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. I genuinely felt like a different person.

We’d not known we were going somewhere where there was no WiFi and no phone signal. To paraphrase Withnail & I, we’d gone on a digital detox by mistake. A small takeover of one corner of the New Forest with my parents and siblings and their offspring. There was a vague sense of panic upon arriving — how to find my siblings and parents and their offspring with no means of getting in touch? — but after deploying the shockingly old fashioned solution of Asking A Person, we just knocked on each other’s little Wes Anderson cabins and treated the fanciest one like our own. From there the long weekend unfolded: we found a short woodland walk that we cut even shorter because there were trees to climb. We sent the children on a mission to find wood for a fire. We swam in rivers and snoozed under trees. We day-drank in the hot tub. Everyone stopped looking at their phones.

It was an education, and quite a stark one. I used to switch my phone off when I embarked on a holiday and would end up reading approximately three times as many books. It’s been tougher to do this in recent years but thinking about it I’m not actually sure why, and I think I will again. For the final day or so my husband’s phone stopped charging and he just let it die. Then he removed his social media access.

But this switch-off wasn’t considered or intentional: we just couldn’t get online. In the process, I was shown what a smartphone is actually useful for — and what we gain when we don’t use one all the time. Here’s what I learned:

there are some people who need a swift reply, everyone else can wait

Granted, I’ve become fairly slow at replying to most people since the second child turned up, but I would still say WhatsApp is my main reason for using a phone on the daily. We’d gain enough flickers of signal for a flurry of messages to filter in, then not have enough to respond. People I replied to were mostly limited to those with a live, important and changing scenario, such as having children in hospital. Everybody else, including work things, could wait. Nothing bad happened.

nothing has made my nervous system feel better

Sort of tragic to admit to this one because I know it’ll take a lot of work for me to get back into the no-phone habit (I could lie, but there’s no point). I felt more at ease, less anxious, more focussed and more emotionally regulated while physically unable to use my phone than I have in years.

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For the uninitiated, Ella has written eight books under her own name, the latest of which, The Kitchen Book, is one of those talismanically great cookbooks, such as Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, which is as worthy a bedside table tome as it is a worktop one. Deservedly, it became an instant Sunday Times bestseller.

Anyway, she gracefully agreed to share a recipe with us (read it here, I have made it, it was very good) and also turn up for a chat in which we discuss, among other things, what is and isn’t chic in the realms of the kitchen, how Deliveroo ruins our Friday nights and reading a different book depending on what you’re wearing that day.

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Anyway, I was swimming in the river and my brother, brother-in-law and I were challenging ourselves to swim under the arches of this ancient bridge where the current was incredibly strong. I was pushing my body swift and hard but getting nowhere.* It was ludicrous and fun and hard work and refreshing.

May’s felt a bit like that: a delicious endurance. There was solo parenting and a paperback launch and the flower show and I’ve been racking up the word count and dealing with tantrums and heatwaves and making good food and sweating and opening and closing all the windows and curtains in the house. I have felt so alive and so lucky and so existentially panicked, all at once. Here’s the good bits:

*That part of the river was shallow enough to walk through. In the end we made steps for the final bit of the way, then whizzed through the other side of the bridge on the current. I wonder if June will be like this.

tasty morsels

guerilla stickers

I’m not sure when my friend’s May Bank Holiday Weekend barbecue first started, but I’ve been going to them for at least five years. In the beginning, they were the kind of barbecue that you ate beforehand, because most of the things on offer were crisps. Now there’s a table with an array of condiments and brioche buns and potato salad. This year there was a pale pink pavlova and seasonal berries. We’re growing up, I guess. Other evidence of growing-up ness: children! Mine were two of five in attendance. At some point, my son got his stickers out of his “packpack” and started bestowing them to choice attendees. At that point in the day, when the garden - and house - were full, but people were still warming up, it made for a strangely ideal ice-breaker, and kept him occupied enough so that I could actually have a conversation.

hand-me-down things on new babies

Three friends had babies this month! Three new whole babies! Our babies were furnished by the generosity of others’ hand-me-downs, and I remember being so struck by this tidal wave of passed-on baby stuff before my son was born. But now I have a constant tote bag on the go of things the baby has grown out of to pass onto the new babies and there is such good cleansing delight in getting rid of things you no longer need, especially when the person who needs it is a tiny baby or a good friend and you get to see photos of the new baby in the hand-me-down thing, the latest in a long line of new people to be wrapped in a blanket or a sleepsuit, it makes you wonder why anyone ever buys new things.

