To those of us of the millennial generation who built identities around the film 500 Days of Summer,1 Morrissey’s later-life hard swing to the right has been disappointing to say the least. However, it’s hard to argue that when he sang ‘shyness is nice and shyness can stop you / from doing all the things in life you’d like to’ that he wasn’t cooking. In my personal ranking of The Smiths lyrics, it’s second only to ‘in my life, why do I smile / At people who I’d much rather / Kick in the eye?’

My whole life, I’ve been dogged by crippling shyness. When I was 5, I quit ballet lessons because somebody’s dad sat on my cardigan and I was too shy to ask him to stand up. The thought of it happening again gripped me with such terror that I may have inadvertently cut short my burgeoning career as prima ballerina, just to avoid asking somebody’s da to scooch over. I’m not so much sitting at the foot of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree as I am picking the fruit off it and hurling it away from me at speed because I ‘heard they have wasps in them.’

Despite this, I’ve never really identified with introversion. I’ve never much minded doing things on my own, but I know that shutting myself up in the house for too long is one of a handful of things with a ruinous effect on my mental health. My favourite kind of social interaction, funnily, is the most low stakes one: a room full of people I’ll never meet again. Some of the most relaxed social experiences I’ve ever had are day-courses, professional development days and one-off events where I’m unlikely to ever interact with the people involved again. It seems to have a solvent effect on my social anxiety, like the opinions of other people evaporate into a fine mist as soon as we’re no longer in the room together. It takes me much longer to come out of my shell doing things like meeting my partner’s friends, taking on a new weekly hobby, or socialising at work, because I’m much more conscious of making a lasting impression.

Shyness, which is how my social anxiety mostly manifests, is like having a bungee cord tethered to your back, pulling taut at the moment of desired connection and yoinking you away.2 There is a woman who comes into the swimming pool changing rooms just as I’m getting ready to leave every week. She must be in her seventies or thereabouts. I get so excited to see what she’s wearing each week, as all of her clothes are clearly handmade, from her cotton button-down dresses to her crocheted cardigans. She even has toe socks which are clearly hand-knitted. Every week, she looks around at the changing room, expression open and friendly, clearly looking to chat with someone. I don’t suck, so I usually smile and say hello, but I can never bring myself to ask her about, or even just compliment, her clothes. It’s self-evidently such an easy win to have a low stakes chat with an old lady every week, and yet. And yet! I have such a powerful envy of friends who have connections, mentors and the confidence to ask for the things they want. Shyness will stop you. Shyness is the Terminator, and I’m Sarah Connor, but in the first movie — before she could do chin ups. 3

People who befriended me as a child likely don’t think of me as someone who is shy or introverted.4 It’s something that has, frustratingly, settled into me with age. It makes making friends as an adult considerably more challenging, since you’re so rarely immersed into the presence of other people by sheer necessity once you’ve left adulthood. I do a very solitary job, so the kind of slow easing into friendship, like into a bath tub of steaming water, isn’t something that seems to be on offer anymore. No, it’s the sort of cold plunge socialising that my incredibly charismatic partner is good at that seems to be on the menu these days.

It’s a culture of make-or-break impatience, and those of us who need to go a bit more slowly aren’t set up to win. I think we’re identifying the problems but not solutions — I’m seeing a lot of discourse about how ‘everybody wants a village but no one wants to be a villager’ from people who clearly want a village but don’t want to be villagers. The action is the thing, right? It’s not laziness, I don’t think, but shyness. There seems to be a very low tolerance for missteps and failures, and a large audience for them when they happen. It feels like the window of tolerance has narrowed to a mail slot. A village cannot exist without grace. Putting yourself out there is hard, and hiding in the house and scrolling, is nice.

ANZAC Biscuits

Through the last few years of my life I’ve found myself inadvertently surrounded by Australasians. My last manager was an Aussie, and my partner now is a Kiwi, which means that I can now pronounce ‘Kia Ora’ properly and identify a Brisbane accent at fifty paces. My manager introduced me to the humble Anzac biscuit — a sort of cross between a biscuit and a flapjack, full of oats and desiccated coconut. The flapjack-y-ness of the Anzac gives it the illusion of healthfulness, despite the fact that it contains three different types of sugar. I attempted to make them last year to surprise Nick, but they didn’t turn out quite right.

Nick’s regional wisdom guided us to the Chelsea Sugar website, a trusted NZ sugar brand. Their recipe worked better than my last attempt. Anzac dough has a disconcerting dryness, which makes the mixture easy to work into balls that you can press out with your hand. It also has one of my favourite baking steps — melting down butter before you put it into the mixture. I don’t know why I like this so much — possibly because melted butter reminds me so much of one of my favourite textural aesthetics.5

I would bake this for slightly longer than the recipe suggests if you have a slightly unreliable oven, keeping in mind, obviously, that cookies and biscuits harden as they cool.

We were left with the perfect biscuits to package up to take to Kiwi friends up north in Manchester, and a few for us to enjoy with cups of tea.

There was a time in my life when doing my PhD seemed like an inevitability. I would stay on board the university train until the degrees dried up. I don’t think I was the only person who expected it of me, either. Even my secondary school guidance teacher seemed to be in on it, writing in my undergraduate UCAS reference that I would be a good student at ‘both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.’ I remember looking at it and thinking that all my teacher’s pet grifting had finally come to its heinously unhip fruition.

But when the time came, about two months into my master’s, to apply for the PhD, I just…didn’t do it. I was exhausted. Exhausted by commuting, hauling books back and forth to the library, pulling all-nighters — something I had never needed to do before — to meet deadlines, and working alongside my studies. I make it sound like I was having a hard time, but I was kind of in my element — I loved nothing more than starting with a big stack of unread books on my left, then putting each book on a pile to my right as I worked through them, watching one stack grow as the other shrank. I loved holing up in the library under those time-blurring fluorescent lights and building a tower of Lavazza paper cups as I caffeinated myself to a low-level hum.1 But it wasn’t sustainable, and I just couldn’t justify adding several hours of PhD proposal research into the rotation. To this day, I remain in awe of friends and classmates who continued to ride that particular wave.

I needed at least a year out, that much I knew. By the time I finished my master’s, I’d come out of a long-term relationship, had no idea what I wanted to do, had a dwindling bank balance, and my self-esteem was completely shot. Oh, and it was December 2019. You can see where this is going.

I don’t know where I got my particular neuroses around having to be thought of as ‘clever,’ because I don’t have any recollection of being under pressure to achieve from parents or even teachers. I can only guess that I started strong, set a high standard for myself, and then built my identity around maintaining that perception by self-flagellating whenever I didn’t meet my own high standards. This was coupled by a general lack of self-esteem in other parts of my life — a persistent and persisting belief that I am neither likeable nor good-looking, coalescing around the idea that being clever is all I have.

Share everything is copy.

Eesh, heavy stuff. At no point during my time at university did it seem particularly important to challenge this particular set of beliefs, so I held onto them despite, in hindsight, a reasonable mound of evidence against them. I did well in both of my degrees, well enough to prompt my mother to muse that it was almost a shame that I never got the opportunity to come up short of my own academic ambitions and see that it would all be alright in the end. If you never fall off the tightrope, you never find out that the waters below aren’t shark-infested.

I have to pause here to state that I am achingly aware of the fact that this is reading a bit like a ‘woe is me / former gifted kid’ rant. I was extremely fortunate throughout my childhood and adolescence that the education system simply worked for my brain, and that gave me the confidence that I could make sense of just about anything with a little bit of hard graft — I had both natural aptitude and a willingness to work hard at the things that didn’t come naturally.2 I was by no means a prodigiously ‘gifted’ child, nor was that the kind of language that was ever being used around me.3 The call was coming from inside the house the whole time, and I kept picking up the phone. I wasn’t exactly ‘burnt out’ by the time I finished my master’s, though I was exhausted; it was more like I turned around at the end of it all to realise that I’d taken a left turn some ways back when I should have taken a right.

The grief I experienced coming out of university and into the pandemic cannot quite be understated. I use ‘grief’ here because it’s a word that several mental health practitioners have told me is appropriate to what I was experiencing. I used to curl up in bed with pangs of homesick nausea whenever I thought about how in my element I was at university, and give in to bouts of what I can only describe in hindsight as maladaptive daydreaming about going back to university instead of answering the phone at my graduate job.4 Every couple of months, I would look up PhDs and try to make a start on an application. I even ordered a few books, contacted an old supervisor for a reference, and attended some very COVID-era online open days where the admissions advisor would simply read aloud from the university website.5 My heart wasn’t in it. I’m not interested in the hyper-specialisation a PhD requires,6 and, if I was truly honest with myself, what I wanted to do was recapture the magic of being at uni the first time around.

The thing with an unreckoned personal belief system is that, no matter how much you change your life, you still carry those beliefs with you, unchallenged. I started to believe that I had peaked at twenty-two. The realisation soaked into my life with this horrible bitumen stickiness. Of course, by my own metrics, I had peaked at twenty-two. My own metrics were ass.

I’d like to tell you that I have since reckoned with these beliefs, but they’re in deep, like when you stack two cups, and they get weirdly wedged inside each other, and it feels like the only way to get them apart is to break them. I thought I had made some progress with it, but it’s recently been thrown into relief by something my boyfriend said to me. You see, it turns out that I’ve been labouring under the impression that being a school librarian is seen, at a population level, as being a clever job, for clever people. This is not to say that I don’t actually believe that myself — the vast majority of librarians I have met are, in fact, incredibly book smart, at the very least, if not very motivated and passionate about children’s literature and getting kids reading. Nick recently confessed to me that that is not necessarily the broad impression — there’s a bit more indifference about it, really; his idea of a school librarian was of a sort of curmudgeonly administrator, not a professional clever person.7 Then I thought back to my own school librarian, and realised that I remember her, primarily, as a kind of curmudgeonly administrator. Welp, there goes a chunk of surprisingly flimsy sense of self.

Cleverness — that is the ability to assimilate, retain, and regurgitate factual information — has diminishing returns in the post-graduate space unless you’re able to transform it into a more valuable form of intelligence — wit, maybe, or insight, or pub quiz aptitude. It is unsustainable to build a sense of self around being good at Only Connect.8 It almost feels like a betrayal to find this out — that this personal quality you invested so much in actually isn’t valued so much as things like being a good pal, or a charismatic speaker, or a reliable RSVPer (and subsequent attendee).

As someone with low self-esteem in other parts of my life, cleverness can become a crutch because it is easy to evidence — degree certificates, quiz scores, number of books read in a year etc. To find yourself in the brave new world of trying to figure out who you are without that is to have to rely on less concrete evidence for your own qualities. Am I a good friend? I rarely cancel plans, I remember birthdays, I try to reach out to people who I haven’t seen in a while for a catch up. On the other hand, I know that I’m also not very good at being particularly warm and asking what I see as personal questions — this, the idea that people do not want my input, is common in people with low self-esteem, apparently. It is easy, then, to convince myself that everything I’m doing is no better than the bare minimum.

I’ve had to pause at several moments, whilst writing this, to wrestle with a visceral cringe instinct. I’m aware that I’ve sauntered well down the ‘I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much’ path with this. I’ve been coming to the realisation that change, for me, isn’t going to come by looking inward — I’ve done enough of that. The time for being cerebral and thinking around my problems — which I have pulled apart and reassembled many times, to no avail — is over; the time for actioning is here. The time for ordering sticker sheets for journaling and breath work has arrived.

In seriousness, I think identity shifts have to happen externally — you have to become the thing you want to be before you can internalise the change. I don’t know if I’m posting about this for accountability, but I do feel compelled to talk about the fact that I am hopefully entering a personal season of change, if for no reason other than to externalise it, to speak it into existence.

Don’t throw out your cauliflower leaves

I can’t remember who told me that you can actually eat the big green leaves that enclose your head of cauliflower. This is excellent news to me, as I’m a perpetual grazer, and these can be cooked as a snack whilst you wait for whatever cauliflower-based meal you’re having to be ready.

INGREDIENTS:

• Cauliflower leaves (you want the biggest, greenest, least gross ones — but I’d tend to avoid the ones with big tough stalks as well as they are super tough to chew through.

