Five Items Of Note

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Good morning lovely people of Substack and as I write this, I am EXTREMELY late. In fact, it’s 5pm on Friday and usually I have this post nailed by Tuesday, ffs. However, I was thwarted this week with holiday catching up, some essential deadlines and mostly, by my friend Kate Hiscox coming to visit last night. Next week, I will be back on track. It’s still absolutely BAKING here in York even though it promised that it would cool down today but my iPhone promises only 24 degrees tomorrow (today) which is good as I’m going to Castle Howard for Ministry Of Sound Classical later to celebrate four friends birthdays. We had plans for picnics and cold wine, but a closer look at the website showed us that actually, you’re not allowed to take ANYTHING in at all bar a small bag and, if you’re lucky, a small foldable chair. No drinks and no food, meaning that we will be entirely at the mercy of extortionately priced food trucks for eight hours. I am not one for dressing up, but I did buy an Anthropologie sequined jacket from Vinted that is my one concession that is quite nice. I’ll report back in Wednesdays List Of Joie for those of you who are paid subscribers (WHICH I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND!).

I was awoken this morning by a WhatsApp from Kate alerting me to the fact that she had gone to the loo without shutting her bedroom window and Flo immediately took the opportunity to head for the hills. Well, the roof. Flo is a house cat, for those not in the know, but does have the courtyard as her outside space as she’s too fat to jump up on to the wall. However, she did manage to make it to the roof five doors down from me before Kate started shaking the Purena Pro Biotic and she came back, but not before the commuters arriving into the car park behind my house were treated to me in my nightdress and nothing else, shouting FLO at the top of my voice. There was a dodgy moment where I went to grab her from the ledge, she struggled and I almost dropped her down the other side of the wall but all was well in the end. Such stress for a Friday morning.

But back to the point and this month, there are a few things that I thought I would discuss with you, starting with my new fondness for non alcoholic beverages that taste like alcoholic beverages. I honestly don’t know who I am anymore. Here are five items of note that I have been contemplating this August that I think you need to know about.

I was discussing my liquid intake with a friend the other day and realised that I only drink water, coffee, teas and wine. I also added Pepsi Max in which I will drink only in the most dire of hangover situations (my sister once told me that diet colas give you cellulite - I have no idea if this is true or not - and I have avoided mainlining it ever since. Once an eighties teen, always an eighties teen). I don’t like fruit juice as it’s far too sweet for me and avoid fruity cocktails at all costs; fruity water is beyond my comprehension, sparkling fruity water even further. I’ve just been away to Crete for a week and survived almost entirely on water, green Power Boost drinks (broccoli, celery, apple - nicer than it sounds) rose wine and champagne. I mean, I’m not complaining. When in the sun and relaxing on a lounger, these things are an essential. However, now I am back I have been thwarted by the fact that the weather is amazing and all I want to do is pour a freezing glass of wine with lots of ice and sit in the courtyard.

This is all well and good when on holiday, but now I have returned to York, I need to get back to normality. Much as I would love to drink wine every night, it’s not feasible long term, mostly because I’ll wake in the night with a full on hot sweat - this doesn't seem to happen when you are in an air conditioned Hotel, but back in North Yorkshire I don’t even have a fan. This is mainly because my kids have stolen every fan that has ever entered my house as they are OBSESSED. Seriously. All three of my kids cannot sleep without a fan blaring in their face as they are addicted to the white noise, even in the midst of winter. Leo currently has not one but TWO in his room. There were no fans in our Greek Hotel where I was sharing a bedroom with my daughter Ella, but that did not stop her playing fan background noise on her phone ALL night that sounded like someone was constantly flushing the toilet.

But I digress. At 4pm on Tuesday I was sitting in the courtyard working, the sun was out, it was warm as toast, there was a light breeze and the only possible accompaniment I could think of was a glass of cold wine. But 4pm on a Tuesday is not really the time - in normal circumstances, I can go all week alcohol free unless I’m going out - so I discovered a bottle of Pavari 17 on the wine shelf that I had been sent about six months ago and had forgotten about. I grabbed a wine glass, filled it with ice, added the Pavari and some slimline tonic (again, always the eighties teen) and honestly, it was DELISH. It gave me the thrill of an ice clinking wine glass but hot sweat free and mostly, it made me realise it wasn’t the alcohol I was yearning for, it was the FEELING of a ‘special’ drink. Game changing. Perfectly happy, delicious drink, no alcohol involved. I mean, if it were a Friday night I’d have gone straight for the Whispering Angel, but this gave me the same hit which was entirely unexpected.

So this week, I’ve started trialling the non alcoholic drinks for mid week drinking and I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed it. This is most unexpected, if I’m being honest. The closest I ever usually get is a Kombucha (also love - Remedy is the one if you are new to Kombucha) but this was a whole new ball game. I’ve only tried the ones that I’ve mentioned I have in the captions so far, but am planning on trying the rest and will report back at a later date. Let me know what you think if you’ve got there before me.

