It's the Rightmove Roundup with a sore throat

It’s the end of the first weekend of 2026 and you’re knackered for no reason, your throat hurts, your will to live is already sapping - or is that just me? Sorry but this winter bug just keeps coming back to get me every time I think the coast is clear. My spirit is strong but my body is just so low in energy. It’s annoying.

Still I have masses to say - particularly about my newfound love of darts, yes darts. I went to the tournament at Ally Pally! I saw Luke Littler in the flesh! But there’s so much to say about him, my new 18-year-old obsession, that it might have to wait for another newsletter altogether.

Instead I’ll mention here that I also went to see Marty Supreme this week and that was the most exhausting thing of all! Partly because Timothée Chalamet is working so hard for an Oscar that it’s just tiring to watch him - and my God the things he can do! My God! (A friend said to me yesterday that she needs some kind of longread dissection of his relationship with Kylie Jenner because - for him to have that level of talent and commitment… I said yes yes my thoughts exactly - we don’t understand…)

But it was also exhausting because I have the unfortunate condition where things that happen on the big screen and often on the small screen too feel like they’re happening inside my body, so if it’s a very fast-paced and up in-yer-face film then I tend to physically feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. Which is what happened the other night at the Hackney Central Picturehouse with my friend Helen. It’s a brilliant film though and I suppose I did say I was already feeling cream crackered so hmm.

(This is also the moment where, if you were in my kitchen, my teenage daughter would do an annoyingly decent Californian accent and say, ‘My mom is trying to tell you that she’s an empath.’)

I’ll tell you what I found more calming though - Materialists, watched on my bed at home on Amazon Prime. How had I heard so many mentions of it and yet not realised it was a romance, almost a rom com? Male leads are Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, with both of them gently underplaying their Pedropascalness and Chrisevansness, which was kind of them. Cool calm thinking and a very un-exhausting energy to it, but mentally intriguing all the while.

Except that every time I start watching a Dakota Johnson film I think, why is her acting so wooden, why does she say it all in that flat, flat way? - only for me then, about 20 minutes later, to become utterly mesmerised by her flatness. I then have a whole internal conversation with myself about how hard it is to be flat like her, how intentionally she does it, the poise, the grace. Then I forget all of this the next time I watch her and spend 20 minutes wondering why she’s flat again. (What do you think? Is it just me or do you find Dakota J lacking in dimensionality? )

Actually, the best thing I’ve ever seen her do - and it feels like this got slept on - was Persuasion in 2022, for Netflix. Just a lovely film, with a knowing wink. Oh and also her being Lily Allen’s Madeline on SNL was a pretty fun moment, obv. Not that I find Saturday Night Live very interesting the rest of the time - really feels like a guess you had to be there from me to the whole of America, that show. Even though I have been there! So much!

Not going there any time soon though, not while the president is so fixatedly deporting Latin Americans, although he’s reversed that procedure this week by straight up importing a couple of Venezuelans. That would be the president, Maduro, and his wife. Trump says Nicolás Maduro is a criminal and surely he is - it takes one to know one, after all - so presumably ICE will be kicking them out again soon? But not before Trump has replaced them with a leadership prepared to give him half their oil.

Ah, oil.

It always comes back to that dead matter, doesn’t it, risen up from fossils, marine life - dinosaurs, even - to create light and power now. The oldest of the old, the deadest of the dead. Somehow everything that ever passed is feeding into how we stay alive this minute, how we keep warm at night, how we keep the lights on in the dark, how we defend ourselves and kill others. And why. The black gold that is probably powering me writing this.

It is the swamps and the riverbeds that seem to have given us not just the oil but the men who will fight anyone for control of it. Perhaps we could send those men right into them? To lie down in that sticky black stuff and sleep, perchance to dream?

I might be delirious tbh. (That’s enough blethering oil rumination - Ed.)

Anyway, before we even get to the Rightmove Roundup, I’ve also written a slightly random list of five pieces I enjoyed reading on Substack in the last year, ie they popped into my head first and I remembered them making me happy.

1. My favourite was about Gerry Adams, of Irish politics and IRA fame. If you think there’s no way on earth something involving him could ever be funny - well, Gráinne Maguire found a way. I was howling when I read this.

