immediately. Having recently gone through birth, a lot of it felt so familiar. Having never been through divorce, a lot of it did not. Regardless of how much personal affinity you might have for the subject matter, it’s brilliantly written and full of exquisite turns of phrases. It reminds me of Soldier Sailor.

“When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.”

And this piece by writer Ashley Ford on her favourite things - normally a pretty standard Q&A - is unexpectedly moving. “I thought it was a superpower to not have preferences” she writes, of her upbringing. “Oh, Ashley, she’s so good, she’ll never make a fuss, she’ll be grateful for anything.” It was not until she was 30 and financially secure, that she allows herself to consider what her favourite things might actually be.

“I started with food and told myself, I’m not going to eat things I don’t like anymore just because I don’t want to be difficult. Then I moved to clothes. For so long, I had stuck to the clearance rack. And I had to recognize, girl, I get that you save money, but you have never woken up and known what you wanted to wear, ever ever ever. So, what if you allow yourself to buy some things that fit your body and that make you feel beautiful? This price tag may be more than you’re used to spending, but you’re not broke anymore, and you don’t have to punish yourself.”

It isn’t an edition of this newsletter without a meme of an animal having a great time/ doing funky shit. Thanks, as always, to my husband for sourcing this showy little goose. Rock on, my good goose. Rock on.