It’s not Friday, you’ll have noticed. savourites traditionally goes out on the last day of the week but if your inbox was anything remotely like mine yesterday you’ll have had enough emails. I enjoy Black Friday as a handy reminder of all the corporate databases I need to remove myself from.
Onwards. Earlier this week I posted a little giveaway up on Instagram: five annual subscriptions to savour. Entry was via the sharing of the current favourite delicious thing in your life. I popped it up and carried on with the day - a busy one, with podcast recording and meeting friends in town. It was a joy to see the comments fill up with generosity and tasty morsels: stem ginger and baby milk breath and homemade onigiri and pregnancy cravings and doing what your body wants and being taken to look at the moon by small relatives.
Writing savour - and savourites - has made me look at life more closely. I appreciate small nothings more, I slow down to make room for them as I’ve come to learn they are rarely the things that we plan. But I’ve also grown to realise that writing about these things is more challenging in times of Big Somethings. While this year has been an extraordinary one on a personal level, I’ve been conscious that we are living among unimaginable horror unfolding on a global scale. What good does a newsletter about relishing the everyday do in the face of it? When I’ve struggled over the past year it’s felt borderline deceitful to turn up to a keyboard and write about delicious things in life. Sometimes life isn’t delicious. Sometimes it’s really hard work to seek that out.
I loved reading about people’s delicious things in life because it made me realise how many of them there are. Tea featured a lot, so did loved ones. But more cheering were the things we so often overlook: the softness of moss or the freeing isolation of solitude. Thank you for keeping me going.
Other good things this week: