the april review

Immensely grateful we’ve made it out of the winter trenches and into the thick of Spring. Pink was once again the colour of the month — I am so happy it’s peony season!!

I started the month in Cairo for my friend Imo’s wedding, which was stunning and heartwarming and everything you could ask for from seeing one of your childhood friends marry the love of their life. The city was overwhelming, I’ve never experienced a place like it — it was incredible and reaffirmed that I’d love to see more of the Middle East.

The lifestyle juxtaposition was entertainingly visible in my life this month — in Egypt I ate as much food as I physically could (a necessity when visiting somewhere new, I have no regrets,) drank multiple turkish coffees irrespective of the time of day and topped up the pollution and dust accumulating in my lungs with fun flavoured cigarettes — sadly no shisha, but if I’d had the opportunity I would have taken it.

Naturally I got sick of feeling slightly greasy and swollen by the end of each day (regardless of how I actually looked — truly the biggest hurdle is my brain) and so the past few weeks I’ve been leaning into my gym routine and cooking consistently for the first time in many, many months. I can feel my sugar cravings levelling slightly — I hope to one day be free from the shackles of my sugar addiction but you’ve got to shoot the alligator closest to the boat and tackling it head on would take more energy than I have available — plus I’m spending less and my skin is thanking me at every opportunity.

At the start of the year I realised that the only way I was going to get consistent with exercise and nutrition was by reducing friction, so I switched from the classes at the beautiful but distant gym I was attending to joining local one and buying a Shreddy subscription, and started running a couple of times a month when the weather is nice.

For food, I live and die by the sword of Emily English, aka Em The Nutritionist. Her salad recipes carry my lunches, I’ve yet to try a bad one. Jack and I joke that the only thing I cook in this house is stir fry (as in, the supermarket mix-and-match kind) — they’re always on the menu here because they’re so easy and quick to make, again reducing friction. The number of fucks I have to give are limited so I need those in my rotation. Anything I can shove in the oven, set a timer and forget about is also a win.

The vlogs reflected this — Cairo was like a fast-paced dream sequence, then by mid-month I’m documenting my Sunday reset and folding my laundry. I’ll leave them both here in case you missed them ♥️

If you would like a Studio168 tote, they’re a limited edition run that I send to all founding members when they sign up. If you support my music on here as a founder, I’ll post one to you wherever you are in the world! ♥️

Finally found some opportunities to wear these Charles and Keith ballet slingbacks I bought last year — both at the wedding (they are now wedding-approved by me, very comfy) and then on a date night at Goodbye Horses. They’re surprisingly affordable too.

Honestly I haven’t really bought any new clothes lately. I’m trying to save some money as I have a busy summer ahead, plus I haven’t found anything I love and it’s actually been satisfying enough to bring last year’s summer clothes back into rotation. Not the most exciting wardrobe update, but if the mood isn’t taking me then why shop for the sake of it? Here’s some of my outfits from the warmer weather this month, featuring the suede Arket ballet flats I love, my reliable Abercrombie Curve jorts and the rope Alienina bag I barely ever take off.

I discovered this new EP from Nomi while scrolling Tiktok — I love her sound; it fills a Solange-shaped hole in my heart, and even an Amy-shaped one in places.

I update my Honey playlist with everything I’ve been listening to recently — all of my latest finds are on here.

Before I left On Women by Susan Sontag in the seat pocket on the plane (RIP), I read her amazing essay on the double standard of ageing that put into words many of the reflections I’ve had about getting older. Much to my disappointment, I am still preoccupied with a nervousness about ageing, moving further from my youth and what that symbolises to me, compounded by concern about how my worth to society will change as my appearance and life choices evolve. The futility of my preoccupation was explained painfully well and showed me 1. there is a rationale to my fears but also 2. they are a result of social conditioning that I can choose to de-center. I’m going to include a few quotes here, but I’d encourage everyone reading this to buy On Women and read the essay as it profoundly moved me and inspired me to actively try to shift my thinking around ageing. I have so much more to say on it, I was making notes as I read so I might share a longer essay or video on it? Let me know if you’d like to read that.

“Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination — a moral disease, a social pathology — intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men… Men are “allowed” to age, without penalty, in several ways that women are not.”

“Aging is a movable doom. Being a crisis of the imagination rather than of real life, it has the habit of repeating itself again and again.”

“And of course, as with all crises that are inauthentic and therefore repeat themselves compulsively (because the danger is largely fictive, a poison in the imagination), this friend of mine [who cried when she turned twenty-one] went on having the same crisis over and over, each time as if for the first time.”

One of the purest joys of doing this as a job is meeting you when I’m out and about, and I had the absolute delight of giving one of your babies a cuddle when I crossed paths with a subscriber at Eyeculture a few weeks ago. So to the woman who trusted me to hold her six month-old daughter while we took a pic for your group chat, thank you for making my day!

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