This past week, I went with my family to Daios Cove in Crete. Now, I’ve been there twice before - the first time to review it for work, the second time as a customer with three other couples to celebrate my friend Shivs birthday. Every time I have been, I ENTIRELY relax. I mean, properly. In a ‘I don’t have to go anywhere, no one will judge me if I don’t go and visit local historic sights’, type of way. It’s entirely set by itself down a long track in a cove (thus the name, obvs) and you feel totally cut off from everything. There are five restaurants to eat in, each one different (one of which is an Alain Ducasse property) and if you opt for the Residents Club package, every single thing that you eat and drink is free. Truly. So if you can order a bottle of Veuve Clicquot whilst lounging by the pool with a book, why would you leave?

It’s been, let’s say, an eventful year for my kids and I really wanted our week away to say thank you to them for being what I can only describe as fucking amazing. I wanted them to relax, I wanted them to do everything they wanted for a whole week, whether that be stay in bed, swim in a pool or play golf. And me? I wanted to do the same. I wanted to feel as though I had no responsibilities, I wanted to read books, I wanted to just go PHEW and let my shoulders drop. I didn’t want to have anything scheduled except fun stuff.

So that’s what we did. I threw financial caution to the wind and booked a week, back in January when they did a 30% off Early Bird Offer. We didn’t leave the resort, bar once to pop to Agios Nicholas to shop for an hour and then the boys took a day to play golf. In fact, we even got our taxi to come early to collect us from our shopping trip as we wanted to get back to Daios Cove. We ate nowhere except in the Hotel restaurants, did nothing except Hotel activities and it was BLOODY AMAZING. We did not get bored. In fact, at the end of our holiday we all admitted we’d be happy to do another few days which has never happened in the history of Dawsons Going On Holiday.

There is a very big part of me that feels that if you are going to another country and another culture that you should make the most of it. Get a car, drive around, find off the beaten track beaches and restaurants, see some historical sights. It seems a shame not to see everything that there is to see - also, I like to write about my holidays afterwards and part of the fun for the last ten years has been sharing my favourite parts of it with readers. I cannot do a write up about Daios Cove as I did nothing but dip pitta into tzatsiki and eat tomatoes. When I was younger and my kids were also younger, we felt the need to take them to different places so that they could experience new things. And this is what we did. But often we returned home feeling more exhausted than relaxed which sort of defied the object.

Now that they don’t need to be amused, I don’t feel the necessity to do ALL the stuff. I can read a book a day. I can shut my eyes on a sun lounger. It’s an entirely different holiday. When I went to Marrakech last month, my friends and I were possibly the only tourists ever to visit who didn’t go the Jardin Majorelle. I mean, we WANTED to go. But we wanted to do other things more. Shopping. Chatting. Dipping in our mini pool. We did that solidly and had an amazing, relaxing time. Part of me felt slightly guilty on both occasions that I was not making the most of my time in another country but the other part of me felt released from the expectation that we needed to see everything.

Holidays should be a break from the norm, from the monotony of expectation and routine in your every day life. And if the daily norm is feeling that you need to ‘get things done’, then I can’t see any reason why lying on a lounger with a bowl of Greek tomatoes and homemade taramasalata with a glass of Veuve shouldn’t be the break that we all deserve.

I really do love Instagram. I wrote about this a few months ago, about how even though I know that its popularity is dwindling, it’s still a pretty great place to be. After a decade of content creating on the platform, I have seen a lot of trends come and go but there are a few that I skip on by. Take, for example, ‘POV’. POV, of course, means point of view. Captioning ‘POV: you wear a hat’ on your Instagram post is NOT a point of view. Wearing a hat is not a situation. Yes, I know that I am quite grouchy about this but as a grammar pedant, it just feels all kinds of WRONG.

Social media has much to answer for. The push to define your own individual interior style in a sea of similar posts is constant - comfy, cosy, quirky, trendy (these four words are on my do not use list), minimalist, maximalist, farmhouse, boho, eclectic, Scandi (thanks to socials, this word now conjures up a bland, pale, beige box whereas in reality, Scandinavian design is full of texture, inherited pieces, warmth and COLOUR). We don’t need style ‘boxes’; your home should make you happy and that, my friends, is that. If you want to hang a monkey from your ceiling light or add a pole for dancing in a leotard to the middle of your living room, that’s entirely your choice. Trends, schmends. If you walk through your front door and your heart sings, then you’ve nailed it.