• Olive oil (I actually think a spray would get you a good crunch on these but regular olive oil is fine)

• Flaky sea salt (table salt is also fine,9 just sprinkle carefully)

For the dip:

• 1tbsp mayonnaise

• 2tbsp greek yoghurt

• 1 clove garlic, diced

• Small squeeze lemon juice

• A sprinkle of chives, if you have them

This is really straightforward. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees10 and lay the cauli leaves flat on a baking tray. Coat them with a layer of olive oil and sprinkle some salt over and pop in the oven. I usually roast them like this for 10-15 minutes, until the leaves have browned, shrivelled slightly, and have taken on a kind of translucent quality. Crispy!

Make the dip whilst the leaves roast, by combining the above ingredients. They should fit perfectly in the GU ramekin you’ve been promising yourself you’ll reuse.

(More than one hundred of you now subscribe to my wee substack, which has been an immeasurable boost to my self-confidence when it comes to my writing. Thanks to all who have liked and shared my work over the last few months!)

They tarmac-ed over the puddle from my very first substack. By they, I think I mean the council, but it may be whatever mysterious management company deals with our building more generally; one of those things in life that I know I probably should care about but simply can’t bring myself to. Anyway, I was initially sad about the loss of my puddle. Still, it has discouraged the more egregious fly-tipping that we used to see — mattresses, empty NOS canisters, and similar —1 now it’s mostly just bags of soiled bedding. Still grim, but much more easily dealt with. At the weekend, I noticed two teenage boys filming each other doing kickflips, an art form that I had assumed was in serious decline since Tony Hawk hit middle age, and this morning, a preschooler in pink scooted around in circles as her mum looked on. It has become a smooth surface of delight.

My boyfriend and I have given up social media for Lent. We made a few practical exceptions, Substack being one I justified by arguing that this is, mostly, a long-form content platform, so in terms of reclaiming my attention is fairly harmless — beneficial even.2 I’ve continued to watch a great deal of YouTube for similar reasons. Nick caught me doomscrolling on my Strava feed last week, and said it was one of the 'saddest things I’ve ever seen.’ So, there have been successes and, well, failures feels ungenerous, but I’m still sitting on a 4-hour daily average screentime.

Giving up social media is the habit du jour, and I’m more than a little aware that giving up my precious feeds is, to some extent, simply hopping on the bandwagon. I think it’s a pretty worthy bandwagon, though, so I don’t feel that bad about it. Incidentally, there’s a great deal of content being uploaded to YouTube at the moment about going analogue and getting offline, which ironically just sucks you back into the endless carousel of content which relies on you being very much online. This video got me thinking about the skeuomorphic turn things are taking — instead of listening to a playlist, why not watch an hour-long video of a girl spinning retro Japanese records in her aunt’s kitchen? There’s an impulse to make tech feel more analogue, even if it remains as digital as ever. Even Nick’s app, FarrellyFilm, is designed to give you the experience of taking and developing your own photos.3 Skeuomorphism is nothing new, of course — think of our boy Clippy. But I think a youth-driven aesthetic pull back from the digital is clearly a reaction against the glossy horror of AI-generated slop. Businesses that want to build trust will be capitalising on this — go into any recently gentrified neighbourhood and count the businesses that have started changing to hand-painted signage to give their frontage a more personable feel.

A phrase that comes up in a lot of the pro-analogue content is that we should be ‘creating more than we consume.’ It’s one of those phrases with a patina of common sense that falls apart at the lightest prodding, like a particularly funky blister. I think perhaps, in the sense in which it’s meant — stop scrolling and maybe like, paint something idk — it’s about right. Passive media consumption is hypnotic — something I’ve noticed now that I’ve been off the socials for over a month is that I am glazing over less often. I thought mentally checking out from time to time was just something I did. Finding out that it’s a consequence of being online, at least in part, has prompted some self-reflection.4 I’ll admit that I myself didn’t give the phrase much thought until I came across it in Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon as a phrase sitting prettily in the mouth of none other than Jeff Bezos.5 Turns out, Bezos used the phrase in his 2020 Letter To Shareholders:6

If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.7

Well, that’s ruined it, hasn’t it? Now, every time I read the phrase ‘create more than you consume’, I imagine Jeff Bezos’s big baw heid. That’ll kill the mood. As a rule of thumb, it’s probably worth casting a critical eye over any kind of aphorism that comes cosigned by one of the 21st-century’s foremost cartoon villains, the figurehead of consumption himself. Cui bono, Bezos?

McGurl points out that ‘create more than you consume’ is:

…a slogan just vague enough to allow us to forget that, in the retail world, your creation is necessarily someone else’s consumption.

Ah, yikes. Here I am, consuming your ‘create more than you consume’ content, which required you to purchase, first, a camera, then probably a book (for you to read in a cafe in your video, where you will buy and consume a fancy and expensive pastry and a flat white), and maybe also a palette of watercolour paints from Flying Tiger, which you quickly realise don’t give off enough pigment, so you need to buy another, slightly more expensive set, from Amazon.8 Sounds like a lot of consuming for your creation to get going there, hmmmmmmmmmmmm?

I’m being facetious. Consumption and creation beget one another — we must consume to create, and in creating, we consume, etcetera, etcetera. It’s conservation of momentum, or energy, or mass, or whatever physics metaphor you want to use. It’s a banana covered in peanut butter so that you don’t keel over on a long run. But perhaps you think I’m overthinking it. I think that passive consumption of what we’ve ickily decided to call ‘content’ en masse by a whole generation has hit a crisis point where many of us are no longer happy to spend our one wild and precious life slotting coins into the claw machine of the attention economy. As a statement that simply articulates the desire to get off of the screen and into the world, ‘create more than you consume’ is an innocuous platitude, I see that.

But I have to wonder if the proliferation of so much — I’ll not mince my words — shite online is partially a consequence of people creating more than they consume. There was a recent flurry of discourse around whether or not being a reader is a prerequisite to being a good writer.9 I both read and write, and my ability to do the latter well is predicated on the fact that I do the former at least ten times as much.10 If you have ever written even an undergraduate essay, you’ll know that at least twenty times the prescribed word-count has to go into the mental mincer to make just one halfway decent academic sausage. The production of good art is a consequence of the consumption of great art. The problem we have in our current pop culture ecosystem is that there is just so much garbage to wade through.

I’m not even talking about the AI-generated stuff; I’m talking about the masses of vacuous content uploaded to the internet, published in print and uploaded to Apple Podcasts. I’ve lost count of the number of video essays I’ve started watching because they have an interesting title just to loudly declare ‘You have nothing to say!’ ten minutes in. There’s a remarkable amount of content dedicated to simply regurgitating other people’s much more interesting content in a shallow, thoughtless manner that demonstrates a complete lack of critical thinking. People are out here saying things for the sake of saying things; they’re putting the creation cart before the consumption horse.11 You can’t be out here eating a diet of nothing but simple carbs and wondering why the stuff that comes out of you sits at an undesirable end of the Bristol Stool Chart.

An ex of mine’s conservative father once declared at the dinner table that the problem with your generation is that everyone thinks they have something valuable to say. It’s a cynical statement, and I definitely don’t agree with it in the way in which he meant it.12 In my least hopeful moments, twenty minutes into a video which, it turns out, really is just going to continue recounting the plot of that Wes Anderson movie in excruciating frame-by-frame detail,13 I find myself wondering if my ex’s dad has a point. I don’t mean to say that we don’t all, in our fashion, have something valuable to contribute to the world, a perspective we could mould into a thought-provoking work of art, but I do think there’s a tendency to start generating before we’ve had time to digest.

‘Create more than you consume’ is, viewed through a capitalistic lens, an incredibly useful way for tech-CEOs and big business to harness the power of the little voice in your head that tells you that maybe you’re not actually getting anything out of the infinite scroll. You can serve them just as well by posting content as you can by consuming it. You can serve Jeff Bezos just fine by buying all your new hobby materials for next-day delivery. I think it might be the immediacy of the exhortation to ‘create more than you consume’ that I’m chafing against — the idea that now is the time to stop consuming, now is the time to start creating. It’s a big Nike ‘Just Do It’ tick of a slogan, a rerendering of productivity culture for the self-care generation. You aren’t dissatisfied with your experience of the social internet because you’re on the receiving end of the content rather than the production end of it. It discourages thoughtfulness, engagement, and the seeking out of meaningful connections with the material world. These are the things, after all, that we miss whilst we’re lost in the infinite scroll sauce. Meaningful connections with the world around us aren’t necessarily forged in the creation of a material or cultural artefact — they’re found in the discussion of and thorough engagement with ideas, being physically and mentally present in a space with other people, and maybe keeping your AirPods in the case long enough to hear some fucking birdsong.

8

Find out what I read in January here.

FICTION

My dad loves a grim classic, which is why I simply rolled my eyes when he requested a copy of Cancer Ward for his Christmas one year. I wish I could say I picked up One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich out of a hope to understand my father’s enthusiasm for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but it was actually mostly a hankering to read something short but dense. This book offers a bleak but insightful glance inside a Soviet labour camp. For all its bleakness, Shukhov (the titular Denisovich) is an endearing spark of a character, whose strategic and scrappy navigation of his own unfortunate circumstances doesn’t come at the expense of his kindness and generosity. I did feel, however, that a lot of the interesting characterisation was somewhat subsumed by all the chat about counting and recounting inmates. 1

Last month also marked something of a reading milestone for me and my friend Alice, with whom I read Mansfield Park. After discovering that we both had one final Austen novel to conquer, and that it was the same one, we agreed to read it by the same date, and then meet for pizza to discuss. Even though we both completed it with less than an hour to go before our pizza date, we did both get it in under the wire. Mansfield Park is Austen’s heftiest text, and possibly her driest. I found myself agreeing with a lot of the usual complaints about Fanny’s worthiness, though that didn’t destroy the sympathy I felt for her. I think it was a pretty strong feeling of ‘Come on, woman, do something!’ Still, even Austen’s early writing has passages of remarkable insight that have you gasping at an antiquated faux pas, or relating to a Regency teenager as she has to help her romantic rival rehearse a steamy scene with the man she loves.2

The only other adult text I got to in February was Bewilderment by Richard Powers. I read The Overstory as part of my year of big fat books, and enjoyed it despite its very American earnestness and self-conscious ‘Great American Novel’ vibes. I enjoy litfic which engages with the climate crisis via nature writing, so Bewilderment should have been the one for me. It ended up being neither here nor there — there was a very Bluesky-ish tone to the whole thing, this kind of Gen X-y feeling to the whole thing.3 The main character is very cynical about what is self-evidently his son’s autism — refusing to have the kid boxed in by something so clinical as a diagnosis. I would have felt more forgiving towards this perspective had this book been written twenty years ago. The whole thing felt a bit heavy-handed in everything from its politics to its handling of grief. I also kept thinking there was going to be a speculative twist, which never came.

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NON-FICTION

I listened to Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, a book I think would benefit from being read in the physical copy rather than the audiobook. This one was generating considerable buzz in the Jane Austen world, and rightly so — it digs into the female writers who influenced Austen’s work but whose work was never properly canonised.4 Romney is an antique book dealer by trade, and I found that her perspective really lent itself to making this book so much more than a literature survey. Romney considers the influence of the likes of Burney, Radcliffe and Edgeworth, amongst others, on the work of Jane Austen. In doing so, she recasts Jane Austen’s literary universe; instead of characterising her as the lone female genius in a male dominated literary sphere, Romney shows that Austen was actually one of many well-respected female authors during her lifetime. Rather than diminish Austen’s achievement, Romney builds Austen a community of peers, without whom her novels may not have existed. There’s also lots of really interesting stuff about the antique book trade in here, especially the place of women in that male-dominated industry, which I had never thought about before.

