My preloved finds don’t always pay off. This month they did.
It took me a while to get used to this TV cabinet because, once we got home, we realised it was much higher than advertised on FB Marketplace and looks enormous compared to our previous chest. We wanted something that fitted in the cove (the chest of drawers that lived here previously was smaller and of far better use in our bedroom housing tees and underwear) and provided ample storage.
Ta Dah!
It makes me ridiculously happy - DVDs, crafts, face paints, placemats, cables - it’s one giant man drawer I hide behind closed doors. The seller gave us an original receipt with the cabinet, suggesting someone paid almost £1000 in 1980, which I think is unlikely, considering inflation? But nevertheless, I think it suits our home perfectly and cost far less than the previous buyer (who was possibly scammed).
All my secondhand clothes this month are from the same vintage pop-up: Future Love, a store I discovered a few years ago when I began to try harder with secondhand clothes. Set up by ex buyer Emma Stordy, her curation is impeccable and I am always blown away by her product - APC, Matteau, Isabel Marant - in pristine condition. They’re not carboot prices, but I find Vinted pricing can often be fierce and at least you get to try on (but she is launchng a website soon!), it’s where I bought my recent Barbour jacket and my Isabel Marant Étoile jumbo cream blazer.
This trip, Emma asked if I could share on Instagram and gifted me these pieces as a thanks. Here is what I picked and how I’ll be wearing them:
Wales Bonner x Adidas shorts
Isabel Marant Étoile top
And our hallway is no longer a sock graveyard!
We previously had an old Ikea bench here - sans storage - which we moved to our kitchen table, still determined to find useful storage for this space. I was on a job for Ikea visiting their BuyBack & Resell service where customers can sell their old Ikea furniture back to store (it’s well worth a browse, they have sofas, kitchen cabinets, shelves and rugs) when I spotted this preloved Tolkning bench for less than half price, it was the perfect size with oodles of storage. We purchased it post filming and it settled into its new home immediately - look at all the tat I am hiding in there! Hats, triangle scarves I’m too nervous to store away just yet, suncream, hairbrush, sunnies. It has made me rather giddy.
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You’ve probably heard about Substack’s partnership with Pangram, an AI detection tool to help users suss when writers use AI in their work. It will probably come as no surprise to you, with all my typos and grammatical mistakes, that I do not use AI. Not even for proof reading (which might be a mistake!). I don’t use it to find a recipe, help me build an itinerary, send people auto generated links to my outfits (manychat is technically not AI but I hate ‘comment shop’ so much), nor to sort my inbox. The only AI I use (and pay for) is to cut the backgrounds out of images for my shopping slides (which I didn’t realise was AI until recently).
Like most tech growing up, I never really realised I could opt out of it. I moved on from CDs and twenty years later find myself repurchasing my entire teenage collection from the charity shop. I collect DVDs, I write and send cards to my friends, I enjoy wondering what to write, coming up with ideas - my head is filled to the brim with content pillars bursting to spill out. I don’t use prompts, I worry they’d angle my content towards what people want to see rather than what I want to write. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to move away from soleley algorithm based ideas and focus on what brings me joy and this is how it will stay for the forseeable. Not everything in my life needs to be optimised, I’d rather learn to be content with the mundane and until AI can do the really boring stuff on my behalf (like clean the blimmin’ slimy paddling pool in the garden) then I’m not onboard. ‘But you’ll get left behind’ - I’ve survived my career jumping from one dying magazine job to another, I’ll figure it out.
Quite right !
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