The most recent trend that has popped up on my Instagram feed is INESCAPABLE. ‘Kinda chic’ is the current bandwagon of choice and all over my feed like a rash. If you haven’t seen this (grammatically infuriating) concept, it’s a carousel post that has ‘kinda chic’ statements on each slide, all of which are basically humble brags by the poster that often come across as a little bit supercilious and smug. I mean, surely it’s either chic or it’s not chic - there’s no middle ground here. But that’s just me splitting hairs/being pedantic/being a misery. The phrase was started, it appears, by an influencer talking about continuing to post despite trolling, an extremely valid point and a retaliation against the darker side of socials. But it soon snowballed and now you cannot MOVE on the platform without being bombarded with ‘kinda chic’ posts across the globe.

Some of them are really perplexing. A quick search on the hashtag immediately comes up with ‘kinda chic to like getting dressed’. No love. It’s not kinda chic to like getting dressed, it’s a basic social requirement. ‘Kinda chic to call off your engagement’. I mean, surely that would depend on why? And surely not chic, just rather inconvenient? ‘Kinda chic to wear a headset’. I don’t even UNDERSTAND this one. ‘Kinda chic to not have to buy creamer anymore’. WHAT are you talking about? ‘Kinda chic to romanticise your ordinary life’. Literally NFI what’s going on here, it sounds like word soup. ‘Kinda chic to have your baby without an epidural’. TRULY? And the very worst, ‘kinda chic to have ambition and still be a good mom’. I mean, WTAF does that mean? That women can’t generally do more than one thing at the same time? My brain combusts with random words strung together that mean nothing, I tell you. It’s like the misunderstood POV x 1000000.

It won’t last forever, but it’s a really good example of how a genuinely original idea can quickly become deeply unoriginal once it’s used as a template by millions. What started out as ‘kinda chic’ has quickly become ‘kinda NOT chic’, making it no different than any other drawn out social media trend. Roll on the next one, please, but let’s make it grammatically correct. Ha.

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Generally, I am pretty good with my skin although I have to admit to liking the sun on my face which I am trying to stop doing so much. I always take my make up off and cleanse and moisturise, plus I whack on SPF 50 every day without fail and as standard. I go make up free about 50% of the time to try and keep as hydrated as possible. It’s a known fact that from the age of 20, collagen production begins to drop by 1% every year, affecting firmness and elasticity. Skin cell turnover also dramatically drops as we age, taking more than 50% longer over the age of 40.

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When I went to Marrakesh, one of the (many) things that I brought back was an Ultima 15 vintage ashtray replicate. I LOVE an ashtray, particularly a vintage one. Not that I would ever use one for actual cigarettes as they are far too nice and also, smoking is no longer a sociable activity (although admittedly I am partial to a party puff on the odd occasion), but I love to collect them. Vintage lighters, too. Heavy marble, quartz ones.

Smoking is no longer classed as de rigueur but that doesn’t mean that their vintage appeal should be ditched. It had its time and its place. When I was younger, I lived in Hong Kong and everywhere you went had its own emblazoned matchboxes. Whether it was The Royal Yacht Club, Chuck E Cheese or Dennys, there was no ban on smoking indoors and as a result, it was an opportunity to spread some marketing joy via a little cardboard packet. My Mum collected these for years, she had a big carboy full of them and I kind of wish that she’d kept them.

Anyway, I have a shelf in my glass cabinet entirely dedicated to smoking memorabilia. Vintage ashtrays collected at fairs and from charity shops, tactile table lighters that don’t work (if anyone knows how I can get these working again, please do tell me - I once spent an entire afternoon searching online companies who fixed lighters with no joy). And I have, at last count, four contemporary ones on my massive marble coffee table (including examples from OK Mason, L & Clay Ceramics and Jonathan Adler) topping books, plus my Marrakesh find and a vintage crocodile who can hold cigarettes and matches that bought years ago from House Of Brunswick. If you’re looking for vintage, then it’s well worth checking out the smaller vintage and charity shops who have lots of great examples.

But a quick look at the internet shows that despite the trend being more lemon and lime vape action than a packet of Marlboro Gold, there are still plenty of modern ashtrays out there for viewing. I mean, you’re probably not going to be using them for what they’re designed for often, particularly not inside, but they are great for coffee table styling and for storing bits and pieces. And they add a kind of wanton edge to your decor. The older I get, the more I feel as though I am lacking in edge due to virtually everything I once enjoyed doing being outlawed or considered bad for you so having an ashtray on my coffee table is a nod to the fact that I might not have many vices now, but once, I was fairly wild. Well, wildish. Anyway, you know what I mean. Here’s my pick of favourites, all of which being as beautiful as they are occasionally practical.

1.OK Mason, £78; 2. Vintage Electrical, £34.99, 3. Casa By JJ, £70; 4. Wolf & Badger, £88; 5. Seletti, £32.90; 6. Maison Flaneur, £52.13; 7. L & Clay Ceramics, £165; 8. Smoking Shop, £59.99; 9. Fornasetti, £140; 10. Lola & Sidney, £12; 11. Laetitia Rouget, £80; 12. Bitossi £160; 13. Seth Rogan, £69.

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