CHILDREN’S

My focus on adult literature and the classics in 2025 meant that my children’s and YA reading suffered, so I’ve been trying to reorient myself towards my occupational endeavours in the first part of this year. In my cynicism about the state of the Young Adult nation, I’ve been leaning into 8-12 fiction, or Middle Grade, for hope. Helpfully, a big box full of World Book Day £1 novella’s landed on my desk at the start of February, two of which I got to before the month was out. Nathanael Lessore’s Against All Odds is a real demonstration of Lessore’s growing finesse as a children’s author — I’ll confess to not being that impressed by his first outing Steady For This, though I could see the appeal for young boys in particular.5 Against All Odds is a much more sensitively conceived story, though short, which deals with family dynamics, friendships and masculinity, all without feeling preachy or patronising. Lessore has a real gift for connecting with teenagers on their level. I also picked up Bear Rescue by Hannah Gold. I’ll admit to not having read The Last Bear, but this was delightful nonetheless. I think I’d need to read it to understand if the main character really does have a psychic bond with a polar bear, or if the polar bear is a self-protective imaginative exercise on her part. It was perfectly sweet reading for a younger audience. I do wish we’d get more WBD offerings for a slightly older crowd — more like Against All Odds would be fantastic.

I finally got around to Under Golden Seas by Silvia Bishop, the follow up to fantasy novel On Silver Tides. These books are about the silvermen and wyrms who live on Great Britain’s waterways, apart from the landfaring people. If you were fascinated by Philip Pullman’s Gyptian people in His Dark Materials, I’ve been enjoying imagining that these novels are extensions of that world. Though these books have had little fanfare, I reckon Silvia Bishop will have her day eventually. She’s a Children’s Author, proper noun, with a preternatural flair for children’s writing and a good sense of how to balance action (without leaning into cinematic bombast) with considered description (without doing what I like to cal ‘LitFic Jr’ — writing children’s lit for grown ups). I also picked up Ross Montgomery’s most recent outing I Am Rebel, mostly because of the cover hero’s resemblance to my own family dog.

Talking animal books have a retro vibe which can be a hard sell to children in 2026, but I’ve been trying to press this one into their hands. Rebel is a loyal family dog whose owner, a 12 year old boy, joins a rebel group on its way to take down the government, who have been taxing their people into poverty. In a world where our children are more worldly than ever, a dog’s perspective offers the perfect innocent naivety through which to explore themes of loyalty and justice. I Am Rebel was simply a great adventure with a message of hope for an increasingly cynical and hopeless generation of kids growing up in a restless world.

The longlist for the Carnegie Medals dropped in February. I’ve long been a bit of a cynic about the Carnegies’ and the way in which they go about selecting the so-called ‘best book written for children’ of the year. I think they tend to lean into the LitFic Jr phenomenon that I mention above, and give undue precedence to ‘issues’ based books, which tends to make the experience of reading all of the shortlisted books in succession feel like a bit of a slog. I also don’t think they give enough weight to the actual enjoyability of texts. That being said, there are always gems in amongst the chosen books.6 One such gem is this year’s shortlistee, Wolf Siren by Beth O’Brien. This book was not set up to be a winner for me — I’m all retellinged out, and this ‘feminist retelling’ of Little Red Riding Hood didn’t fill me with initial confidence that it would impress.

Red lives in a village that only the women can leave, a fence encircling it to keep the wolves, which only attack men, out. However, the woods call to Red, whose grandmother disappeared into them years ago. When the town’s woodcutter goes missing, everything they thought was settled about their way of life is called into question. This book has a bluntness about it that I think keeps it from leaning into the twee, which it is at serious risk of, and keeps it honest about the nature of misogyny. I think a lot of recent retellings, in both the adult and YA markets, have suffered from some seriously defanged feminism. This is not one of those books. Wolf Siren refuses to pull focus away from the female characters and their relationships, all whilst showing how men are recruited into the patriarchal structure of the town — whilst staying within the parameters of children’s literature, I think O’Brien very successfully demonstrates how we all lose under patriarchy. This is definitely the sort of book I wouldn’t hesitate in giving to an adult reader either. If you’re looking for something Carter-esque, maybe with a breath of Atwood,7 this is a great one.

A lot of fireworks being let off in my area the last few days, on account of it being Eid. Nothing wrong with this in principle, of course, but there’s something about the acoustics of my neighbourhood that means I can only ever hear the bang and not the fizzle, which makes me question whether I’m hearing a firework or some other explosion, no matter how many of them I hear in quick succession. I’ve also seen enough teenagers firing them into bins or, worse, at each other, as a recreational activity that the sound of them provokes visions of one flying straight in through our kitchen window.

I’m feeling a little fragile this week. I fear I may be the first ever librarian to experience workplace-induced tinnitus, walking home every evening with a high-pitched whine static-zapping between my ears. I started journaling earlier, then sometime later found myself curled up on the sofa, unable to recall at what point I put the pen and notebook down. I have started regularly expressing the desire to become an individual gnocchi (a gnoccho?) as if being something small and dense and floury and all one consistency all the way through would somehow fix what ails me. It’s necessary to be a little silly with a mental health crisis, I think. Otherwise, it will Get You.

Relatedly, if anyone has any advice for navigating the BACP register, please do share. It seems that everyone on there is a “person-centred” therapist, which I’m sure is a meaningful designation in the profession, but to the layperson feels like if a restaurant were to describe its menu as “food-centred.” It also seems that your standard therapist in London now costs almost £300 a month and does not work on evenings and weekends. By all means, these people deserve good pay and work-life balance, but the whole thing does make one want to Scream A Little Bit.

My partner and I have been off socials for over a month now, which has mostly been surprisingly easy, considering I don’t think I’ve been offline for more than 48 hours since before I had a Bebo account.1 One thing I’ve become hyperaware of is my tweet-brain; the impulse to broadcast that follows every clever little thought or frustration that flits across my mind. I think it’s a misplaced bid for connection, but instead of directing that bid towards an individual, I’ve just been broadcasting it out to anyone who will listen or at least hit a like button. Something something meaningful emotional connections something something. I’ve never coped well with a high-stakes social interaction, and I’ve been avoiding dealing with this by redirecting the impulse to forge connection through twitter and instagram for the lion’s share of two decades now.2 It’s going to take more than forty days and nights of mild withdrawal to pull myself back from that.3

coffee butter + scones

Last summer, I thought one of my neighbours had laid a trap for me. I was walking home when I spotted a sign that said ‘free books and kitchenware →’, so when I walked over, warily, I did fear that what I was about to find was a pile of books laid under a giant cup held up with a stick.

Luckily, the sign was legit, and I picked up a book that seemed meant for me — Kate Young’s The Little Library Year. This cookbook pairs recipes with book recommendations to accompany the changing seasons. Considering it’s trying to do at least three things, it is surprisingly successful in its mission. I’ve always aspired to have a shelf of cookbooks, mostly as objects to admire, so I never thought I would be a cooking-from-a-cookbook-person. As part of my analogue shift, I’ve been cracking the handful of cookbooks I own and attempting one or two recipes. This week I tried the ‘biscuits and coffee butter’ recipe from this book, inspired by Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. I won’t post the whole recipe here, since it’s not freely available online, but I’m sure there are similar ones about.

I was fascinated by the idea of coffee butter and a touch giddy about making butter from scratch (which you can do by simply whisking double cream past stiff peaks until the fat separates from the liquid). It almost feels like something you shouldn’t be able to do at home, and yet here I am, more coffee butter than I know what to do with.

The biscuit recipe uses buttermilk made from the coffee-soaked cream, giving your biscuits a subtle coffee flavour. I added sugar to my biscuits to more or less make them into scones, and sprinkled a little salt on at the end because I fundamentally believe very few recipes aren’t improved by swapping unsalted butter for salted butter.4

My parents are ceramicists by training.1 I was raised with a respect for the importance of arts and crafts that I didn’t realise wasn’t typical until I started living with other people at university. My childhood memories are of warming a ball of plasticine between my palms until it was soft and pliable, watching my mum fold tissue paper into puff-ball flower garlands for a birthday party, and labouring over the balance and arrangement of the Christmas tree every year.2 A childhood like this teaches you the ability of work to enable the best kind of play; when you know that to draw a face you must know that the eyes are level with the ears, or that to give a painting actual depth you should avoid using the black paint, it becomes all the more exciting to defy the rules. Some of the best fun of crafting something with your hands is the look-adjust-look again hard work of moving the needle closer to the creative vision you imagined in your head. The friction is the fun.

I’ve been turning a particular visual from this part of my childhood over in my mind recently whilst thinking about the idea of doing hard things; namely, the practice of ‘score and slip’, a ceramic technique in which one scores up the surface of the clay and then applies a ‘slip’ which is basically a wet clay solution, to act as glue when you attach another piece, like a handle to a mug, for example. This technique helps build stronger bonds between pieces and, downstream, is to thank for the fact that you don’t regularly end up with a lapful of scalding liquid every time you have a cup of coffee. There are other similar things I could use to construct the metaphor I’m about to construct — sanding a surface to create a profile that paint can more readily adhere to would be one.

So much present-day discussion about technology and its place in our lives is about making our lives frictionless. How easy it is now to order an item and have it in your hands by 10 pm that evening.3 We have an entire generation of children now who will have never had to navigate to a location using a paper map. My cousin and I were discussing this earlier this week — memories of our parents circling round and round a city on a ring road, arguing about the correct exit, or ending up entirely missing the place you were trying to get to. We do appreciate just how much safety a map app offers us as women in foreign countries, for example, being able to make our own way around without risking the vulnerability of asking for directions in a language we don’t speak. There’s a loss of some serendipity there, though, isn’t there, when you always get to exactly where you’re going by the most efficient possible means?

Social media and LLMs are the latest great smoothers. The former smooths the discomfort of boredom, gives your hands and brain something to do with every unaccounted-for moment of your day, so that you don’t have to sit with the discomfort of being alone with your own thoughts. LLMs finally deal with the pesky business of thinking. I don’t personally make use of LLMs like Chat GPT — my work doesn’t necessitate it — but I have stood and watched a child use it to complete homework many times. One child in particular was using Copilot to complete a piece of discursive homework about the two sides of a prominent political debate. I watched him ask the question of Copilot, which churned out a list of arguments for each side. The kid then copied out these arguments, careful to rephrase them in his own words.

Was this cheating? Something about it definitely felt like cheating, but I did have to reason out that the kid was taking the time to paraphrase and regurgitate the information, suggesting that there was some digestion of information going on. Would it feel less like cheating if the kid had simply googled the question and then copied down the arguments from a single webpage written by a human, rather than an LLM? Maybe. Probably. There’s definitely something about the frictionlessness of the whole thing that I find unsettling — I can’t help but feel that the child was only holding the information in his mind briefly and then letting it drift off again. It feels very much like sticking the mug handle on without doing any score and slip — a surefire way to end up with a lapful of hot coffee.4

On Friday, I attended a day-long seminar run by the National Reading Trust on teenage reading. One of the talks was given by the fabulous Dr — of whom I was already a huge fan — about the idea of reading pleasure and reading pain. He asked us to gauge our level of agreement with several statements — things like ‘Children should read the classics’ and ‘Reading should be pleasurable.’ It prompted a lot of nuanced discussion about our general agreement, but fundamental caveats, with each statement. Chetty signposted an article recently published in the Tes magazine about whether the educational drive to encourage ‘reading for pleasure’ has failed. I recommend reading it for some interesting perspectives on the subject.

Encouraging reading for pleasure — that is, reading outside of the curriculum — has been the North Star for literacy professionals during my lifetime, at least. There’s plenty of research suggesting a correlation between extra-curricular reading and things like exam performance, life satisfaction, and social mobility. For those of us who work with kids with complex and varied socioeconomic profiles, reading can seem like the silver bullet which might just help some kids defy the constraints put on them by circumstance. But does it have to be pleasurable? If English wasn’t your favourite subject at school, you probably remember the structured, narrow reading you did in class as a kind of strait-jacket on reading enjoyment. The impulse can then be to say, well, if the kids don’t like being forced to read something, we should give them freedom to choose to read whatever they like. That’s how we get them reading.

A fair impulse, but we don’t live in a vacuum. Chetty pointed out that if we leave children to guide their reading ‘independently’, the main force that will guide their reading is the market, and the market does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. There has been a — fundamentally well-intentioned — move in education over the last decade or so to lean away from challenge and conflict, to smooth the distress out of the educational experience. Of course, I don’t think there’s any reason to cause undue distress for the sake of being provocative; I’ve recently been showing my Year 8s a movie trailer that briefly depicts a car accident, and preempting that has helped to temper the level of shock and alarm that upsets the kids and unmoors the calm of the classroom. But, there is a level of stress that we should endure to develop some resilience to the world — kids should have to work in groups, for example, even with kids they don’t get along with, and they should have to complete assessments that involve giving presentations and public speaking, even if that experience causes them anxiety.5 We can’t be trading in a child’s resilience for their short-term comfort.

