What's got my attention this week #77
Links and recs to get you through the weekend
SCROLLING
• There have been a lot a lot a lot of column inches about Gregg Wallace, including mine – here, if you missed it. Here are some that caught my eye:
• Fantastically voyeuristic piece in which 11 people talk candidly about whether or not they’ve had work.
• If you only read one piece make it on her experience of taking antidepressants.
• We don’t talk enough about dementia grief.
• I’ve been a big fan of ever since her Sassy magazine days, so I was thrilled to see she’d answered the Oldster questionnaire.
• Vanessa Friedman on Trump’s cabinet and what it tells us about what power looks like. (Gift link)
• “I’m about to marry a man and I’ve just realised I’m not straight.”
• Why Mary is the Bennett sister we need right now. (Gift link)
• Glorious piece by
• Some women shouldn’t become mothers. Wow .
• is sharing previously unseen excerpts from All Fours and reporting live from a body that’s no longer playing ball.
• Who doesn’t love watching TV in bed?
• There’s not much doesn’t know about Agatha Christie. Here are her top ten on-screen Agathas.
• “I felt like a bystander in my own internal recovery.” Kat Lister on her battle for health after a lifechanging diagnosis.
• How I became a person who doesn’t drink. (Me, writing a year ago. Still not drinking, and no plans to start.)
• might be the only person who could convince me to read a couple of thousand words on private jets, and their corrupting force.
• Revisiting ’s comforting piece on celebrating the long midwinter.
• One of my favourite writers on substack, (Time Travel Kitchen) is treating us to a time travel kitchen advent calendar. Here’s day one to whet your appetite.
• If you’re boggled by extortionately expensive beauty advent calendars, is here to unboggle you.
• Why we’re all hooked on gift guides.
• On the trail of Wham’s Last Christmas. £ (Sadly this is FT so it’s behind a paywall.)
(A note about the links: some are behind a paywall, but almost all (eg The New York Times, New Yorker, The Cut, and many, but not all, Substacks…) allow a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don't are marked £.)
READING
A Thousand Threads, Neneh Cherry
I first read this when I got my hands on a proof several months ago, and then I read it again the other day ahead of interviewing Neneh Cherry for a special bonus episode of The Shift podcast which will drop on Tuesday morning (follow The Shift with Sam Baker wherever you get your podcasts to be sure you don’t miss it). It was only on the second reading that I really understood just how multi-layered and intricately woven the threads of her life are, and how beautifully she pulls them together in this, her first, but I’m sure not her last, book. Born to Swedish artist Moki Karlsson and two dads, her birth dad Sierra Leonean musician Ahmadu Jah, and the man who was her day-to-day dad, her step-dad, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, Neneh takes us on a journey through her peripatetic childhood, from Sweden to New York, LA and everywhere in between. She dropped out of school at 14, moved to London, joined seminal punk band The Slits, became a young mum, began making music in her own right and put a flame under teenage girls everywhere when she performed Buffalo Stance pregnant on Top of the Pops in 1988. But that’s just the beginning. This is a story of creativity and collaboration, motherhood and daughterhood, joy and pain, love and loss, the importance of female friendship, family and roots that make her the person she is today. All the elements, in fact, that make up a life once you find yourself knocking on 60. It’s a classic.
• A Thousand Threads is out now, in hardback. You can get it from amazon, The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org or wherever you buy your books.
WATCHING
Black Doves, Netflix
What do you get if you add Sarah (Happy Valley) Lancashire, Ben (Q/Paddington) Whishaw, Keira (Love Actually, Atonement) Knightley with the screenwriting of Joe (Giri/Haji) Barton? The next level spy thriller that is Black Doves, which just dropped on Netflix. Knightley is Helen, a politician’s wife who is passing her husband’s secrets to the organisation that recruited her (the eponymous Black Doves). When Helen’s lover is killed, her handler, Reed (Lancashire) sends in assassin Sam (Whishaw) to protect her. (Still with me?) Set against the backdrop of London at Christmas, this has blood, bullets and Fairytale of New York. It’s festive in exactly the same way as Die Hard.
LISTENING…
• I was a big fan of the first season of
AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
Designer Bella Freud joined me to talk about the lifelong impact of growing up outside convention and how she finally shook off her childhood coping mechanisms, the “wonderful feeling of progress” that’s come with ageing, what we can gain from unravelling life’s knots, the impact of losing both of her parents in one week and how she’s learnt to appreciate her body as she’s got older.
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. If it’s orange, it links! (But not all orange links are affiliates…)
Thanks so much for including me in this round up! And putting me in the company of Neneh Cherry, who I've known a little through mutual friends - and admired a lot - since we were both probably in our 20s. I cannot wait to read her book and to listen to your podcast with her, both. Thanks for all your good work!
Thank you as always you brilliant woman. 💕 Loving all the other recs.