good things you’ve missed
leaving Instagram | underwhelming holidays | summer reads | evidence of mum
The notion of a 9-to-5 is strangely unimaginable to me now but when I did have one (and I had one for a good while), I would relish those languid summer afternoons when my main responsibilities were looking after the work experience kids and editing increasingly deranged Edinburgh Festival reviews. Silly season for the news desk, archive deep dive season for me.
I’d spend hours reading features from, say, Laurel Canyon in the 1970s in Vanity Fair or arch trend pieces from a slick Manhattan Loft-era New York Times. I was topping up my ideas and cultural references cup, and I was very lucky to have an editor who not only trusted and valued the importance of this, but joined me in nerding out over it. It led to pieces like this one, on the love story behind Plantasia - a cult record made for plants to listen to that saw the birth of synth - or this, in which I tracked the lost history of the Penguin Classics bookcase.
I don’t do as much journalism these days (although I loved interviewing author Joan Barfoot for The Observer New Review’s summer books special this weekend. She wrote Gaining Ground, a book that fundamentally helped me define what Why Women Grow was going to be. She’s a hoot - and the book is mindblowing. I’ll be talking about it with Amy Key and others at Big Foyles in August) but I still love a good archive trawl.
And so it’s in that spirit that I offer you a little trawl from the savour archives. Summery things. Longer things. Things you may have missed. There’s more than 400 pieces in the savour archive, so if you like what you see it might be worth subscribing - savour members get full access to everything.
what happened when I deleted instagram
Instead of a wedding car, we took a black cab. Through the windows we watched the sun glint on the river, and spoke about normal things with our photographer, India.
why the first day of a holiday is always bad
We invented the holiday pancake a few years ago, after a fateful collision between a tedious flight, a comically underwhelming hotel and a plate of wholly fine pasta in an Italian city after watching all the locals eat better.
summer books special
My old arts desk brain tells me this is an illogical time to send out a books recommendation list: in the dog days of summer, cutting it fine on summer holidays; too early for the publishing rush of autumn. But part of the reason why I set savour up was to do things more instinctively, and this week, I felt like rounding up the books I think you should consider reading.
evidence of mum
I learned it early, the face my mother would make when we tried to take a photo of her. The split-second shiver of discomfort that would ripple through her body.
lido
It started with a text, when it was still hot. Did we fancy doing morning swims at the lido, perhaps once a week? I re-named the WhatsApp group: “swim club”.
I went on a digital detox by mistake
I suppose the signal tapped out around the time we thundered gently over the cattle grid and into the realm of the wild ponies. I wouldn’t see meaningful 4G again for four days, when I thundered gently back over it, and looked at the lay-by where I’d pulled over to feed the screaming baby, sweaty after hours in a hire car that somehow didn’t have working air-con.
car sweets
M has a fondness for sweets that would rival a 10-year-old with fresh pocket money but these Coccodri - lurid and squishy - were car sweets. We were three stops into a three-week road trip from Puglia to Umbria, and the cubby holes in the brand-new hire car were disarmingly empty.