As Dr Chetty pointed out, referring to his sick-bed reading of The Secret Garden as a child, often the value of reading a text isn’t felt until a gap of time has passed. That value isn’t always found in pleasure. In his reading of The Secret Garden, Chetty has been drawn back again and again to its portrayal of British colonial mindsets, from the barefacedly racist to insidious subtext. He argued for the need to guide children back to the canon of classics to build an understanding of the foundations and history behind our literary tradition. Using literature to help children reckon with a country like the UK’s colonial history, for example, is not an act of reading for pleasure. It’s a reading to introduce friction, to challenge. It’s also about giving children who might otherwise never be able to accumulate this kind of intellectual cultural capital the opportunity to access it. In a smooth, frictionless world, the challenge is to teach young people the value of roughing up the surface of their intellectual landscape so that their learning will stick.

I’ve been pivoting the language I’ve been using in my teaching to be more challenge-focused. Some reading is hard, yes. It’s certainly more difficult than a two-hour doom scroll, but now I know adults whose attention span is so shot that they can’t motivate themselves to sit down and watch a feature film. It’s easier, I tell them, to build that focus muscle now through practised, habitual reading, than it will be to regrow that muscle after it’s atrophied. There is value in doing hard things. I realised that perhaps I had a different idea of what ‘reading for pleasure’ is — was I reading for pleasure when I spent my July hacking away at Joyce’s Ulysses? The experience of reading it wasn’t pleasurable in the way that reading a romance novel by Ali Hazelwood is a pleasure shot directly to the dome. I think the pleasure of reading Ulysses was in the slow untangling of it and the satisfaction of having conquered a text so universally considered challenging. There is a lot of chat online — how scientific it is, I don’t know — about cheap vs expensive dopamine. Cheap dopamine is the hit you get from something like scrolling, or any other kind of instant gratification activity, whereas you can, in theory, build up a more sustainable kind of dopamine reserve by doing effortful tasks — weight lifting, reading, painting, etc. This is more expensive in terms of your time, but ultimately, like investing in a good coat, you never regret it.

My grandpa passed away a few years ago from dementia, which progressively snatched away his memories and brain function until he no longer recognised us, his family. The knowledge that this happens to many families doesn’t make it any easier to watch. My father responded to grandpa’s illness by taking up the guitar again. The way dementia works is that it breaks down the connections in your brain, working from the most recently formed until it finally reaches the fundamental parts of the memory, the loss of which is the most distressing thing about the disease for the sufferer and their loved ones. Without a cure for this and similar diseases, the public advice is to delay the onset of dementia and alzheimers by building up a cognitive reserve. This is achieved by doing intellectually stimulating activities, which build up more of those brain connections. This is the intellectual equivalent of piling up chairs to build a barricade; the more there are, the harder it is for the enemy to break through. What my dad clearly saw in picking up the guitar was a way to rough up the surface of his intellect so that his whole world might hold together a little longer.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting we ply children towards reading with the threat of long-term cognitive decline, something that probably isn’t even a concern for many of their grandparents yet. But I do think we need to start thinking about frictionless living as a public health issue that is already affecting the mental health of our young people. How better to create a disenfranchised, disillusioned general public than to convince them that ease is the ultimate thing to aspire to?

My fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon (“Growing up is tough but you can make it,” that sort of thing). Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice?

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Message About Messages

UK Kidlit is a village — just last week I had a decorated children’s author in to speak at my school and he was telling me about how he was good friends with another Carnegie Medal winner. They even holiday together.

This is kind of the way things go with children’s writers — they all know each other, socialise together, and if you catch them in the right mood, you can get some good author gossip. As a breed, they’re generally lovely, and incredibly generous with their time and advice.1 Many of them are also, or have been, school librarians, teachers, or have otherwise worked in the publishing sphere. There is therefore a lot of “oh, do you know / have you met so-and-so?” It always makes me feel a little twitchy about my reviewing.

If you read a lot of children’s books and perhaps have a developed taste for what good children’s writing looks like, you might end up chafing against the cloying adulatory tone of children’s book reviews. I am naturally mistrustful of a reviewer who never hands out one or two-star reviews of books, and I’m always dismayed when I read a book that I think is guff, and I can’t find a single voice raised in agreement. There seems to be an unspoken agreement that leaving a critical review of a children’s book is somehow cruel. I suppose there’s probably a general sentiment that holding children’s media to adult standards is unfair, and that it might not be productive to criticise something like the Minecraft Movie for not meeting Sundance-level cinematic standards. There is probably, also, a sense that adults shouldn’t criticise media that isn’t for them, and whilst I do find myself irritated from time to time by adults leaving reviews on kids’ books that criticise them for being the thing that they are — kids’ books — I have to wonder what we’re doing if the very adults whose job it is to read and recommend books to children don’t feel comfortable calling out lower quality writing when they see it.

I definitely feel this impulse to moderate my critical thoughts and try, as best as I can, to put myself in the shoes of the child reader. I, after all, spend 40 hours a week with child readers, and know what they will connect with, what’s cringe, and what they won’t touch with a barge pole. I have also, many times over, recommended books to children that I personally don’t think are incredibly high quality, because most of the time it’s about getting them reading at all. Sometimes this means parking my own feelings.

Is this good enough, though? I was recently the first person to leave a less than glowing review of a middle-grade debut on Goodreads. This book wasn’t bad, by any means, but I think it had some glaring rookie issues that are worth considering before you pick up the book, namely that the author was clearly quite anxious about making sure that they addressed every social issue that floated across the periphery of their narrative fully and sensitively. This is a noble intention, for sure, but it ended up making the book feel overly didactic and bloated with moral messaging that I’m sure children will pick up on and be turned off by.2 I thought the writing was great and that the author clearly had some fantastic ideas stewing in their creative cauldron, and what I set out to do in my review was tease out what worked, and which threads they might follow to garner future success with a child audience.

It’s not the first time I’ve picked up on this either; there is a lot of push to diversify children’s literature at the moment, which is — and I want to be absolutely clear about this — great and long overdue. However, I get the sense that, rather than fostering a diverse range of voices who can individually address their own perspectives on things like gender, race and neurodiversity, there are some authors feeling the pressure to be everything to everyone. This has made a lot of recent children’s writing feel like a well-meaning box-ticking exercise, rather than an attempt to open up the publishing industry to a wider range of stories, carefully and thoughtfully told. I think many reviewers pick up on this anxiety and assimilate it into their criticism, worried that people will misinterpret their misgivings about the way diversity has been handled as suggesting that it’s ‘woke gone mad’ or some other reactionary nonsense. The result is that reviews often praise diversity simply for its presence, rather than for the quality of its representation, or even beyond that, ignore the actual story entirely.3 I just think it’s more important to do a small number of things well, than a large number of things in a conspicuously clunky way.

There is one more thing that I think is driving the lack of critical reviews of children’s books — simply, the worry that they will someday meet the person who’s work they’ve criticised. It feels more likely, somehow, in the children’s space, that you will meet an author whose work you didn’t enjoy. Indeed, I’ve met several very lovely people whose books I didn’t enjoy. This often has very little bearing on whether they are good at presenting to children, encouraging them to read, or chatting to them in a signing queue, which is my priority when they work with me. A more egomaniacal anxiety that I can confess to but not project onto other reviewers, is that I would also, someday, like to get my work published, and worry about being taken into a social environment where, at any moment, someone might find out I’ve read their work and didn’t enjoy it.4

I don’t think the same anxiety quite exists in the big brave world of adult publishing, but I might be wrong. Either way, I feel I should soldier on with my honesty, because children deserve the best, and authors deserve to know what’s working and what isn’t. I think criticism needs to move away from focusing on the thematic, social contexts of these books as a marker of quality, when telling diverse stories5 should just be the industry standard, rather than something that books are praised for acknowledging. Also, authors are grown ups, even if they don’t write for us.

marmalade, or paddingtonmaxxing

Delia Smith is a national treasure, but also a personal treasure of mine, for the ways in which she will always co-sign the easier way of doing things. I used her recipe for this marmalade. If you’ve ever looked at a recipe and thought “Do I really have to do that?” she’ll let you know.6

I’ve recently taken an interest in eating seasonally,7 and was delighted to see Seville oranges on a list for February. I’ve never tried to make any kind of jam or preserve — I’ve viewed these things as the preserve (haha) of much more serious women with cooking thermometers, and Jeremy Corbyn. In the spirit of doing things I don’t usually do, I decided to have a go. A co-worker gave me lots of advice on how to do it, and slightly spooked me by suggesting I should have a larger pan than the one I had.8 She did emphasise the importance of putting some saucers in the freezer ahead of time.

The first thing you want to do is check your Seville oranges haven’t gone mouldy on the underside, as several of mine had. Oops. Then you boil them until you can stick a fork right through them (fun, and slightly alarming). Then you want to pulp n juice them and chop up the peels, burning your fingers if you’re impatient. You tie the pulpy bits up in a muslin and stick it in the pot with sugar, water and the chopped up rind. You have to make sure, when it comes to actually boiling the lot down, that you scoop off the white scum that builds around the edges. My marmalade did, at one point, boil over.9 When you think it’s ready, you spoon a little of the liquid onto your frozen plate and then after a minute, push it with your fingernail. When it wrinkles up, you’re ready to decant into your (sanitised) jars. This will be, for a fleeting moment, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to you in your life. There is no way to get the smell of laoganma out of the lid, that’s just how it is now.

I got about 4 jars out of halving Delia’s recipe, just so you know! I don’t even like marmalade, but I’m told it was tasty.10

Visiting my parents this past week, I found myself milling about my old local Waterstones. Dundee’s Waterstones is a bit of a community hub — it’s been there as long as I can remember, and its characterful interior, complete with a mezzanine cafe, makes it possible to forget you’re in a chain bookshop. I did a short seasonal stint there as a bookseller, and came to appreciate the influence the employees were able to exert on the space, window and chalkboard art skilfully executed by cafe colleagues who had graduated from the local art school. When I was a kid, the children’s section was one enclosed corner of the shop; now, it sprawls out, eating up more shelves every year. I reached my teenage years just as Young Adult was coming into its own as an accepted category of books. Now, it’s huge.

“I’m finding the YA offering a bit uninspiring at the moment,” I said to my Dad, rejoining my parents in the cafe after a browse.

“Well, it’s not for you, is it?” he replied, a little cheekily. I would say he had a point, but as a secondary school librarian, it is quite explicitly in the job description that I should be reading and having opinions about the quality of YA books.

Moreover, he’s wrong. Research released last year by Farshore and HarperCollins found that over a quarter of YA readers are over the age of 28. Three-quarters of YA readership were found to be over the age of eighteen. If you asked an uninitiated member of the adult public what age group they thought Young Adult literature was supposed to appeal to, I imagine you’d get an average of around age 13-20. Where has the teenage readership for teenage books gone?

As a 29-year-old whose job it is to engage with kids’ reading, I can make a few educated guesses about what is going on here. As I’ve already mentioned, I grew up during the first YA boom; I remember when my Waterstones first got a teen section, a single bookcase of titles. My childhood saw the sensational rise of Harry Potter, then Twilight, then The Hunger Games. It was a golden age for event publishing — I really don’t think we’ve had anything quite on the same scale since. The thing that might get forgotten in all of this was that it was really hard to get your hands on merchandise. Early-day Harry Potter fans will remember that it wasn’t until all of the movies were complete that you could find the widespread Hogwarts house merch,1 which I’m sure now plagues landfills the world over. Though it was fairly easy to get your hands on a poster with Robert Pattinson’s besparkled face on it, I do remember having to send away to the USA for an unlicensed ‘Team Edward (until Jacob takes his top off)’ sweatshirt for my friend’s fourteenth birthday.