front garden flower subscription

I’m fortunate enough to be within the delivery area of Ros Ball, who grows flowers in other people’s front gardens (with their permission, obvs) and then cuts them and cycles the bunches to people who live nearby. Since we moved in I told myself that the house was such a dump that flowers would only showcase its… dumpiness. But actually the opposite is true. It’s amazing how lovely my Weetabix-covered, sad-Venetian-blind-clad, very-much-a-former-rental kitchen is improved by a bunch of locally grown seasonal flowers. I wish more people would ape Ros, it’s such a clever idea.

goslings

They have arrived in the pond at the park and they come out onto the grass to eat things and they are so tame and fluffy and sweet that I heartily sympathised when I overheard my son reasoning to a friend that if they were gentle enough they could touch them (I did point out the wary eyes of the parental geese; we didn’t touch them. But oh! They are so fluffy).

spontaneous picnic

On the really hot day - you know, that unbearable Saturday - we lured friends over from the other side of town and when it became apparent that they’d have to walk through the park because Thameslink was down (obviously, because Thameslink is always bloody down) I felt so bad about the extra three minutes of walking in the weather that I decided (truly, a decision made of extreme heat) that the only solution was to pack up the heavily Ella Risbridger-informed lunch I’d been working on and carry it to the park to meet them there. Our garden is too tree-deprived to offer shade. And so we sprawled under a great big oak tree, drinking hibiscus tea (see below) and encouraging the children to consider eating a sandwich as well as all the watermelon (although who could blame them) and it was much better than doing it in the house, all told.

existential contact nap

I was always a bit scared of contact naps with the first baby, lest we develop some kind of cuddle addiction. But the second baby seems to nap well-enough, and so I’ve taken to doing the short afternoon one curled sweatily on the sofa, while thinking a lot about the passage of time and the meaning of life and trying to eat biscuits without waking her up or getting crumbs in her ear.

to read

“Am I choosing writing over motherhood?”

In which and I unpick that most taboo of subjects and remain Good Friends.

little egg

’s post on pregnancy loss is one of the most tender and remarkable things I’ve read in a long time.

this post on Hark

Which really gets to what I was trying to do with the book in a very special way:

The art of living

What the World Sounds Like When You Finally Stop

There is a particular quality to the silence at a music festival between five and six in the morning. Earned, brief, already ending. Day and night sounds bleed into each other; frequencies arrive in the chest before they reach the ears. And then, that hour - the world holding its breath before the whole machine starts up again. I found…

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a month ago · 2 likes

to listen to

is it ever OK to put your kids on social media?

I can still remember the first time I spoke to : he called me up as a newly appointed editor of our student newspaper. I was working on the shop floor of a stultifying French brand in Bicester Village and remember hiding behind the counter to discuss the fact he was asking me to be Entertainment Editor. That was 19 (!) years ago. Now we both have kids and books and ennui, but, as this episode of his brilliant Good Father podcast demonstrates, the ability to make one another laugh and also Get Deep. Watch and listen here.

to watch

glastonbury for people who wear linen

My take on Chelsea this year is below but I strongly recommend you sit and watch all of Grayson Perry’s, which is both accurate and highly entertaining. Among a sea of pastel florals you could spot his anorak a mile off:

to go to

the hark tour

Yes! It’s still happening. I’m at Notting Hill Daunts tomorrow evening with , and then Veranda on Thursday with to discuss her incredible book Vocal Break and then, next week, at Omved Gardens with .

1536

A disclaimer: M has been instrumental in getting this play into the West End, but as evidence of how much I listen to him talk about his job, I only really found this out after I went and subsequently grilled him about it because it’s hard for us to go to the theatre together these days and it is one of the best things I’ve seen since The Years. If you liked that, I suspect you would very much enjoy this. Tudors! Feminism! Girl talk!

to eat

air fryer cookies

I became that person who a) makes cookie dough with their children and b) doubles up the recipe to make some for the freezer and c) gives boxes of frozen cookie dough to kind neighbours this month. Will it ever happen again? I doubt it. But let me tell you: Ravneet Gill’s cookie dough recipe works in the air fryer and that means cookies without heating the oven and that is a very potent combination, my friend.

