Make Love to Your Days #2
Welcome to another edition of the fortnightly series for paid subscribers, called Make Love to Your Days. A soft space for remembering the beauty in ordinary things, slowing down for long enough to savour them, and an antidote for the incessant shouting, and snark that floods our feeds. Here you’ll find musings on seducing your life, places I’ve been exploring, and things I’m cooking, making, smelling, listening to, and reading.
THIS WEEK: The song I’m having big feelings to, life lessons from a 2 hour wait at a restaurant, a cake I can’t get enough of, the hand cream that I will return to again and again to soothe my constantly sanitised hands, the cheap supermarket find that induces olfactory orgasms, and a story about the most random occurrence to stumble on.
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Citrus Poppy Seed Cake
A tart tang betrothed to the sweetness of velvety buttercream. Flecks of poppy seeds offering the daintiest of mid-bite crunches. The zesty gust of shavings of orange peel. There is everything to love about a citrus cake. Be it lemon and elderflower (my signature bake), lemon and poppy seed, or here, as I recently made, a get together of lemon, orange, and grapefruit. A loaf cake, sliced on slate, pillowy frosting waving its way out of a piping bag, and served to friends, alongside shared ideas, laughter, and the casual post-dinner musings contemplating our very existence. Adapted from a recipe by Benjamina Ebuehi in The New Way to Cake.
A Man and His Tortoise
Sometimes in life, you crawl onto the path of something so deliciously unexpected that it makes you lose all comprehension of where you are, and what on this lush earth is going on. This past weekend, on a lunchtime walk on the coast, breathing in tandem with the swells of wind, I witnessed the most spectacular of spectacles. An elder, with his red jacket punctuating the soil like a post-box, holding something in his hand with such attentiveness I assumed it was a fresh-to-the-planet baby. No. It was a tortoise. A tortoise whom the man held up, so his reptilian friend could see into the sea. He kissed his friend. Whispered unheard words. They stayed there for some time, as life brushed past them both. Just a man and his tortoise, pausing to look at the sea.