Nowadays, it feels like every third title gets a gift edition, a spredge edition,2 a special edition fan edition second anniversary edition with limited edition book sleeve edition. Now, something you might remember about being a child is that children, as a rule, do not have money. I am personally of the opinion that even publishing a new children’s book in hardback without a simultaneous paperback release is somewhat unethical, so seeing a sparkly hardback edition of a book that has been out for several years already retailing for £30 is hard to stomach. There will always be teenagers who hassle their parents for the shiniest new edition of their favourite book so that they can have an ‘aesthetic’ bookshelf, but something tells me that the 20th anniversary hardback edition of Twilight: New Moon is not for the fifteen-year-old collector. No, this is for the thirty-year-old nostalgia junkie with fun money looking for the shopping hit we couldn’t get back in the day.

Adults should read children’s books. This is a belief I stand by. If a friend comes to me saying they’re in a reading rut or slump, the first thing I will suggest is revisiting a childhood favourite or picking up a book from the kids’ table at the bookshop. I would particularly urge adults to pick up something new, released in the last decade at least. I find myself despairing when teacher parents come into the library asking if I have a title like Swallows and Amazons or Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day that they can borrow to read with a hesitant child. Look, I’m not going to knock a classic, and I understand wanting to share something you loved in your childhood with your own offspring, but times have changed since you were a kid, buddy, and you need to meet your kid in the world that they live in, not the one you grew up in. There is a lot of excellent work being done in the middle-grade space in particular, with many authors bringing new perspectives and adventures into the 8-12 market. Reading children’s books, even if you don’t have kids of your own, allows you to reconnect with simplicity, not for the sake of escapism alone, but also to understand that under all of adulthood’s complexities, there is a fundamental value system that we all would like to adhere to in principle — be brave, be kind, be respectful.

Adults reading YA must surely, then, be a good thing. I’m not sure it’s that simple. As the first readers of YA have moved into adulthood, there’s been a reluctance to cast off childish things, with many clinging on in the name of escapism. This has opened up a space in the market for ‘New Adult.’ New Adult has sprung up in response to a demand for the stylistic qualities of YA to be replicated, but with more adult content. More sex, basically, but also older characters — university students, recent grads, interns etc. Some of the biggest authors of the last decade have made their names in this space — Casey McQuiston, Sarah J Maas and Colleen Hoover, amongst others. Sometimes even Sally Rooney’s name gets thrown around in these discussions.3 I was initially a big proponent of this new designation — I was in my early twenties, and crying out for something that felt like it spoke to the particular time in life I was experiencing.4 As the romantasy subgenre picked up momentum, however, a blurring of lines started to occur. Take Sarah J Maas, for example — her Throne of Glass sits solidly within the YA market, having been written by the author during her own teenage years. A Court of Thorns and Roses, Maas’s Beauty and the Beast retelling trilogy, is littered with graphic erotic sex scenes that get more and more graphic the further you get into the series.5 Only the canniest of librarians and booksellers have the savvy to shelve these books in different sections, and it’s clear that Maas’s publishers don’t put much energy into making a distinction between Maas’s writing for kids and her writing for adults. Why would they?

The responsibility for this trickles down to my school library desk, where I’m constantly put in the tricky position of deciding which of these books I let out to children, and at what age. I’ve had children as young as eleven ask me about Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and Hannah Grace’s ice hockey romance, Icebreaker. I can’t help but develop anxiety-by-proxy for older librarians who aren’t online enough to cotton on that these books with incredibly child-friendly illustrated covers are actually concealing pages of graphic sex.

It almost makes me nostalgic for a pulpy bodice-ripper cover, or a romance with a well-oiled and anonymous torso on the front. I don’t say any of this to be worthy or overbearingly moral — teenagers are pathologically curious about sex, and I do think fiction can be a relatively safe way for them to discover things about adult relationships without being met with, for example, a graphic image or video. I do think it becomes an issue when they no longer know what to expect, or if they find something somewhere they haven’t gone looking for it.

There are obviously two markets at odds here — the YA reading adult-public who are happy, enthusiastic even, about encountering sex in their YA fiction and the teenage reader who is the ostensible target reader. Adult readers want their romance to fizzle with erotic tension, but they also want the thrill of first love and the simplicity of a world viewed through youthful eyes. Teenagers, however, are less keen. There’s plenty of reporting out there whipping up hysteria over teens wanting less sex in their media — I think we should be wary about leaning into any kind of reflexive puritanical impulse, but I think it does speak to a desire to want to encounter the sexual on their own terms.

Sex absolutely has a place in YA literature — I think of the end of (spoilers I guess!) His Dark Materials as one of the quintessential examples of the Blakean progression from Innocence to Experience. Pullman achieves a lot with sparing detail in those scenes. Of course, you can be more explicit with it. Teenagers do have sex, but the sex that they’re having is mostly awkward, clumsy, and if it can be said to be good by any metric, it’s probably in a sense of safety rather than thrill. It is therefore possible to write sex for teenagers in a way that meets them where they’re at, acknowledging the anxiety and awkwardness that comes with it. It doesn’t all have to be dripping in a sense of embarrassed detachment either — it can be nice and sincere and, vitally, not written with the adult reader in mind. Nothing quite sets me off like an adult starting a Goodreads review for a YA novel with, Kind of immature, felt like a kids’ book.6 My love, that is what it is.

I would implore the adult reader of children’s literature, which is what YA is, to approach these books with a sense of what they’re voting for with their money. I think authors of what should be New Adult are being shoehorned into the more widely recognised YA designation for the sake of being more marketable and profitable. Read children’s books, for sure, but with the knowledge that they are for children, and that they don’t owe you, as the adult reader, a reflection of your present experiences.

6

I’m incredibly wary of falling down the listicle rabbit hole with this substack, so please call me out in the comments if things start to smell a little search-engine-optimised. I think that’s why, until this point, I’ve only vaguely talked about what I’ve been reading recently. However, this past weekend, Nick did ask when I was going to write about what I’ve been reading — it seemed strange that I wouldn’t, given that it’s literally my occupation and the thing I’m better qualified to do than anything else. Fair enough, here’s what I read in Jan:

NON-FICTION

Three non-fiction titles made it out of my TBR pile this month — How To Winter by Dr Kari Leibowitz, In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger, and And Then? And Then? What Else? by Daniel Handler. I dealt with How To Winter pretty comprehensively in my last substack, so I’ll not belabour that there.

I read Ella Risbridger’s recipe-book-cum-memoir Midnight Chicken towards the end of 2025, enjoying it despite its slightly cloying late-2010s tone. I was interested to see where she went with In Love With Love, a panegyric on the romance novel. My feelings about the current state of the genre are mixed — finding a genuinely good romance novel is, I think, a needle in a haystack job, and the slashing of editorial staff across the publishing sector is clearer in few other genres.1 When a romance novel is good, however, it can be really great, and it needn’t sacrifice its tropes and fluff for the sake of being seen as ‘literary’ to achieve that. Still, Ella Risbridger overreaches slightly in this book — to be sceptical of the quality of romance novels in general is symptomatic of, at best, a lack of whimsy, and at worst, a deeply internalised misogyny. Whilst I thought some of the analysis in In Love With Love was insightful and enlightening about the historical denigration of this genre ‘for women’, I found its unwillingness to engage with legitimate criticism of the genre’s more problematic aspects a little overbearing. 2

I put Daniel Handler’s And Then? And Then? What Else? on to listen to whilst cleaning the house; naturally, a lot of the details of this memoir are a bit hazy with the distraction of doing dishes and folding laundry. For those unaware, Daniel Handler is the real name of the children’s author more famously known as Lemony Snicket. I want to be clear that I had no idea that Handler had any controversies until I read his Wikipedia page about halfway through the book, where Handler somewhat awkwardly tries to wade into the discussion about cancel culture. It’s otherwise pretty par for the course when it comes to author memoirs — he talks quite extensively about his influences, including Baudelaire, the man whose name he would pinch for his ill-fated orphans in Unfortunate Events.

ADULT FICTION

January was a month of peculiar books; it was bookended by two book club reads, Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens and The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft. The former tells the story of nineteenth-century French writer George Sand through the eyes of a Spanish ghost, with the action focused around a trip Sand really took to Mallorca with Frederic Chopin. There are some really delightful parcels of prose here, and the premise alone deserves recognition for its originality. Something I particularly enjoyed about this one is that the ghost physics felt well-realised without being overwrought — I completely understood why our narrator had stayed put at the Mallorcan monastery where she died for several centuries, though she could move around. I also learned a lot about George Sand.

The Extinction of Irena Rey was another odd one. Patti Ratchford’s surreal cover design for this book is really something, if we can talk sheer book-as-object here — I’ll be hanging on to this one for its sheer prettiness for some time. This one follows a group of translators as their author, the eponymous Irena Rey, goes missing at the start of their gathering, where they are to translate her newest novel, Grey Eminence. This novel starts at a drag, but builds up propulsive energy as the behaviour of our characters becomes stranger. I would describe the mystery part of this novel as being akin to when you go out for dinner with a group of friends and realise your arts and humanities degrees have left you all ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of splitting the bill. Our translators are incredibly out of their depth when it comes to Irena Rey’s disappearance, leading them down all kinds of surreal and comical pathways. Irena Rey is thematically obsessed with translation, narrative and narration. What we have here is a novel centring around a novelist who unreliably relates her own life, narrated by a Spanish translator with her own axe to grind, and translated into English by a translator who herself appears as a character in the novel.3 If you can sit back and relax into the idea that nothing makes a great deal of sense, this one is a lot of fun.4

I also took on two Booker winners last month — a reread of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and last year’s winner, David Szalay’s Flesh. I picked up Lincoln in the Bardo almost on a whim, wanting to have another look at it ahead of the release of Vigil, since the two seem to have thematic overlap.5 I last read this the year after it won the Booker, and it didn’t really hit for me — I found its cacophonous polyphony hard to follow, and its tendency towards sincerity hard to stomach. I don’t know if I’ve matured significantly, if my reading ability has grown, or if I am now simply in a phase of life more amenable to this kind of litfic, but this one really worked for me this time. The novel is centred around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, and reports that Lincoln repeatedly visited his son’s tomb in the days after his death. It’s told from the perspective of a group of ghosts living in the ‘Bardo’ — a Buddhist liminality between death and rebirth, where inhabitants are yet to accept that they have passed. I found the sincerity of this one much more digestible on a second go around for sure.

I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing; swarms of insects dancing in slant rays of August sun; a trio of black horses standing hock-deep and head-to-head in a field of snow; a waft of beef broth arriving breeze-borne from an orange-hued window on a chill autumn—

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

I can’t say that Flesh agreed with me in the same way. The most recent Booker winner has drawn a lot of discourse about its portrayal of masculinity. Flesh is about Istvan, a Hungarian boy, then man, who is an unfortunate, then fortunate, then unfortunate again leaf in the breeze of his own life. After spending some time in juvenile detention, then the Hungarian army, Istvan moves to London, where a chance encounter on the way home from his shift working as a bouncer sends him rocketing up the career ladder to become a property developer. Istvan is an unpleasant character, designedly so, but even so, I couldn’t rustle up a crumb of interest in him or his various passive misadventures. I felt that, whatever this had to say about masculinity, it really wasn’t my business — like the names of golfers, or the specifications of an expensive watch. It also had this very sparse, minimal narration, reliant on perfunctory dialogue. I can’t say it was bad — just very much not to my taste at all.

CHILDREN’S FICTION

Being a children’s librarian, I usually get more children’s books in on a month-to-month basis, but it took a back seat this month. I was given Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret Countess as a Secret Santa gift, and picked it up in an effort to prioritise books I’ve been gifted.6 Shamefully, this is my first Ibbotson, despite many of the kids I work with having recommended her work to me in the past. The Secret Countess is about a wealthy Russian girl who loses everything in the revolution, so must take a job cleaning a stately home in the English countryside in preparation for the return of the handsome Earl of Westerholme. When the Earl, Rupert, returns, he announces he’s engaged to be married to a young woman who, it turns out, is absolutely obsessed with eugenics. The book is set in the years following WWI, so this actually becomes an interesting angle — what will these people do when faced with what we now consider to be a morally objectionable stance? Despite this, the story remains quite light; fundamentally, a period romance of sorts. Though it does touch on a couple of points that reveal it to be a little dated,7 I thought this one was generally good fun!