Nutymax

Picked one of these up from the Turkish supermarket and it was like a pistachio Kinder Bueno? Incredible stuff.

latest obsessions: iced tea edition

There was the summer of lemon verbena iced tea. This year it’s ramped up early. I want to cool down, I rarely day-drink any more, I don’t need any more sugar. My current favourite involves hibiscus flowers (the bright pink water!) and a couple of rose tea bags in a massive old enamel coffee pot with a squeeze of honey, the juice of a few limes and a fat handful of mint. I suspect this could be improved upon, but we’ve got all summer.

It’s true: we’ve never mown the lawn. And the garden is, in some ways, the living embodiment of that old nugget of advice to leave a new garden for a year to see what turns up. I’ve not entirely left it: plants from the old garden have gone in, a lot of green alkanet, dock and Robinia saplings have come out. But the lawn

is a jungle that we’ve made our own path of desire through, and in these hazy days it is starting to reveal itself as a beauty. Field mustard, white ramping-fumitory, bright orange meconopsis, some bigger Papaver orientalis that are a yet-to-be-revealed colour. Various kinds of buttercup. Big boy flowering grasses. I’ve been planting into the spaces left behind by jumbo green alkanet. I suspect the “proper lawn” will come for us one day, but for now we have this, as I love it.

what to do - and not do - in the garden in the heat

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Look, we are all awash in information. I can barely open Instagram without someone I don’t recognise shouting at me about whether my child is happy or not (sometimes he is not! This is normal!). I’m old-fashioned in that I like my recipes in books and our recipe books are smothered in oil splatters and scrawled pencil marks and have folded corners. But sometimes a recipe is so spot on, and written so well, that it can exist helpfully on the internet, perhaps even landing in your inbox. The recipe below is one such thing, and it is my gift to you.

, who has been writing about food and love - on the internet, but also in many acclaimed books - for years, has a new cookbook out and it’s one of those books that I have been opening in M’s face to go: “look, you would love this! So would C! It is an ideal recipe! It is going to answer all our problems!” (Tumeric Satay Salmon with Greens). As someone who likes to make themselves a fancy little lunch, it also has a chapter dedicated to doing that. And then there’s a recipe for crisp salad, and I love crisp salad. Anyway, it’s called The Kitchen Book and I implore you to order it, perhaps even order two, to give one to a friend.

Beyond that, I’m pleased to say that Ella will be joining me here for a chat at 7pm this coming Wednesday, 27th May. The Kitchen Book is, as she writes in the introduction, “a book about the beautiful and useful things I make all the time: the things that make my life better and easier and nicer just because I know how to make them.” Which sounds pretty savour-compatible to me. Do join, it will be lovely.

Until then, the aforementioned recipe for the long weekend ahead, which, if you also have small children, feels more like a kind of minor sweaty marathon. I will be making the tart, as I think it will make my life better and easier and nicer.

I’ll cut to the chase: savour membership fees haven’t increased in three years, and after a lot of thinking and horrible maths I’ve realised I’ve got to put them up. I’m increasing them because it means I can keep writing the newsletter, keep writing it well and often, and offer more besides (such as conversations in chat, writing hours, competitions and events).

Here’s the need to know: if you are already a paying subscriber, good news: your subscription rate won’t change. Not now, not ever.

If you currently subscribe monthly, you may want to consider upgrading to an annual subscription: you’ll still save money.

If you don’t currently subscribe, but have thought about it from time to time, you’ll save more than 25% by taking out an annual subscription today, and over 30% on a monthly one. Subscriptions will increase on June 1st.

Subscribe now

I’m beyond grateful to those of you pay for a subscription. Who have always paid for a subscription. Who hit the silly little heart-shaped button that sways the algorithm and comment and share insight into your own lives. Who choose to spend money on savour over other things. This has grown bigger than I could have ever imagined, and that’s down to you: thank you.

A reminder of what a paid subscription offers:

• locking in the subscription price: you’ll never have to pay more

• access to listen to my voiceovers (recorded by me, not AI, with whatever other noise is happening in my house at the time) on every post

• voicenotes from the garden - short, sweet updates about what’s growing and what’s not

• recommendation lists of all manner of things - books so good you’ll read them regardless of everything else going on; restaurants I take my favourite people to; gift lifts that make giving presents actively fun; ways of getting to the desk when everything seems impossible - at least once a month.

• essays about the little things in your life that will make you see them differently.

• dedicated monthly newsletters on my latest obsessions and motherhood, from someone who is surviving it with very little expertise.

