The book is delivered and I’m back in my usual Wednesday morning venue; sitting in Edinburgh Waterstones Cafe, doing battle with the TikTokers to get a seat with a view of the castle (thanks a mill Dua Lipa). Or just a seat, because there is no way I’m queueing outside before it opens to bagsy one of the coveted balcony tables. Also, I live here, I’m lucky enough to be able to see that view any day of the week, if only I remember to look up.
I’m in the midst of post deadline come-down. You know how it is, you work and work and work to get something done, telling yourself that when this is done you’ll feel great and you’ll get x y and z done and then…. Total anti-climax. The high of delivery lasts as long as it takes to press send and start catastrophising when you don’t get an immediate response. (Self doubt, it never gets old.) And despite the fact that I have an enormous to do list of ‘all the things I didn’t do because I was on a book deadline’, I wouldn’t be doing any of them if I didn’t have the cannily self-imposed deadline of an entire podcast series to record. If there’s one thing I have finally learnt about myself it’s that if there’s no deadline no work gets done (why revise when you can build a colour coded revision timetable?) so my life is one big jenga of manufactured deadlines. It works for me, not sure about the people around me.
This newsletter is one of them. How it works is I collect ideas all day, every day, and then on Wednesday morning I sit down and plow through them. I’ve been doing that - collecting kernels of ideas - ever since I started as a baby journalist on the weekly magazine Chat in my early twenties, and never stopped. It used to be ‘cuts’ or ‘tear sheets’, piles and piles of the things all over the house, but now its endless links sent to myself or cryptic one worders in the notes app on my phone. I miss the piles TBH. Everyday was Christmas when you scavenged through those paper mountains in search of inspiration. The notes app doesn’t have quite the same appeal, but it often does throw up unexpectedly interesting things.
Currently my Notes app looks something like this:
Wrong shoe theory
Handwriting
Nigella’s green sauce
AI - destructive scanning
Drew Barrymore kinda chic
When a book finds you
What’s your emotional age?
Faces are making me sad
Bottle episode
Ariana Grande can’t win
Natalie Portman/Rachel Cusk WTF?
The analogue bag (that’s bag with stuff in to you and me)
Happiness v freedom
Basket man
Old bird role model spin off
Also:
Elec/gas readings
Money Aug 2026
Subscriptions
Books 2026
Bin days
But I’m guessing you’re not so interested in the domestic!
What usually happens, of course, with the ideas, is that they fall below the bottom of the phone screen and therefore off my radar. I am very much an out of sight, out of mind kind of person. That’s why a wardrobe uniform works so well for me. Anyway, here’s a glimpse at the contents of my head/Notes app currently.
Natalie Portman/Rachel Cusk WTF?
So, all the literary gossip is that novelist Rachel Cusk’s new book, Life of M, is based on her close friend (former close friend?!) and fellow Paris-resident actor Natalie Portman. In a nutshell, the ‘novel’ is about M, a filmstar who was a child actor, won acclaim in a ballet film and advertises a French fashion house, who lets a stranger write her biography. Any similarities to persons living or dead are entirely a coincidence, I’m sure. Although it has to be said that Cusk has even more form than most novelists when it comes to using the characteristics of real people in her work. Anyway I couldn’t possibly comment on the veracity of the rumours because I haven’t been lucky enough to read it yet, but my pal jennycolgan has. Here’s her take. And either way it’s some pretty impressive pre-publication publicity!
The Wrong Shoe Theory
This instantly appealed to me. It’s a fashion thing, inevitably, and what it boils down to is intentionally making sure that at least one thing in your outfit doesn’t ‘go’. The easiest way to do that, of course, being accessories. Shoes, for instance. So, strappy sandals with track pants, big boots with dresses, you get the picture. Or a smart bag with combats or jeans. It’s why day sequins with casual bottoms still somehow look cool, or a combat jacket over a dress. I need to watch myself or I’ll start coming over all fashion singular (you know ‘a jean’, ‘a lip’) and that helps nobody.
