“I feel a bit like I’ve bashed up the hire car and I just need to return it in one piece,” a friend said to me yesterday, when we were talking about getting to the end of a somewhat bumpy year. It made me laugh, but it was also the perfect analogy. Some years finish with a bang. For most of my adulthood, November was a sort of warming up to a December that was held together by parties, as if canapés and the previous night’s mascara were lights on a string. Christmas would be a final hurdle to overcome.

But this year I have been in and I have been ill. I have cleared my deadlines and have a few things I’d still like to do. I feel as if I am holding the final part of the year in tissue paper, and it needs putting away safely. So much has happened this year that I am struggling hard to make sense of it. I keep feeling the urge to write a list; it has held such a lot and I have felt strangely removed from it, somehow.

As of this week, I am done with deadlines. I call to mind Ali Smith’s wise words in Why Women Grow, when she told me about winter’s ability to “clear the rot of autumn off itself as it shook it off like a dog in the water and then you get that cleanliness, that cleansing of winter.” Winter lies ahead: largely, deliciously empty.

For those of you wanting to take a moment to rest and reflect, Erin Taylor and I are taking our always-sold-out workshop online ahead of the Winter solstice. Details here.

Other good things this month:

tasty morsels

richmond park walk

I’ve always associated Richmond Park with a kind of pretend countryside. As someone who grew up in the countryside, I’m unused to the immaculate Barbours and Hunters and inexplicable large-brimmed brown hats that people seem to deploy to walk there. Also, it’s far, and I still consider West London to be an entirely other city from the one I live in (London), despite marrying someone who was born and raised there. Anyway, on the weekend I went for a walk there with a group of former colleagues and my gatecrashing toddler. The light was low and hit all the bracken and the young stags were rutting and we totally lost track of time as well as the feeling in our toes. We’ve decided to do it on the first Sunday of every season now.

vns from the pram

I’m very fortunate: my maternity leave collided with that of my two best mates. We have now emerged from squishy sleeplessness of the baby days into the grinding exhaustion and relative sanity of the toddler days. I love voicenotes anyway, but they have felt particularly precious lately, sent and received while we are out with the pram or making some kind of small meal. I love hearing my friend’s voices. I love hearing the minutiae of their lives, of who slept and who didn’t and who is opening cupboards and what ice lollies have been consumed.

collective memory around elections

The US election itself now feels eons away, along with the nervous glimmers of positivity that preceded it. I’m almost wary of including it here, really, but I compile these lists through the month and at the time I really enjoyed watching people share their collective memories of previous elections. They are lightbulb moments, aren’t they? I will always associate discovering Trump’s initial victory with making M dinner for the first time, for instance; or Barack Obama’s win with my freezing, cavernous room in a student house in Newcastle. Others were in labour wards or at parties. Memory fascinates me. These are the moments that allow us to telescope into it.

st james’s park leaf-scrubbling

People move out of town to raise their kids and at times I get it, I really do. But the rest of the time I take him over to St James’s Park and release him into the fat carpet of leaves to roll and laugh and collect and generally scrubble around while I sit down on them with my friend and her much smaller baby and two cups of hot chocolate and have a chat and, oh, it is so relaxing.

road trip

Earlier in the month we spent a long weekend in Somerset, kindly hosted by the remarkable 42 Acres, a rewilding estate that made me extremely nerdy about beavers. We had hired a car (the train-outta-town, local-car-hire combo is winning for us rn) and were tasked with keeping the baby awake so he’d sleep while we attempted a lunch at Holm (we did! it was hard-won…). All of which meant the journey became a kind of delirious road trip in which M gave an experimental DJ set, featuring hits such as ‘Get On Up’ by 5ive and the Cocomelon rendition of Baby Shark. I found the whole thing so silly I couldn’t stop laughing.

good therapy light

In recent weeks my therapist and I have slid into the conclusion that we do things over the phone rather than in-person. This is something that has been discussed quite lengthily in therapy, natch. But last week the light was totally perfect, coming through the windows and hitting the plants on the mantelpiece, and as I lay on the sofa and chewed over some stuff without being able to take a photo or do anything other than look at it, I realised I was exactly where I needed to be.

kitchen disco

The toddler knows how to put the Sonos on now, and for some reason Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ was always ready to roll at the time. Delighted little kitchen discos and an endless earworm.

to eat

get-better freezer broth

When it comes to cooking, there’s a rule in our household: whoever is better at making that particular recipe makes the recipe. I take brocpasta. M takes things including, but not limited to, roast dinners and a particular Anna Jones broth that is some kind of medicinal. We made and abundance of it a few weeks back and I froze a couple of portions. Last week, deeply fed up with the nursery lurg that wouldn’t shift, I got out of bed to defrost some and emerged an hour later feeling like a new person.

freshly pressed olive oil

November saw the first proper savour retreat at Lime Wood! It was gorge, tbh. Among the handful of favourite memories I have from it, I can’t shake watching head chef Luke Holder stand at the table we ate at in the kitchen and drizzle a salad with freshly pressed, grassy olive oil for 21 full seconds. Just incredible.

squash pasta

Sure, two AJ recipes in one newsletter but it’s been that kind of month. This one is from A Modern Cook’s Year and reminds me of that grim little January lockdown, when M and I entertained one another by competitively cooking new recipes. We ate dinner early on Saturday night so I could scoot off to Sadler’s Wells, which meant the toddler was at the table too. I love it when that happens.

to read

Coops

I’ve read Riders, Rivals and Polo since we last discussed this. I think I may be ready for something that isn’t Jilly Cooper now but god, it’s been a riot.

wages for housework

I’ve been pecking away at a proof of Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework, between all the showjumping and suntans, a history of the 1970s feminist movement that tried to get women financially recognised for their domestic labour. Needless to say, it wasn’t successful, but Callaci’s portrayal of it and its key players is so accessible and personal that I have folded over most pages to text passages to my mates. It’s out in February.

what gardeners actually want for christmas

A couple of weeks ago I dedicated my New Statesman column to the impossibility of buying things for gardeners (unless they’re just a pair of Niwaki secateurs, which everyone secretly wants), and learned what happens when I address M in print. Last week he was in the letter’s page, telling the world that gravel out front needed weeding.

talking about breastfeeding comedowns

I’ve found it difficult to get into the groove of writing features since returning to work in January, but I loved upholding women’s stories of post-weaning depression for Vogue, after I suffered something similar. I guess other people did too: it has since been published by US Vogue and Vogue Singapore, and a couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour to discuss it. Guess we’re not so silent anymore, huh.

to see

the cockettes

A totally brilliant, totally charming, can’t-believe-it-exists documentary about a performance troupe from San Francisco who performed between 1969 and 1972. I’ve never quite seen anything like the Cockettes, despite sitting through numerous naked-people Edinburgh shows and going to Glastonbury for the best part of a decade.

gigs in glasshouses

Going out on a Sunday is dramatically improved if you can be home in time for tea. I loved seeing Alice Boyd and Catrin Vincent (solo and stripped-back, as opposed to with her band Another Sky) perform in the plywood wonder that is the Barn at Brockwell Park community glasshouses. Cosy and communal in all the best ways. Keep an eye on their events page - they’ve got Slovakian Gypsy Christmas music coming up next weekend…

tirzah garwood at dulwich picture gallery

Just go, it’s so gorgeous, and the subject of this week’s Wednesday letter.

leftovers

voicenote

Alice Vincent · Jul 31

And voicenotes do have their own etiquette - of which I am deeply fond. The little explanation of why we are sending one, perhaps a self-reprimand for waffling, a shocked pronouncement of how long we’ve managed to go on for.

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