• access to events, writing workshops, weekend chats and lives, where we can really get into it.

don’t just take my word for it:

‘Writing so beautiful and comforting it’s worth every penny.’ - Jack

‘There is something rich, nourishing and calming about Alice Vincent’s writing style that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’ll enjoy catching up with her.’ - Miranda

‘I enjoy reading your words, because of the mix of art, literature, gardening, London and early motherhood that you cover and the warmth and freshness with which you write. My children are adults now but your writing reminds me of the sweetness and tiredness of those years!’ - Kathryn

One of the great parts about writing on this platform is that the writer gets to charge for it. It’s also one of the most awkward. I’m much more comfortable doing things the old-fashioned way: I write something - a column, an essay, a book - and it gets edited and published by somebody else, and then I invoice for my words. It takes out one of the increasingly large, constantly lesser-realised parts of being a professional writer, which is constantly advocating for your own worth.

But if working for yourself means ice creams at 3pm because you’ve made word count, or being able to turn up to a meeting with your baby in tow, or writing about exactly what you want to, it also means doing the scarier stuff and advocating for your own pay day. Thank you for turning up and making that easier. Thank you for being here. I’m really excited about what the next chapter looks like.

more on savour

Recently I realised that the RHS Chelsea Flower Show was the horticultural equivalent of Coachella, the annual event in Palm Springs that has long been a marketing exercise first, and a music festival second.

Like many thoughts that appear during the strange twilight of a night feed, it felt a little far-fetched in the cold light of day, but I’m back from a morning at press day, trying to recalibrate a bit, and I can’t quite shake it.

The Chelsea Flower Show is the biggest horticultural event in the Western world, possibly on earth. For the third week in May, the BBC offers blanket coverage of gardens that have been expertly - and invariably beautifully - designed and meticulously built, often using volunteer (read: unpaid) labour and plants that have been masterfully grown in nurseries. Members of the public, who are not RHS Members (who pay £55), pay between £107 and £133.90 to attend. Other people, including me, go for free, so we can write about it or show up and have our photo taken. Horticultural experts judge the gardens, and the designers - who are, as I’ve said, wildly talented and have poured a huge amount of physical, mental and creative energy into their work - can use the outcomes to bolster their career. Tiny charities gain more column inches in a week than they could dream of, and beautiful gardens relocated to places that need them (although relocation costs can frequently be six figures in themselves, and need to be funded, too).

It is a celebration of some of the finest work in the gardening industry, and it is a demonstration of some of its most shameful aspects, all at once.

I’ve been attending the Show as a journalist for about 12 years now, interviewing designers and writing about their gardens and rounding up trends. I’ve drank a lot of free fizzy wine at Chelsea and nice meals in that time. I’ve mingled with my pals. I’ve taken my nine-week-old baby, once the RHS finally decided they could be allowed in (children under five still can’t go), and I’ve celebrated the work of my friends. Last year we dedicated an entire season of the Why Women Grow podcast to women who had designed gardens at Chelsea, including recording an episode on site during press day.

But I’ve also criticised it openly in the press for years - the non-existent gender equality (even a garden dedicated to raising awareness of gynaecological cancers was designed by a man this year); the greenwashing; the inherent hypocrisy that arrives when you try to fund gardens that cost six figures with grubby money - so the fact I find it so persistently problematic shouldn’t be wildly surprising.

This year’s show, though, feels particularly tweaked. After several years of bringing green velvet sofas to the hospitality suite, The Newt (the hotel that exists on the former estate of aristocratic gardener Penelope Hobhouse) bowed out as a sponsor this year, to Range Rover. David Austin, who use the Show to release a new rose every year, have decided to create one in honour of David Beckham. This is the last year that Project Giving Back, which for the past five years have linked up charities with garden designers to fund Main Avenue show gardens, will contribute to Chelsea. Nobody knows who will stump up for the Show Gardens of the future. It all feels a bit end days.

Press Day looked much the same as it does every year. Women shivering in floral dresses (it’s cold outside in May at 8am, many people forget this), cameramen and photographers urging people to stop nattering while they record. Small groups of special RHS members being led around the gardens like shoals of fish (this is crucial: you can’t actually access the gardens unless you have special privileges; most people just peer at them from around the outside). Judges gathering over clipboards. Exhausted designers and their teams, dressed up after weeks of hard work, putting on game face. As the sun rises the entertainment turns up - a brass band here, a ribbon dance there (not this year, but certainly in previous ones), Shirley Ballas sitting on a bench - to compete for the attention of the cameras. Later, everyone will be ushered out so the King, Queen and, this year, David Beckham, can have the place to themselves.