Thanks to the constant insistence of the children I work with, I read the first Skandar and the Unicorn Thief book by A.F. Steadman. These fantasy novels are about the closest thing today’s young bookworms have to a Harry Potter-esque phenomenon. They’re about a young boy, Skandar, who is whisked away to the Eyrie to train at unicorn school. These aren’t your average unicorns, though — these beasts are fearsome and require training. There’s also a dark threat looming on the horizon. Generally, I found very little to write home about in this book, but I’m assured that they find their way a bit more in the sequels. Whether I give those a try remains to be seen.

(Hello to everyone who is new here! Thank you for all the love on my last post. Expect a mix of literary commentary, food and mental health chat)

It was March of last year, a Sunday. I was leaving Sainsbury’s with two heavy (and overpriced) bags of shopping when I noticed the feeling had gone out of the fingers of my left hand. The sensation was strangely familiar, but not one I had experienced for quite some time. I looked down at my numb digits, sallow and yellow to the second knuckle. I was having my first Raynaud’s episode in at least six or seven years.

I’ve never been formally diagnosed with Raynaud’s, but the symptoms are unique — primarily, circulatory issues in the fingers and toes which mean that blood flow is partially cut off during prolonged cold exposure. It has the funky side effect of making your fingers go completely white, up to a seemingly arbitrary point.1 It also makes them go completely numb, and restoring sensation is not only laborious (I spent many childhood afternoons with my hands and feet pressed to a radiator) but also painful. At university, I would often have to turn up half an hour early to my Winter exams to find a heater to defrost my hands on so that I could reliably hold a pen for two hours.

I hadn’t realised until that crisp Sunday afternoon, early in the Spring of last year, that it had been so long since I last experienced this. I grew up on the east coast of Scotland, in ‘sunny’ Dundee. Something you learn very quickly, if you spend any time in Dundee, is that ‘sunny’ ≠ warm. All the long summer days where the sun barely dips below the horizon are more than made up for by the hazy sort of twilight the north experiences from late November to mid-February each year.

For some reason, my pasty little body has never coped well with Scottish winter.2 Whenever people ask me what my favourite thing about living in London is, I have to fight against the urge to say ‘the weather.’ But it’s true — it rarely gets cold or dark enough down here for me to feel the effects of SAD in the same way that I did before I left the country at age 23.

I have to give myself some credit, however, when it comes to actively resisting the pull of the winter mental health lull. I like to think that, now coming to the end of my thirtieth winter, that I have at least a little wisdom to dispense around the topic.3 I recently listened to the audiobook of Dr Kari Leibowitz’s How To Winter, in which she attempts to make sense of the fact that people who live in the coldest and darkest climes (think Svalbard) tend to cope better with the winter than those of us living in a more temperate climate. I am fond of winter as verb — ‘to winter.’ The only other season you can do this with is summer, but I think there’s something much more connotationally active about ‘wintering.’ ‘Summering’ is going on holiday, ‘Wintering’ is taking your place on the start line of the Tough Mudder of seasons

.

In her book, Leibowitz talks at length about the ‘wintertime mindset’ — about how there wasn’t any genetic predisposition towards surviving long, dark winters, but a social and cultural one. These cultures did not resist, but embraced the season. The persuasiveness of Liebowitz’s argument is undercut a smidge by the way she talks about Scottish wintering. She spends some time on the island of Harris (I think!) in February, where the locals arrange for her to attend a local Burns supper. She emphasises the importance of ceilidh to fostering social connection through the darkest months. Perhaps, perhaps, this is indeed the case on Harris, but I fear she has confused the cultural importance of preserving ceilidh — the intensive training children go through at primary school to ensure that they never embarrass themselves at a wedding — and its ongoing social importance, which is, I think overstated. Regular attendance at ceilidhs is more of a niche hobby; most Scots will only participate in ceilidhs at weddings or similar celebratory occasions.4 It did make me wonder if she had overstated the importance of some of the other traditions she mentioned to other cultures.

Perhaps that’s cynical, though. Fundamentally, I agreed with Dr Leibowitz’s arguments. In my experience, winter is vastly improved by simply altering your approach to it. You have to work with the season, rather than against it. This is fairly easy to do through November and December — the world is set up for the run-up to Christmas. This apparent enthusiasm for Christmassy-ness has got me into scrapes before — in one workplace, I was given the official role of ‘Office Christmas elf’;5 in my current role, I somehow have found myself in charge of organising the staff Christmas party. With mulled wine heating in a soup tureen in every pub, and lights twinkling in every window, pre-New Year winter is a relative breeze.

It’s the bit that comes after that I think we have more difficulty with — the stretch of cold and dark that runs from January to March or April, depending on the persistence of the cold in a given year. We seem to think that this is the best time of year to subject ourselves to harsh schemes of self-improvement — resolutions and Lent deprivations designed to make us better versions of ourselves. I actually quite like a New Year’s resolution for something to focus on when there’s very little to do, but my strategy is to never go too hard into it in January, seeing this darkest month as a season of easing in. This time of year is a bit tougher to romanticise; people who know me well will be familiar with my refrain of “Why must they turn off the mulled wine after Christmas?!” There’s really no reason to do it — it’s not specifically a Christmas drink.

I have a cousin who sets herself the same resolution every year — to always have something to look forward to. The first time I heard this, I thought it was funny. It doesn’t adhere to any of the principles of setting a SMART target.6 But I think it’s basically the ultimate resolution. What do you have to look forward to right now? I have a few things — I’m going to Bruges next month, I am taking a bookbinding course tomorrow night, and a friend and I are buddy-reading Mansfield Park soon. I would quite like to get a few more things in the next couple of months, so if any of my pals are out there and would like to do something, anything fun, I’m keen. I also recently made a list of things I’d like to do before I turn 30 in May. One or two of the goals are serious, but they’re mostly just fun little box-ticking exercises — make a lasagne, or visit the Old Operating Theatre.7 These events are the punctuation marks that break up the long, run-on sentence of winter.

I think the standing commitment is possibly the gold standard of ‘thing to look forward to.’ I put it on my ‘ins’ list for this year:

I think that the standing commitment is going to see a major resurgence as people make more active efforts to put their phones down. There seems something almost unreachably quaint about it. Every time I watch Friends I find myself almost salivating over their Central Perk meeting spot thinking why is that so hard to have, now? I’ve been very lucky, this past year, to live along the street from my friends, so we’ve been enjoying regular pub and cinema trips together. I’m aware from my own experience, however, that most of us no longer have the joy of living close to our friends, especially in our twenties and thirties. The standing commitment is, I think, the way around this. My book club, who I see once a month, have been one of the few constants of my life in London. I’ve also been to parkrun a few times and, though I’ve not been often enough to consider it a regular commitment, I can see that there’s a strong feeling of a permeable community that you could get invested in. The vibes are also immaculate. If you aren’t a runner, even just go along to cheer on a pal who is, or volunteer as a marshal.

There is, of course, also the urge to stay cosy. I feel this the second I get home from work — a complete aversion to doing anything but lying down. The only solution I’ve found for this is not allowing myself to go home in the first place, instead going straight into my evening commitment. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with embracing the urge to hunker down. I would just encourage a lean in to more of a communal cosy that embraces the seasons — sharing food, watching movies together, and grabbing coffees — rather than a lie down and wait for it to pass kind of vibe.

Here’s a few people and things that I find useful to turn to at this time of year:

• As the Season Turns by Lia Leendertz

  This podcast is perfectly paired with chopping veg or a long soak in the bath. Lia Leendertz’s quiet voice is the ideal antidote to the sunday scaries. This is an almanac podcast which releases monthly; in it, Leendertz goes through the wildlife that you might spot in Britain that month, the food that’s in season, and the sunrise and sunset times.8 There is usually also some kind of music and a ritual of sorts, for the witchy. I think this is a really good time of year to lean into British folk traditions, as they were invented at a time when we didn’t have SAD lamps to help us through the season.

• Everything Looks Rosie and her book Slow Seasons

  Rosie is a writer living in Edinburgh, who uses ritual and craft to lean into seasonality as a mental health management tool. She also often writes according to the Celtic calendar, so all of her recipes and crafts have a folksy feel to them too. Her book Slow Seasons is an excellent gift.

• James Holdsworth’s instagram

  Though James Holdsworth’s instagram leans very heavily into a very ‘rah’ kind of London boy vibe, his seasonal approach to cooking is undeniably delightful. His cooking philosophy is seasonal, so if you’re looking to capitalise on what’s good at the moment, I reckon his recipes would be ideal for a dinner party.

• Meg Hermes’ account HomemadeHermes

  I was so surprised to discover that Meg Hermes only has 600 followers — her food and lifestyle content is so goals. I will be thinking about her miso pancakes almost perpetually until I have the organisation to make them for myself.

BANANA LOAF

In Australia and New Zealand, they toast their banana bread. This is an inspired move and, if you ever encounter a banana bread with the structural integrity to weather toasting, I recommend it. I think there must be something fundamentally different about antipodean banana loaf — British banana bread is definitely cake, and resists toasting.

Banana bread has a reputation for being the most accessible sweet bake, which is why so many people got into making it during the pandemic. In my experience, it’s an absolute pain to get right — it never quite rises to the heights I want it to, and my chocolate chips almost always sink to the bottom. However, my friend and former housemate Lucy recently told me that she has visions of my banana bread, which is exactly the kind of flattery you should use on me if you want me to bake for you. So this is banana bread for Lucy.

This is adapted from this Simply Recipes recipe, which you can follow, and I’ll let you know what to change.

Start by finally purchasing an electric kitchen scale and declare loudly that it’s going to ‘change your life.’ Then what you don’t want to do is loan your electric mixer to a pal for the day, because now you have to whisk by hand. I lined a 3x8 inch silicone loaf tin with greaseproof paper for this one. I find the greaseproof paper then becomes good to wrap the loaf in for transport. This left me with a decent amount of batter, so I also made half a dozen cupcakes.

I only had two medium freckly bananas for this task, which is the minimum amount of banana I would recommend. There is definitely such a thing as too much banana, and even such a thing as bananas that taste too much of banana.9 Scoop out the bits of banana that look a bit icky and mash ‘em up, before adding the melted butter. It is quite specific about baking soda, but I used baking powder and it was fine. I also changed out the all-purpose flour for self-raising, and got a much better rise on the loaf than I have historically. If you prefer the doughy, chewy textured loaf, just keep it as is. I didn’t have any vanilla extract, so I sprinkled in a little sweet cinnamon, which worked well. I also doubled the eggs to two and added a splash of milk, as the mixture came out almost so dry as to be a dough. Not the desired effect.

I then crushed up about 100g of Cadbury chocolate buttons and mixed them into the batter, then poured it into the tin. I recommend keeping a few buttons to wedge into the top, as they have the least chance of sinking to the bottom from there. I also crushed up some walnuts and put them in the cupcakes (one of my friends has a nut allergy, so I couldn’t do the same for the loaf). I recommend getting the walnuts down quite small if that’s what you’re going for, they’re quite overbearing. This recipe calls for you to bake it for 55-65 minutes, but because I had split it into a loaf and cupcakes, it came out in less than half an hour.

Winch it out of the cake tin and into another vessel. I believe strongly that banana bread deteriorates very quickly, so I’d get that thing sliced up and eaten pronto.

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n.b. the subject matter of this post kind of necessitates a bit of Harry Potter chat. Apologies.

In my second year of university, the theme of the Christmas Ball was Hogwarts Houses.1 Working behind the bar during the pre-drinks portion of the night, I immediately saw the flaw in this theme; looking out across the room, I could see an ocean of almost uninterrupted blue. Turns out everyone at the prestigious and academic university thinks they’re a Ravenclaw. Who could have seen that coming?

This penchant for sorting children into houses has been a mainstay in KidLit for the last three decades, at least. It’s most common in the fantasy genre, particularly where some kind of magical school or training camp is involved, but also turns up in dystopian sci-fi from time to time, where sorting into various factions is often the most notable feature of the dystopia itself.2

School houses are a hangover from the days when boarding at British independent schools was more common, with the word ‘house’ literally referring to the house you would have lived in as a boarder. Nowadays, many schools, particularly public schools, retain the house system as a pastoral care framework and way of creating shared social identity and belonging between children of different year groups. My comprehensive school experience of the house system was mainly one of evasion — mostly avoiding the weekly recruitment drive for house sports.3 Otherwise it was generally forgotten about until the winners were announced at an end-of-year assembly.

