I wake up to stripes. It’s 6am, and the desert light - bright but not yet the unflinching glare it’ll become in a few hours - funnels between the blinds. The sun’s not come over the mountains yet, and I sneak out of the whitewashed room to look at the pool and taste the air while it’s cool, the bands of turquoise and coral painted by water and rock and sky. Later, back in bed, I plot.

My mind is swiftest in these quiet, lonely times of day; the ones where the hours are new and uninterrupted. I think about the project I’ve been toying with: words, weekly, on whatever I like. It’s been something I’ve been putting off because it feels vulnerable and effortful and risky, somehow. Most things I make start this way: books, columns, gardens. In time, some of them come off and I begin again, forgetting in the process the stubbornness with which they emerged.  

This was a little over a year ago, in Palm Springs. We’d taken a few weeks to drive down the Californian coast and into the desert of the American South West. I turned off email and deleted apps, read books set in the specific places we were staying in and forgot about work for a while. At the time, savour - this newsletter you’re reading - still felt like a huge punt. Today marks a year since the first issue went out and with the exception of Christmas and the Wednesday when C arrived, unexpectedly, on his due date, we’ve been catching up this every week since. 

One of the main hesitations for me in starting a newsletter was the commitment. Before it was savour, this newsletter was called noughticulture. It went out every fortnight, then every month and eventually every season, dwindling with apology. I enjoyed that I could send it when it suited me, but it ended up becoming formless. A weekly issue demanded a new rigour and structure. savour has been written in dedicated hours and snatched moments, rattling along the Victoria Line or sitting on top of the bus. Its intention - notes on the delicious things in life - has encouraged me to see my life as a series of delicious things. Sometimes this is a challenge in itself.

Still, nearly 100 issues on and we are here: nearly 6,000 of us savouring every week. This space still nudges me into new ground and encourages me to interrogate the world with fresh curiosity. I’m very glad of that. I’m also conscious of the economics of my work. When I started savour, I set subscriptions at less than the recommended minimum. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who has enabled this project to exist, but I am also breaking my own professional boundaries when it comes to knowing my worth. I’ve always wanted to make more of savour but without the investment of time - which comes, in a late capitalist society, from the investment of money - it’s been impossible. From Friday, new subscribers will pay £5 a month or £50 a year for savour. If you’d like to subscribe at the original rate of £3.50 per month (Substack’s minimum) or £30 a year, you’ve got until Friday to do so.

It’s dawn again and I’m typing. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this time from this side of the day. The baby has slept through for the first time but our bodies are tethered and mine continues to wake up when his usually does. I leave the room we share, its curtains struggling to contain the new light, and head upstairs. Here, somehow jetlagged from the absence of our watch, I feel my brain recalibrating. Something old, something new: an undeniable embarking on something else.