What's got my attention this week #65
Links and recs to get you through the weekend
SCROLLING
• Tracey Thorn on the loneliness of living with a loved one’s long-term illness is my piece of the week.
• One of my favourite things about travelling is foreign supermarkets, so I adored this piece about food shopping in Rome.
• Why we all need a rage friend.
• Powerful piece by
• Since her later-life diagnosis with ADHD, has been writing about her relationship with her broken Brian (not a typo). It’s quite something.
• If you, like me, are a junkie for other people’s wardrobes, this peek at the pieces stylish women hold on to is catnip.
• The kids are gone, you’ve lost your hearing, what remains? Thank you for writing this (and taking the paywall off) .
• The cost of convenience.
• has a lot to say about the menopause goldrush.
• Who really has the right to kill in self-defence? (This piece is specific to the US but holds plenty of resonance all over the world.)
• Questions we don’t ask our families, but should. And in the next breath, how not to ask your dad about family secrets!
• Chloe Sevigny is (almost) 50. How the hell did that happen?!
• on how TV used to dominate her life.
• This story about a 60-year-old woman who died at her desk – and nobody noticed for four - FOUR - days is truly shocking. And tells us all we need to know about corporate culture.
• Interesting thoughts from on hetero-exceptionalism.
• Have you got skin dysmorphia?
• Love on how she transformed her divorce-haunted home.
• What being disinherited gave me.
• Would you do a life review?
• does not attract the male gaze. Yippee!
(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…) all a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don't are marked £.)
READING
The Voyage Home, Pat Barker
You might feel like Greek myth retellings are ten a penny but, like Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker’s iteration of the Trojan War sits firmly on the top of the pile. This is the third in Barker’s trilogy (the first two The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy are equally brilliant, but you don’t need to have read them to get lost in this. In fact, it’s made me want to read them all over again). This time the story is told by Ritsa, maid to Cassandra, King Agamemnon’s “war wife”, as we follow the enslaved women on the eponymous voyage home to where Queen Clytemnestra awaits. Clytemnestra has spent ten years plotting her revenge on her husband after Agamemnon killed their daughter, Iphigenia, in exchange with the gods for a fair wind, and Cassandra brings with her a prophecy and fast-following furies. I have loved this whole trilogy, but I think this might be the best.
• Buy The Voyage Home from amazon or bookshop.org.
WATCHING
Slow Horses, apple TV+
I know, I know, Slow Horses AGAIN. But I simply can’t stress enough how brilliant this adaptation of Mick Herron’s novels is. The first episode of season four dropped on Wednesday and it kicked off with a bang, or two, or three. Spoilers coming up, if you haven’t watched the first three (and/or read the books): a suicide bomber has taken out a shopping centre, old spook David Cartwright appears to have taken out his son, River, and Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott-Thomas, above) is taken out by the powers that be when a hapless new first desk, Claude Whelan (above), is parachuted in above her. If you’re thinking Claude looks familiar and are knocking around my age, that’s because he’s played by James Callis of Bridget Jones fame. (“Fight! It’s a fight!”) Meanwhile Jackson Lamb/Gary Oldman continues to fart on order and wipe the floor with the suits.
• If you can’t be doing with Slow Horses (who even are you?), Nicole Kidman is back in The Perfect Couple (Netflix) doing what she does best: duplicitous ice queen. AND I’ve almost finished Kaos (also Netflix) which I wrote about last week. It’s a hilarious, action-packed romp. Highly recommend. (Believe it or not, I do occasionally do something other than watch TV…)
LISTENING
• still on the Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne’s highly entertaining tale of a certain sort of media-tainted American privilege.
• Loved
ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
… (A Model Recommends) joined me to talk about her experience of modelling in the noughties, the incongruity of being reduced to your looks when looks were never your currency, why there are two Ruths in her life (I wrote about this yesterday, if you missed it), the trouble with social media and why she’s too lazy, too tight and too chicken to tweak!
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift.
Thank you for leading with the heartbreaking story of Rebecca Cheptegei. For anyone who thinks gender equity has reached its peak, the continued violence against Black women, and women around the world, tells a different story.
From Uganda to India, women are fighting for the right to simply live with dignity. We have so much work to do as a society until the safety and value of women are a given, not something they have to fight for. ❤️
So many thanks for sharing "Long-term illness is Not a Battle to be Won." As a someone whose partner is suffering from a degenerative cognitive disease, it hard. There's lots written about the role of caregivers -- lip service, mostly -- but this piece plows through to what feels like truth.
"There isn’t much understanding of what it feels like to live with a long-term condition, and perhaps even less of what it feels like to live with someone who is living with that. My role is so vague as to feel invisible. I’d say that I share in Ben’s predicament, but that isn’t quite it. You can’t truly share pain or suffering; you can’t share stays in hospital, or scans, or drug treatments. All I think I can say is that I witness it. And that takes its own toll."