The boarding-school novel dates back to the start of children’s literature as an intentionally-conceived genre.4 Tom Brown’s School Days and Mallory Towers are two such series. The house system is present in these novels as it has been, historically, in real life. However, as much as it pains me to credit the series with anything at this point, it would be disingenuous to attribute the current wave of house-based school fantasy to anything other than Harry Potter.

In real life, the decision of which house you are placed into is mostly a practical consideration; typically, you’ll be put in the same house as your older siblings or, at more traditional (read: expensive) institutions, your parents. There will likely be some consideration of who your friends are, or kids you’re likely to butt heads with, but that is probably the extent of the personal considerations. There is no trial, no personality test, which informs this decision.

Cut to your young chosen one sitting with an enchanted hat upon his head, muttering “Not Slytherin, not Slytherin” under his breath. Slytherin is the house of the baddies, the children with tatted-up parents in a resurgent ultraright-wing militant group — the sly, the crafty, the innately evil. The Sorting Hat, of course, takes your wishes — your wishes to not be put in the cartoonishly evil house anyway — into consideration. Otherwise, the talking hat is privy to something innate in your character that suits you to either the clever clogs house, the brave main character house, or the minor character who is friendly and loves cake house.5 There was a lot of discourse online, back before Rowling was persona non grata within the community, about how these identifications were oversimplifications of the author’s intent — there’s nothing wrong with being a Hufflepuff, it didn’t mean you were damp! And of course, you didn’t have to be the fash to be a Slytherin, you might just be crafty and fiercely loyal (all your mates will be the fash though, sorry). But, like, come on guys. All the baddies were Slytherin. Like almost exclusively.

There’s something intensely phrenological about the sorting ceremony; something completely at odds with the way we speak to children in real life. I’d consider it an absolute abdication of my moral duty to children to sort them into categories the moment I met them — it’s a problem of internalised bias the education sector has been grappling with since forever. Why, then, has the sorting ceremony become one of the most persistent tropes of children’s literature today?

I’m a school librarian. This involves reading a lot of children’s books and separating the wheat from the chaff. There’s not necessarily more chaff in children’s books than in adult literature, but I get to be less picky, so it often feels that way. Something that comes up over and over again, is the idea of sorting kids into teams for their schooling. There are some that do this with a slightly lighter touch — the sorting of kids into cabins in Percy Jackson is based on parentage, which determines your powers (not to spoil, but Percy is a son of Poseidon, so therefore has water powers) — but many of them are preoccupied with the determination of innate character traits.

I recently picked up A.F. Steadman’s Skandar and the Unicorn Thief,6 the middle-grade series that is probably the closest thing to a Harry Potter competitor we’ve seen in the last decade. Skandar lives in a world where unicorns are real and, on your thirteenth birthday, you are given the opportunity to attempt to bond with a unicorn of your own. These aren’t cute fluffy unicorns, oh no, but bloodthirsty, carnivorous beasts that require taming through hard graft at the Eyrie, the magical school of this series. This is actually, not the most derivative idea on its own, and I can’t say that the novel is badly written. The feature I take a little more issue with is that, once you have your unicorn, you must find out what element you are allied with. There are four elements. Three guesses. You got it — Earth, Water, Fire and Air. This is of course, determined by a lengthy sorting sequence, by the end of which you realise you’re halfway through the book already. In my personal view, these kinds of sorting ceremonies have an absolute dreariness much akin to being told at length about someone else’s dreams.

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As in other books of the kind, the element you are associated with says something about you as a person:

Flo laughed. ‘Bobby, you couldn’t be more of an air wielder if you tried.’

‘What do you mean?’ Bobby asked suspiciously. ‘My mum says air wielders are extroverts. And they like change, and dancing, and noise — so basically they really love parties, whereas earth wielders…’

‘Would rather just stay home with a good book and a chocolate biscuit?’

There is absolutely nothing original about Steadman’s sorting premise. It fundamentally scratches the itch that the others do, with the double whammy of its predictable four-element division. Let me guess, fire wielders are hot headed? In children’s fantasy, characters rarely chafe against the house system in the school, usually finding it a convenient way of creating an illusion of belonging and in-group, out-group conflict.7

The Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth is oft-mocked for being derivative. coming hot on the heels of a flurry of other dystopian YA novels. These books are, somehow, the offspring of The Hunger Games trilogy, which notably does not utilise the sorting ceremony trope (it does use a selection ceremony, which is admittedly similar). The society of The Hunger Games, Panem, is not sorted into factions, but districts, dividing people along class lines instead of, I don’t know, the content of their hearts and minds. The Hunger Games is overall a much more gutsy endeavour politically and I maintain that it is actually very good. Its horrifying brood, however, does leave a bit to be desired. The difference between fantasy sorting and dystopia sorting, is that usually the sorting system is the source of the conflict in the latter.

In Divergent, our hero, Tris, is a teenage girl on her way to be sorted into one of five factions: Abnegation, the faction she has grown up in, Amity, Erudite, Dauntless, and Candor. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the factions; they do what they say on the tin. The day of her sorting, Tris finds out she is Divergent, not clearly fitting into one faction’s selected character traits. She must choose between three factions, her family in Abnegation, Erudite, or the reckless, thrill-seeking Dauntless. If she does not choose, she could become one of the underclass ‘Factionless’ who live on the streets of post-apocalyptic Chicago. She chooses Dauntless, obviously. The remainder of the series becomes about resisting this kind of easy categorisation, a revolution centred around toppling the Faction system. Regardless of the ultimate message of this series — that people are not so easily boxed in — the draw of this categorisation is irresistible to young people. It can’t help but undercut the message the author is trying to put across. I’m sure at some point I would have told you I was an Erudite, even though I knew that in their heart of hearts, everyone is unique, everyone is Divergent.8

Whether or not this world-building is patently preposterous is unimportant to the teenage reader. I ate this kind of thing up at age fifteen, desperate to find another identifier to attach to my build-your-own-identity keychain. As an adolescent, you are absolutely desperate for someone to tell you who you are and who you should be, so this kind of easy designation is catnip for teenagers.9 It sells. I think, on a case-by-case basis, its fairly harmless fun, but if we take a step back to look at this phenomenon as a whole, a less rosy picture starts to emerge.

In her pamphlet ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise,’ Katherine Rundell writes:10

…what I try for when I write — failing often, but trying — is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember.

I like this attitude — it’s a way of articulating the value of children’s literature without leaning too heavily into the didactic. Didacticism should not, in my opinion, be a focus of literature aimed at children, particularly teenagers. They resent anything that could be read as patronisation or condescension. However, I think it is worth considering what it is we most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember when we commission yet another boarding school fantasy with a personality-trait based sorting system.

In the early to mid-noughties, Tumblr was the site where all of this YA-identity building built its roost. There is a notorious post where all the fandoms are called upon to defend the sanctity of tumblr, starting with ‘Potterheads, grab your wands!’ This post is now considered the urtext of millennial cringe and what I think it demonstrates really well are the ways in which ideas of justice became tied up in fandom-based identity building. Before there was ‘woke’, there were Social Justice Warriors, people who believed strongly, and well-meaningly, in progressive social politics — LGBTQ+ rights, accessibility, intersectionality and the right to choose . I would probably have been categorised thusly at the time. It was common for the bios of so-called SJWs to contain a number of fandom and faction identifiers — your Hogwarts house, at least, was a must. Cringe though it might have been, I feel a great deal of tenderness for this time. This was a movement, made up almost entirely of children, which earnestly wanted inclusion for all. It was relentlessly demonised by grown adults in the press and now years down the line, has been absorbed into existing ideas of the left as being lily-livered.

Things have changed since then. The political rift between right and left has deepened further since the early 2010s, the tone of discourse rising to a fever pitch across the political spectrum. In the UK, polls are showing that the top two political parties are the Greens and Reform UK, which sit to the left and right of the usual powerhouses of Labour and the Conservatives. On the left, progress is continually undermined by infighting and internal demands for perfection. I personally suspect that Moral Scrupulosity OCD might be the focus of a lot of mental health chat this year. This diagnosis, which has historically been mostly attributed to religious obsession, is a subtype of OCD wherein the patient is preoccupied by the morality of their actions, whether or not they’re a good person. With discourse around politics encouraging you to cut out those with a difference of opinion,11 I would not be surprised to find that this is on the rise.

I think the societal level of despair we are constantly feeling these days can be at least partially attributed to a misplaced belief in the immutability of character. We believe that people are, fundamentally, who they are. We believe that people who do wrong will inevitably repeat that wrong. We believe in our own impotency to do anything about the current state of affairs. I don’t know about you, but I have definitely changed. I certainly hold different political beliefs, some more radical, some more nuanced than when I was posting on Tumblr at eighteen years old. I’ve written at length around how transformative discovering swimming was for me last year in terms of changing my perception of myself. I had a friend of mine recently express surprise that she was hit on by an old classmate of ours at a bar — ‘But Ellen, we were geeks.’ She said this as if school didn’t finish for us almost twelve years ago now, but I understood what she was getting at. Identities are, for sure, sticky things — I think improving our awareness of the assumptions me make about ourselves subconsciously is transformative. I think if we want the next generation to be able to smooth over the deep furrows in the political landscape, they’re going to need to be able to see mutability as a possible thing.

Returning to house sorting in children’s lit. The message urgently communicated in these novels is one of belonging — the idea that, even if you can’t find your people now, they are out there for you somewhere, they are here right now in this book. This is not invaluable, certainly wasn’t invaluable for me as a child. However, going into adulthood, it definitely encouraged me to treat people with suspicion. I was a Ravenclaw, cleverer than you and as soon as I could get out of this damn school, I would show you all! People would see, clearly, that I was a nerd, and continue to treat me with the same social disregard as they did at age thirteen.12 In my cruellest moments of self-deprecation, I always think of the school reunion episode of 30 Rock where Liz, imagining herself to have been the downtrodden social outcast, is actually revealed to have been unnecessarily cruel to those above her in the social pecking order.

I hope, earnestly, I was never this bad. However, I was probably suspicious of people with no malicious motive and I imagine that came across. Apologies, classmates, if you’re out there.

Maybe, maybe, I’m taking this whole thing too far. Maybe these identities are a life raft for those who socialising and fitting in doesn’t come naturally. I have to wonder, however, if having an entire literature dedicated to baking in the idea that people are easily categorised is the message we really want children to take on board. The characters in these novels often resist development, coming out of the other side roughed up and surely traumatised, but fundamentally still the people they were in the novel’s first chapter, just maybe a little more confident with it.

If I had a message that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember it would be that very little about you is immutable and fixed, unless you choose to make it so. If you choose to identify strongly with your academic intelligence, you may have that identity forcibly unmoored by discovering that intelligence has very little value on its own, and that you also need hard work and people skills to transform it into success. If you choose to identify with your physical prowess, you could have your identity ripped apart in seconds by an ACL tear. If your moral value system is rigid and fixed, you have to be prepared for the possibility that this will end longstanding friendships, and that, even if you truly believe yourself to be in the right, this is going to hurt regardless. If you believe yourself to have innately unimpeachable morals and those who don’t to have a fundamental character flaw, you will shock yourself immeasurably when it turns out that you, too, are capable of hurting others. If you believe yourself, Earth wielder, to be fundamentally introverted, you’re going to miss out on the whole party.

I’d like to see more children’s protagonists forced to reckon with worlds that try to sort them into neat and comfortable categories. We can give these kids life-rafts, sure, but they need boats, boats they can feel comfortable Ship of Theseus-ing into adulthood as the waves hit them and break their preconceived notions apart. For the sake of positivity, here are a few children’s books I think do this really well:

dot-dot, line-line / spiders crawling up your spine / tight squeeze, cool breeze / now you’ve got the shiveries!

The house I lived in during my honours years of university was so cold and expensive to heat that I spent most of my time in the university library.1 Most days, I would leave the house at around 8 am and return on the midnight campus bus.2 You could say I became domesticated to the library environment. I’d pad about in my socks,3 use the boiling water tap to reuse the same teabag until the water ran clear, unhook my bra and slip it into my bag at 8 pm. It didn’t help that the library introduced a blanket loan system in the colder months. I became accustomed to using the library space to recoup some of the rest I couldn’t get in my £450-a-month igloo.4 When deadline stress started to accumulate painfully around my mid-back, I would often pop an ASMR video on and then hastily reopen my OneNote window.