2. I always get a lot out of reading Philippa Perry’s advice but this one called ‘Parents Behaving Very Badly’ really did something to me. Not because of the parents behaving badly but because of the younger adult, who wrote the letter, being asked to step into her adult space and not shrink herself to make a situation easier. It’s something I think about a lot, adults veering between their child and adult form. Adults I know, and indeed me, who struggle to leave the child role behind. Who are still waiting for someone to come and rescue them, or pretending not to have aged. It fascinates me. And is unfortunately fed by the “you’re as young as you feel!” angle which does seem rather to give permission for people to live on the run from themselves. Personally, I have had to conclude that you are, in fact, the exact age that you are, so take a deep breath, admit it and build from it. Cos the rest is babyish.

3. Found this very relaxing: Why the French Don’t Obsess Over Purpose. While I began reading it with some scepticism, concerned that the sentences and paragraphs were spaced like AI slop and were going to contain Jordan Peterson type work/life gems such as “It is a good idea to go to bed at night,” it actually turned into something more interesting. I suppose I say this as someone who has a personal brand but… the thought sickens me! (You’ll have to read it to understand what I mean by that.)

4. Petra Khashoggi on her very famous childhood - if you remember her name from the papers, and from when the Tory MP Jonathan Aitken turned out to be her father (he was the one who also went to prison, for any non Gen Xers or Boomers reading this), and from when her other father, the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, was the richest man in the world - well you’ll be gripped by her view from the inside of it. Very, very different from what I would have assumed as a gawping member of the public.

   (Also did you know that the journalist Kamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by the Saudis in their embassy in Istanbul, and Dodi Fayed, boyfriend of Diana who died with her in Paris, are all from that same family too? And then there’s their family friend Osama Bin Laden. Is Saudi Arabia very small?)

5. Salima Saxton on being a bad patient. No but, it’s also funny, or meaty when not funny, while being written by someone with a serious illness. God but I love writing with a bit of meat on its bones.

I tried to read no articles at all on whether or not to have children and why it is good or bad to do so. This debate was invented by an algorithm to pit people [women] against each other and I don’t want to encourage it, though I also don’t want to say that I don’t care, or you do you hun, as if our lives have nothing to do with one another’s. We do all live together in the same world and the children belong to all of us whether we like it or not - imagine if it mattered a bit less whether they were mine or yours? Imagine if we weren’t all on the run from the other lives we could have lived!

Now this last bit doesn’t link to anything but I just want to say something and mark it here: my friend Peta Kennedy died this Christmas. She lived, she was a West London legend, she loved hard and difficultly, she caused chaos, she was so clever, she was incredibly funny, she was ferociously proud of her family, and she is dead. I won’t say any more because Peta knew a lot of people so the papers have sniffed around her death and I don’t want to cause that family any more distress. But I will just quote her sister Maria’s absolutely unforgettable speech at the funeral: I wish you could have fought as hard for yourself as you fought for others Peta.

(Now rest in peace and I bloody well hope you took a record player.)

NOW FOR THE HOUSES:

Between Lincoln Heights and Montecito Heights, which is in the ‘over there’ part of eastern LA if you haven’t ventured past Silver Lake, is this Victorian house with 3 beds, 3 baths and 1800 sq ft.

Now the word Victorian, in relation to property, is common as middle-class muck in England, but deliciously rare in the States. This place was built in 1895 and you would be only its second owner in the last 70 odd years.

Which means it shouldn’t be too hard to work out who painted the dolphins and the silver mermaid on the wall, and whether they will come back to haunt you or not.

I have no further details! Ask them!

Now I follow so many people online that I often struggle to remember if I’ve met them IRL or not - just one of the perils of being a 103-year-old passing myself off as a digital native. The owner of this incredible house in Suffolk is one of them, ie someone I follow on Insta (and possibly met at a wedding, also at a beautiful house in Suffolk? I’m sure that lot all know each other? Just muttering to myself here now tbh.) And she was absolutely lovely. I’m sure!

I digress: the house! Is it a stone castle, is it a half- timber family home, is it an absolute bargain at £1.4m freehold or a repair job that will fill every waking moment of your life with dread? I’d buy it if I could, and if there were ten of me to fill it, and if all ten of us were extremely good at DIY. It is one of the most beautiful houses I’ve seen in years.