I have always liked to get to press day early, to get a proper look at the gardens. This year I had left by 9.42am, the chill biting and a bit peckish but mostly just exhausted. Each of these gardens has enough to pore over for an afternoon. I always find it totally overwhelming.

It probably doesn’t help that the baby is waking every two hours at the moment, but the love-hate relationship I’ve always had with Chelsea (I’m not alone in this, even its poster-boy Monty Don has said the same) feels like it’s curdled this year. Yes, there was some lovely planting. Yes, I can see the hard work and how the charities benefit. Yes, there is genuine good being done. But with each passing year the Flower Show feels more removed from reality, and with each passing year that feels more difficult to parse.

Several gardens focused on drought-tolerant designs this year. One was inspired by Australia, the other Provence. Swathes of mulch were swapped, again, for substrate and gravel. We have had the driest Spring yet. You see other things when you get to press day early, invariably someone watering something. The photo up there is from someone washing an already-clean path. I’m just not sure maintaining the pretence is worth it any more.

six things I really liked this year:

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I’ve been wearing other people’s cast-offs for over 20 years now. I’ve worked in vintage shops, I’ve ruined countless beautiful frocks by slashing them to the crotch and taken gorgeous little pumps on dance-floors that weren’t good enough for them. I’ve launched books 37 weeks pregnant in 1970s chiffon and received endless compliments on a blouse that cost me a quid in a rummage bin, found on a hangover in the late-2010s. I’ve worn a lot of very ugly things and loved many gorgeous ones. And while there are some incredible vintage dealers out there, and some excellent shops, the place I pick most of my clothes up are charity shops. I’ve been shopping in them since my teens, and I’ve learned a thing or two.

Whether you’re after an accessory so classic you will wear it to every wedding and date night for a decade or simply want to find your summer wardrobe staples for less than the price of a new T-shirt, raiding the charity shops can sort you out. It’s also far less grubby (ironically) than buying new. Here’s how to do it:

expect the unexpected

Charity shopping is not unlike any other kind of shopping: you go to the supermarket for eggs and leave with reduced biscuits, or you hit up the high street looking for jeans and come home with a party dress. If you are rigid in your expectations, you will likely be disappointed. Go with an open mind and you’ll be better prepared to re-home that little silk blouse in the depths of January or the bargain cashmere in a heatwave. I often think of shopping for vintage – whether clothes or homewares – as a marathon not a sprint: an idle browse of 14 charity shops will lead to a particularly good haul in the 15th. Leaving empty-handed isn’t a failure, it merely sharpens your eye. More on that below.

look for brands – but not the ones you expect

It used to be the case that the fancier the area, or the higher number of elderly residents in a town, the better the charity shop. That’s why a day rummaging in the charity shops of Hampstead or Belgravia can be fruitful. But I gather that nationwide charity shops don’t always sell what’s donated in that store, so it’s not fully reliable. For this reason, local and independent charity shops will always have more intriguing stock than bigger brands. I can’t explain why, but hospice shops always seem to be worth a look.

Anyway, all of this is pre-amble to say that while certain, snazzier charity shops will have rails dedicated to their designer hand-me-downs, and these are worth a peruse, a cheaply made designer T-shirt will age as poorly as a cheaply made high-street one.

Instead, look for brands that have always prioritised classic cuts and quality fabrics.

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I’ve linked below to the seed mix I mention, the sweet pea varieties I’ll be growing and the compost and netting I count on, as well as the best-smelling rose in the business.

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What are you listening to right now? I can hear the distant squeal of the train pulling into the station, the whistle of a plane overheard, the high-pitched thrum of water in the pipes. My tinnitus i…

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Whew. It’s been a funny old month. As I text a friend a week or so ago: “this era of our lives: so much joy and so much awful news living cheek-by-jowl”. Obviously, the News News is blatantly awful, …

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It’s that time of year again: the days stretch out, the wisteria blooms, then the lilac. I usually have a deadline ticking along somewhere and I start taking trains and organising babysitters and lim…

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Nearly seven months after moving in and the vast majority of our books are still in boxes, lurking in the currently inaccessible room-of-doom. I think we may throw some kind of a party when we finally unpack them, an inevitable seven further months down the line.

