letter no.10
I need your book recs/a suggestion for olives/a psa
Hello friends, I really am finding this month never-ending. I’m sure I always get a bit sad at this time of year, but the relentless rain and dark afternoons have made me continually question what date is it and how is it still so long until Spring!!! Last weekend we had a birthday party and a Burns Night celebration to attend and since I now live in Somerset, wassailing in February is on the cards - so it’s not all bad, but still. I will continue to hunker down and cross off the days until hot cross buns and cheery yellow daffodils are the order of the day.
Reading
I feel like I am making quite terrible decisions about what I read at the moment. I’m currently reading ‘Hello Beautiful’ by Ann Napolitano and I’m not loving it. I must have read a review or heard about it from someone I trusted to have bought it, but it’s frustratingly not drawing me in. The characters are falling pretty flat, I’m a bit depressed by the plot and there have been several clichéd turns of phrase that have made me cringe. I am practically incapable of DNFing a book, but I also want to read something I’m really enjoying and don’t want to put down. The last few I’ve read have not done this for me, which is partly why they have taken me soooooooo loooooong.
I would love to know what you’re reading, as well as your thoughts on leaving a book midway through.
Eating
Last Sunday we got together with friends for Burns Night to eat neeps, tatties and veggie haggis drowned in whisky sauce, whilst we listened to bagpipe music played from someone’s phone. We brought wine, not-quite-Burns-night hummus and crackers, and these olives:
Less of a recipe, more of a suggestion; I rinsed a jar of olives, then mixed them with the peel and juice of a lemon, chopped garlic, thyme sprigs, olive oil and smoked sea salt.
Jazzing up olives, much like toasting your own nut mix or making honeycomb, is the kind of low-effort high-reward offering that is excellent for taking to someone’s house or putting out when you have friends over. Of course, olives from the deli section of the supermarket, local indie or farmers market will be perfect, but imagine having three times the amount because jarred olives are so much cheaper and you’re flavouring them yourself. It’s the kind of easy thing you never get round to doing, but can feel extremely smug about when you do.
Enjoying
A PSA: All of Poirot, Miss Marple and Foyle’s War1 is now on Netflix.
I may have got slightly emotional when I saw this. I can’t remember if I read or watched an Agatha Christie first, but both were a formative part of my teenage years and I would argue the natural successor to a childhood spent reading Enid Blyton. From staying up late on a Sunday night so we could watch ‘Miss Marble’ (as my little brother would say - telling him we were about to watch was a sure-fire way to get him to go to bed because at 4 years old, an old lady solving murders was pretty scary), to ploughing through ad breaks on itv player at uni (even worse than normal adverts, I will take no arguments here), to paying for individual episodes of Poirot to get my fix, these programmes have been my ultimate comfort watch and to have them all at the tips of my fingers makes me giddy.
We watched Sleeping Murder last night (chosen because I thought I’d found an episode I’d not yet seen, only to instantly recognise the killer the moment they came onscreen), an episode from the second series of Marple, with Geraldine McEwan as the sharp-witted solver of crimes. It was interesting to recognise that there is certain degree of nostalgia at play in my desire to re-watch, as the episode itself wasn’t great - I’m not sure a particularly faithful adaptation either from certain plot points, although I don’t think I’ve read the book. Truthfully, I’m also now a Poirot fanatic, even if it was Marple that originally got me hooked; compared to the denouement of David Suchet as the Belgian detective grilling everyone in the room (always after declaring “Ah! Poirot ‘as been so stupid!”), Miss Marple’s uncovering of the killer was a tiny bit anticlimactic. Obviously will keep watching though! Nostalgia and comfort watching, it’s a funny old thing.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this weeks letter. If you have, please do share with a like-minded friend, and let me know the low-effort maximum-reward snack you put out for guests, or your favourite nostalgic comfort-watch in the comments below.
Love, Serena
The only programme able to bridge the Sunday evening gap in between Agatha Christie adaptations