And now for something a fraction of the size, at least a third more expensive, four times as noisy and with 27 x more drunks taking a piss outside it at night:

It is 750 square feet! I’ve had gall bladders bigger than that.

“Built around 1700, just 34 years after the Great Fire of London, Number 1 Goodwin’s Court celebrates well over 300 years of existence with the completion of its painstaking ten-year revival. Part of a row of Grade II* Listed buildings within the Covent Garden Conservation Area, it’s a rare survivor of a building type reflecting the conditions of London’s Georgian working-classes and a living piece of London’s rich history as well as more recent fame as the inspiration for Ollivanders Wand Shop in the Harry Potter film franchise.”

This house is off St Martins Lane, not too far from Seven Dials, and I spent far too long looking at its flatplan, hunting for the bathroom/s. I found them eventually and then looked at every corner of every photo and inevitably - this is not a conscious choice this is just what happens when I look at house listings - felt it was already me there living with those exact furnishings in those exact dark corners in that exact expensive space, with some huge mortgage - and I started to feel stressed all over again.

It’s almost as if [insert my daughter’s Cali accent here] being an empath wasn’t a very calming state of affairs. Is there someone I can see about this? Treatment? Drugs?

Seriously though, even if you’re not me, you can surely get past the immediate thrill of this property to admit that it is not actually how you would spend 2 million, if you had ‘em, either?

Just not sure I could do the humble Georgian cos-playing right there, right now, with that kind of mortgage. In Spitalfields, sure, with all that space - but in Theatreland when your leetle historicke alleyway lands in a tube station, a Chipotle, four branches of Pret and the aforementioned 27 drunks pissing on your doorstep at night?

I suppose it would add a realistic level of clamour to the period drama vibes. Maybe you should simply go the whole hog by turning it into a brothel and going on the game.

TOILET SPOILER ALERT!!

You see for a mere £1.25m (and from the same estate agents, a lovely firm called Unique Property Company with whom I once went on a jolly viewing in, erm, Harringay - yes they found me a unique property on the Harringay Ladder, which is no mean feat) you could buy The Third Sun House.

About which all I really want to know is the name. The Third Sun House! What else is required?

Alright it is “one of the best-preserved modernist homes in the UK; part of a revolutionary quartet of Grade II listed Sun Houses designed by celebrated modernist architect Amyas Connell in 1934.​”

And it’s in Buckinghamshire.

That’ll do, pig.

Ahh now this is MY kind of Georgian - I demand to move here, to my manor house on the northern edge of London, immediately. Not stressful at all imagining plumping myself down in any of these beds, plus you could walk to Mill Hill East tube station on the Northern Line in about ten minutes. A mere seven quick stops to Camden! Nine to Kings Cross!

“Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, dressing room, library, drawing room, kitchen/breakfast room, dining room, store rooms and a double garage. There is off-street parking in the drive, while to the rear a large terrace with summer house opens on to extensive grounds.”

Increasingly when I look at very cheap houses, projects, wrecks, I think not so much of the restoration potential as the “would anyone know I was there and that I was me?” potential. Maybe I’ve been watching too many thrillers - the new series of The Night Manager is next on my list - but due to me becoming convinced that the story is happening to me I keep thinking about where I’m going to hide when I have to escape eg whichever arms dealers are currently pursuing me around the world attempting to kill me.

This week, I have alighted on Cleethorpes as the place to start my new life. Possibly in this £60k house here, although the neighbours will talk, so I’m also considering this £78k maisonette above the shops on Sea View Street as it would be easier to slip in and out of undetected. And I’ll be able to see when my escape boat is coming in.

Now in other property news, the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills went on the market a month or so ago for a cool £25 million - I actually think it should have been more. Does anyone know if it’s sold yet?

Photo by Julius Shulman

Some further info here.

Finally, during the long days of tonsilitis or whatever this is, I’ve been too braindead to write but too awake to do nothing, so I made this lovely shop and put everything that caught my eye in it. If you looked it before Christmas then it’s had a big update with lots of new January sales stuff, and you don’t even have to stand in a Boxing Day queue at 5am outside Next to have a squizz. It’s really nice for a bit of window shopping - if you do actually buy something there’s a tiny bit of commission from some of the brands to me, but equally as many don’t pay anything at all, and none of it is enough to corrupt my choices, tragically.

MY LOVELY SHOP wishes you a fond farewell now xxxxx