For Vanity Fair, the novelist Jesmyn Ward writes about losing her husband just before the pandemic descended on America. This is rich, heartfelt, emotional writing and some of the best words we’ve read in a long time (even if it does rip your heart out). She writes: “My Beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso.”
It’s official, we’ve found the most relaxing content on the internet. Enter Sounds of the Forest, a project that collects sounds from forest and woodland areas all around the world and collates them on a map. You can travel to the Ankasa Forest in Ghana and listen to pounding rainfall, jet to Royston in the UK to eavesdrop on two birds, and then hop over to Sydney’s Centennial Park to hear the squarks of fruit bats. Heaven
Swooning over the excellent tiles and wall pottery in this South African house and the insanely chic green and pink kitchen in this London townhouse
Oh, so this is why it’s suddenly trendy to write in all lowercase
Tiny love stories
V has recently become obsessed with the writer Kate Baer who publishes tiny, punchy poems on Instagram about motherhood and messy lives and they just honestly could not be more perfect (read this one, and this one, and this one, and just all of them)
“At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here’s what I want to pass on.”
This tweet and the resulting comments had us in TEARS
This profile on Miranda July in New York magazine is utterly entertaining from the first sentence right to the very last (“Every Wednesday, Miranda July goes to her old home, a modest two-bedroom in Echo Park she has kept for over 15 years, and stays the night. Initially, she felt more anxious about the arrangement than did her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills, and their 8-year-old, Hopper. Are mothers allowed to do this? But she needed a room of her own. In this house, there is no cooking. Takeout is king. Dirty dishes? Into the fridge. Beds? Unmade. She can be an artist first and not a mom or wife or domestic sex goddess.”)
Which house would you choose?
We’ve both tried-and-tested this Spanish omelette recipe over the last few weeks, and using sliced potatoes instead of chunks is a real game changer. Highly recommended
More potato content! The chef Guillaume Brahimi has shared the recipe for his famous buttery Paris mash and let’s just say we know what we’re eating tonight
In an extract from her new book, Caitlin Moran writes evocatively about the fear and anguish of having a daughter with an eating disorder (“She does not eat today, either. She walks around the house with dark smudges under her eyes – eyes that look different today. They seem oddly glittering, snake-like. She looks like she’s seen a vision or is hearing other voices. I am more scared than I have ever been in my life. At 7pm, we google ‘eating disorder specialist’.”)
Finally, we’ll leave you with this video of a baby seeing a waterfall for the first time, quite possibly the purest thing you’ll ever see