Still, new ones creep into the house. M sparked an audit of the unread bookshelf the other day, and came back from the Oxfam shop puffed up on the fact they had a) let him in for a sort of private view after ostenstibly being closed and b) commented about how he was offering up an “interesting selection”. He also returned with three further books. This is how it goes.

After a month of reading totally addictive non-fiction, I’ve spent the past few weeks mainlining just one new novel on proof - more on that shortly. But it’s a chonker, and with all the fascinating chat about paperbacks vs hardbacks going on (which do you prefer? Let me know in the comments?) I thought I’d offer up a handful of slight, potent novels that really will make you forget where you put your phone. As discussed: I don’t even have access to my non-existent bookshelves at present, so these are all from memory alone. They are that good.

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Below: a snap of all the borrowed blossom for you - or at least, all of it from one side.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about full-length mirrors. I haven’t lived with one for over a decade, since I moved out of a flat where one was handed down. Three homes later and I still never entirely know if my shoes match my top. But we’re renovating the bedroom at the moment and it’s getting to the fiddly bits, and I wonder if we should finally get a big mirror in.

Having lived without one means I’m not hugely aware of what I look like, head-to-toe, with no clothes on. I’m not fearful of what I might see, I’ve just never got around to it. But it increasingly feels like a small political protest not to have one.

I thought I had weathered the slings and arrows of millennial body image. I spent my girlhood sailing the choppy waters of Size Zero and Kelly Brooke (who has always seemed lovely, for what it’s worth) and a childhood spent watching fellow child Britney Spears skip down a high school hallway with a bare waist the size of a Walkers multipack. I have always considered myself fortunate to have arrived on the dry land of enough body confidence to eat as I like, exercise primarily for endorphins and wear what I want.

But then I had a baby. And then another one. And it all began again.

Thanks to growing up in an era of the gossip weeklies and Heat magazine’s Circle of Shame (for the blissfully ignorant: pap shots of celebrities were zoomed in on to find “embarrassing” details such as cellulite or, more often, a bit of shadow under a thigh, whereupon a red circle was drawn and a loud shouty caption applied) I was well-aware of the quiet societal merit of “springing back” after harbouring another human inside my body, pushing it out of my body and then sustaining it with, you’ve guessed it, my body. Much as there was a quiet societal merit of my life returning to what it was pre-baby, I would gain the same invisible points if my body returned to its pre-child self, too. I both knew this was ridiculous and silently believed it at the same time.

But times had changed: birthing people now shouldn’t be expected to return to their pre-birth state, that was cruel patriarchal nonsense! Instead, we should relish our post-natal bodies, for they had done wonderful, miraculous things. Our bodies, which had changed in ways we couldn’t even imagine, were framed as beautiful.

For me, this is where the rub really set in.

My post-natal body, like a lot of post-natal bodies, did not look like it ever had done before.

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It’s the birds that wake me, the birds and the absence of noise. Last night I pushed the window behind the bed open, and the sounds of the night - then the dusk, then the dawn - filtered into strange dreams. It is still early now, but the city has woken up. I can hear the screech of trains on the tracks, the distant rumble of trucks going about their business, planes overhead. Sometimes, living here feels like a scene from a Maurice Sendak book. I am trying to sit still between many things that are going.

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“In March the wind blows down the door / and spills my soup upon the floor”, reads Maurice Sendak’s book of months, Chicken Soup and Rice. I mentioned this a few days ago in my fi…

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Love listening to things? I now record voiceovers for all of my newsletter posts, so you can catch up whatever you’re up to.

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For two people who have a lot of books, we’ve been living without bookshelves for six months now - and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon. However, with the office being finished a few weeks ago (I say finished, there’s still a pair of tiny shelves to be painted, a chair to fit into an alcove and the small matter of a hole in the ceiling where the light I changed my mind on used to hang), I unpacked the happy chaos of my reference books. Botanical graphic design tomes from the 1930s, 1970s house plant books, a Serbian handbook to feminist self-defence where the woman photographed has a beehive. All good useful stuff.

I write non-fiction, and I read as much of it as I do fiction. And every now and then a non-fiction book comes along that offers a combination of plot, character and intrigue that is far stranger than any novel could. That’s what went down this month: I spent weeks reading one single book, then followed it up with another non-fiction chaser that was, if anything, even more addictive. If you’re after a porthole into another kind of life, here are two books guaranteed to offer it:

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