Handwriting
Until I started to do a pen and paper edit of my manuscript, at the start of July, I would have said I’d almost forgotten how to write long hand. Like most people I’d gone from handwriting everyday to occasionally scribbling a few words in a birthday card. When I picked up a pen it felt wrong in my hand, uncomfortable to hold, unwieldy, and my writing had become large, scrawling and even more illegible than it used to be. Then I interviewed Lily King for Waterstones Brighton at the start of June. Lily writes the first drafts of all her novels long hand and she showed me her notebook for Heart the Lover (there’s a peek above, but I’ve intentionally used a picture that gives away nothing so as not to intrude on Lily’s privacy). I’ve always been boggled by people who write entire books by hand but Lily’s notebook was a thing of beauty, an artefact, a treasure. And, of course, it gave me the urge to go and buy a notebook (not that I don’t have dozens hardly used at home). Nothing fancy but, like Lily’s, a very, very basic spiral bound A4. I found the perfect one in the local post office, for about a fiver, bought a pack of pens (Pilot 0.7 V ball, black, if you’re interested) and sat down prepared to do all my edits by hand to see if what Lily said, about the link between her hand and brain was true. Obviously this wasn’t the same because I was annotating, not starting from scratch, but when I had to write whole new scenes or chapters I made myself return to pen and paper and it was a revelation (although maybe I’ll withhold judgement until I get some feedback!). Writing was a wholly different experience when done with pen on paper, instead of keyboard. My brain and hand seemed to work at the same pace and the finished words felt less rough, less disposable. Maybe something to do with it not being so easily erased? I don’t know, but it’s definitely something I’m going to explore more. (Also, I guess unsurprisingly, I had cramp in completely different parts of my hands!)
Nigella’s green sauce
I’m not kidding, this is a game-changer. Nigella tipped me off to it on one of the occasions I interviewed her for Red magazine. She always has a jar of it in her fridge and now I do, too, so I’m going to pass the tip on to you. (Also it could not be easier to make because, as you know, I am no kind of cook.)
Approx. 100 grams fresh coriander - stalks and all (roughly chopped)
100 grams fresh green jalapeno chillies or other long green chillies (roughly chopped)
3 cloves garlic (peeled and halved)
125 millilitres vegetable oil
Juice of 1-2 limes
1tsp sea salt
Bung the lot in a blender and zhush until it’s a gorgeous bright speckly green then put the whole lot in a jar and keep in the fridge. It goes with everything.
• Find more even-Sam-can-do-it recipes like this at Nigella.com
Destructive scanning
Following on from handwriting, I guess, I met my friend Jen for a coffee on Tuesday. This is a rare occurrence as she now lives in the UAE and only gets back a couple of times a year. As has become almost obligatory when writers get together, we’d been talking for, ooh ten minutes max, when our conversation turned to AI. And, in particular, AI companies buying up second hand books to train AI and then destroying the books. Anthropic is reported to have bought millions of books in bulk, with a focus on “less common” and high-quality books, to “destructively scan” them. The fact that these books are rare and high quality, and so quite literally irreplaceable, obviously makes it worse, but a book is a book is a book and to do it to any book shows the total disregard they hold for writing and writers, words, stories and, frankly, history. Try as I might I can’t get this image - the destructive scanning - out of my head. I just wrote a whole paragraph about data centres and climate change, but I deleted it because it was all getting a bit out of control, but what it boiled down to was this: we are building data centres while closing libraries. Leaving aside for a second the whole climate change and water usage issue. History has always been written by the powerful (clue’s in the name) and thus never told the whole story, far from it. But think about it: if the AI overloads wipe out all the stories and replace them with their own take on them, where does this leave us in ten, twenty years time? Past, present, future entirely controlled by the techbros? I’m not an AI catastrophist, believe it or not, but if you think about it too long it’s pretty hard to be pollyanna.
Kinda chic
There is no easy way to segue from climate change and knowledge theft (!) to what Drew Barrymore thinks is ‘kinda chic’ but that’s what I’m going to do because this is what it’s like living in my head (or my Notes app). So I’m just going to fling on the brakes and do a handbrake turn. Yesterday I noticed on Instagram that Drew Barrymore was trying to get a kinda chic thing going. Drew’s kinda chic things included ‘being in your 50s’ and ‘eating alone’. And while my first instinct was, ‘that’s kinda cheesy’. I also found myself thinking about it hours later. So here goes. I think it’s kinda chic… to be 60, to be a cat slave, to stop saying yes when every bone in your body is screaming no, to have hand cramp from handwriting, not hand cramp from spending too long on your phone, to know what suits you and wear it and if that’s the same thing everyday, so what…? Your turn.
Miracle eye cream
While I’m here I thought I’d share a recent discovery. Gatineau’s Miracle Eye Contour Cream. TBH it’s not my discovery, I was influenced by Jo Elvin’s before and after video. Don’t be put off by the miracle in the name. (Usually a bit of a red flag, I know.) It’s not one of those lose ten years in ten days ‘miracle’ products. Even a skincare slave like me no longer falls for that. It’s basically a tinted eye cream with vitamin E and niacinimide, but it really does get rid of those purple bags. (This is not an ad, it’s a genuine recommendation.)
Wicker men
And lastly, I’ve been thinking about wicker men. Specifically Alexander Skarsgaard made of basket in Olivia Colman’s new film, Wicker. In which Colman plays a lonely fisherwoman who commissions a local basketmaker to make her a husband… I never have a problem suspending disbelief in the interest of an off-beat premise, but it does, erm, bemuse me that people can accept a man made of basket but get stressed out about where you might end up getting splinters!
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. Thank you, as always, for your support.
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