These were the days when being an ASMR fan was still a touch taboo. I first discovered it around 2012, when the whole genre was mostly Russian women at keyboards pretending to be physical therapists.5 There was this strange incongruity between the quality of the sets these creators could assemble (how did she get a commercial shoe rack into her flat?) and the fact that they were clearly filmed on a webcam or similar lo-fi device. This, as well as the fact that ASMR is triggered by physical touch (or simulation of), meant that it quickly developed a reputation online for being a Weird Sex Thing. One of the cardinal rules of the internet is ‘If I don’t understand it, it must be a fetish.’

Of course, it isn’t a Weird Sex Thing. Or at least it’s not a Weird Sex Thing by nature. I think there’s a natural human desire to mix-and-match sensations — it’s why chemsex is a thing. It follows that there is an entire subgenre of provocative ASMR videos involving the massage of various cylindrical objects, the licking of ears, and cameras that pan down to rest comfortably on a well-upholstered bosom. I was delighted to see that Hayden Anhedönia (Ethel Cain) had come to the same conclusion in her recent video, ‘asmr: is it witchcraft?’

Rule 34 remains a staple of the internet experience. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Not my thing.

That’s not to say I haven’t watched my fair share of unusual ASMR content. On one of those sleepy library evenings, my laptop autoplayed me a Linda Belcher roleplay video. Too embarrassed to risk accidentally opening the tab in the middle of the busy library, I took my Bob’s Burgers-themed punishment with a handful of shame tingles. A personal favourite video is this one, in which I the viewer is transformed into a Russian Tsaritsa. A more recent favourite, alwaysslightlysleepy, leans into millennial cringe and Zooey Deschanel-core to bring you such gems as ‘is become mushroom time?’ in which she tries to convince you to decompose and join the mycelium. There is also an ASMRtist who did fun historical roleplays in which you were a young lady getting her make-up done to sit before Leonardo Da Vinci. That was until something happened to her — it’s speculated that she had some kind of breakdown — and her content took a rapid and alarming rightward political swing, hence why none of it is linked here. Trisha Paytas also happens to be a prodigiously gifted ASMRtist. Some people just have it.

So, what is ASMR? I don’t mean ASMR as a physical sensation — I’m not enormously interested in that here. I mean the actual media generated with the intention of bringing on this sensation, which you may or may not be able to experience. I suspect whether you can is luck of the genetic draw, much akin to whether or not coriander tastes like soap to you. There’s an interesting series by W magazine where various celebrities try their hand at ASMR, and you can really tell just by watching which celebrities actually experience tingles. Cardi B definitely does.

Are ASMR videos art? Some of them, for sure, are crafted with storytelling and care at their heart. However, some of the most viewed videos are real bottom-of-the-barrel content — the mukbang-style video where the ASMR response is supposed to be triggered by chewing sounds, or where someone simply taps on items with false nails, aren’t generally well received by people who consider themselves aficionados of the genre. There was widespread concern amongst the community last year that AI videos could pose a real threat to ASMRtists, and I do think there’s a subgenre of particularly tactile content, such as sand cutting or slime videos, which is under threat; however, I think that content meant to mimic the interpersonal is unlikely to be usurped by AI anytime soon — at least I hope it wont.6

ASMR is still poorly understood. There is a small, nascent fear that perhaps this incredibly pleasant sensation is not good for us to experience, but it seems far more likely that we will be able to harness it for therapeutic treatments in the future. Last year, my boyfriend booked for the two of us to go to Hammock Harmonies in Essex. Hammock Harmonies do not explicitly state that they are trying to induce ASMR in their sessions — which involve lying in a hammock, having your head massaged, doing breathwork, and visualisations — but the similarities with ASMR videos are striking. If you have the chance to go, I highly recommend it. They are not the only business looking to capitalise on the desire to turn the virtual benefits of ASMR into a real-life therapeutic experience — spas all over have started to offer ASMR head spa experiences. I certainly use ASMR to manage my anxiety, sometimes putting on an ASMR video to accompany me to work on stressful mornings. I do wonder, however, if it has its place in formal therapeutic environments, for the treatment of more serious mental health conditions.

I’ve recently been chewing on the theory that ASMR is a form of play. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the importance of play in childhood, listing it as a right in and of itself. As adults, we don’t really recognise ourselves as being in a state of play, though we could clearly distinguish it from other activities like work when we were children. When I think about play as I experienced it as a child, I think about the argument we used to have every morning in primary school — should we play a ‘drama game’ or a ‘running game’? A ‘drama game’ was a roleplay-based activity, like playing Superheroes, and a ‘running game’ was a rules-based sports game, like Stuck-in-the-Mud or Hide-and-Seek-Tag.7 Being unathletic, I had a strong preference for the former. We don’t really delineate play in this way as adults — roleplay is mostly for therapy, or job interviews, and most physical activity and sports are undertaken for the sake of health and fitness. In our relentless quest toward self-improvement, we’ve eviscerated play in adulthood.

But play is something innate to us as mammals, as humans. It is an intrinsically motivated activity, self-chosen and self-directed, following structured rules (even if those rules only exist within the player’s mind), imaginative (or creative) and must put you into the play state of mind; that is, a state of being engaged, alert, mentally active, focused on the activity and uninhibited.8 ASMR videos meet all of these criteria, but peculiarly so; the state of play is achieved by each of these criteria being met by either the viewer or the creator. It almost requires both parties to be in a state of play to work (though the viewer needn’t necessarily be alert — ASMR is intended to put the viewer to sleep).

The imaginative element of it, I think, is most compelling. A successful ASMR video requires imagination in its creation. It doesn’t have to be high-concept, but there must be an element of immersion — ASMRtist edafox’s success is built on the ‘Girl in the Back of the Class’ format, where she pretends to be fascinated by your hair, or your makeup.

There was a period of time when it felt like ASMRtists were constantly trying to one-up each other on the immersion factor, relying on increasingly impressive visual effects and high production value. ASMRrequests’ Departure video from 2013, wherein she plays an intergalactic travel agent, was a watershed moment in terms of what people thought the ASMR video genre was capable of. This was ASMR that relied less heavily on suspension of disbelief, more capable of bringing you into the world as the ASMRtist imagined it.

Recently, there’s been a hard swing back to ‘lo-fi’ ASMR — these are videos that utilise the webcam and built-in microphone, relying on crude props to create the imagined world as stated in the title. Comedian and ASMRtist Caroline Easom simply writes down the setting of her roleplay on the whiteboard behind her, rather than going to the trouble of building a set. What strikes me most about these videos is how heavily they lean on nostalgia. One of my all-time favourite videos is one where the creator, Amalzd, roleplays as an overenthusiastic Dead Sea Nails kiosk lady, an experience I remember having with my mother in our local shopping centre as a child. Similarly, this series of videos by Kristin Chavis, where she plays a Southern ‘candy lady’, seems to speak to some kind of universal childhood fantasy of being given objectively too much sugar by a well-meaning adult.9 There’s also the ‘mean/popular girl does your make-up’ genre of video, which I find fascinating, as it leans into a fantasy I think many of us had as a teenager (“if one of the cool girls would just give me a chance, we could be best friends.”). Recently, I’ve noticed that, though the content of these videos hasn’t changed, the ASMRtists are often tagging these videos #wlw, bringing the homoerotic subtext of these videos screaming and kicking to the surface.

From a play perspective, the success of this kind of ASMR video is contingent upon the ASMRtist and viewer agreeing upon a set of rules. The ASMRtist and viewer agree to full suspension of disbelief. The viewer must accept that what the ASMRtist says is happening, is actually happening. If they say they’re doing your eyeshadow and begin colouring in your face with a Sharpie, that Sharpie is now eyeshadow. A hair salon roleplay can take place inside what is clearly someone’s bedroom. You can get a full eye test in front of a bookshelf full of Sarah J Maas novels.10 You can go to a Doctor’s appointment with a woman wearing an Oodie in front of fairy lights. We agree, for the sake of play, that whatever the ASMRtist says is happening, is happening.

Somehow, this agreement intensifies the experience of ASMR. It isn’t, therefore, the simulation of a hair appointment, or a cranial nerve examination, or a school nurse lice removal trip that provokes the ASMR, but the mutual agreement to pretend that it is. A much better real-world analogue for the relaxation created by a roleplay ASMR is the experience of having your hair brushed on the playground by a friend who is pretending to be a hairdresser, or having your eyes examined by an eight-year-old who definitely doesn’t have a BSc. It’s a simulation of a simulation. We’re playing! We’re playing together until the bell rings, or until we fall asleep, dribbling, phone in hand.

I suspect ASMR roleplays have arisen to meet a desire for play in adulthood that is unmet by the world we live in. The infinite scroll has destroyed our capacity for boredom, and it seems that without boredom, we cannot self-select into an activity as easily as we once might have. ASMR roleplays find space for play in the only space we have left for anything unproductive; in the twilight world between wakefulness and rest, a time resource I imagine was heretofore fairly inaccessible to us for any kind of activity. I’m not sure yet if this is a good or a bad thing.

One of the last books I picked up from my local Borders before its untimely demise was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I made several stabs at the classic throughout my teenage years, in those parched gaps of time between occasional Sunday morning bookshop trips with my parents when I otherwise had nothing new to pick up. I never got more than a few pages into it in those days, finding the first line — Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents — so inexplicably cloying that I could barely get past the impression it gave of Jo March. I thought it was whiny and entitled. I wouldn’t finish the book (and therefore rectify this impression) until around age 23.

Little Women wasn’t the only victim of my childhood aversion to classics. I don’t know what it was, something silly like finding historical speech patterns twee or some other deeply misplaced adolescent pretension that went unexamined into my later teens. I was reading plenty, just not anything in a Penguin Classics binding. The consequence of this is that I’ve felt like I’ve been playing literary catch-up ever since, trying to account for the deficit I built up between 12 and 16. My first university reading week was spent frantically tearing through Jane Eyre. This text was not actually on the syllabus, but the lecturers made such frequent references to it that it was almost impossible to follow the thread of their arguments without having read it.1 Then there was having to confess, in the first week of my master’s degree in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, that I’d read Hamlet for the first time in full the preceding week.2 I think everyone has a couple of texts that they haven’t, for whatever reason, got around to yet, despite their acclaim. Hamlet was particularly embarrassing, though.3

Earlier this year, there was a back-and-forth happening in my orbit on Twitter.4 It concerned whether one could be truly well-read if one hadn’t read some critical mass of the backlist of Nobel Prize for Literature laureates. Of course, being of flimsy disposition, I made my way to the relevant Wikipedia page and made a mental tally. By my estimation, I’ve read about ten of them in any substantial way.

Despite the headshot to my own ego, I can see the point being made. How can you possibly be ‘well-read’ if you haven’t read substantially from the sanctioned list of most impactful writers of the last century or so? I also chafe against the constant lowering of the bar when it comes to the quality of reading a lot of us are doing — I think it is necessary, in some ways, to come to the defence of the high-brow, not so much to defend the cultural status of the ‘well-read’, but to resist the cynical idea that the general public can’t access or appreciate a challenging book. I think there are a lot of good reasons, literary and otherwise, to encourage people away from the path of least intellectual resistance.

The thing about chasing the ‘well-read’ identity is that it isn’t a fixed target. There’s a great deal of Dunning-Kruger at work in this space; the more you read, the less you find you have read as a proportion of all the reading it is possible to do. Then you do the mental tally of how many books you realistically can read in your lifetime and find the number much smaller than you need it to be. It’s how a school librarian with a postgraduate literature degree ends up feeling inadequate in their ‘well-readness.’ It’s how you end up genuinely entertaining the idea that you are not well-read, because you haven’t read László Krasznahorkai. It’s how you end up at the Fitzcarraldo Summer Party, struggling to, for one dollar, name an author.5

The internet has warped my relationship with reading, as I think it has for all but the most offline amongst us. I have meticulously tracked my reading using Goodreads since I was fourteen years old. I’m not immune to the way that these tracking websites encourage a quantity-based attitude towards reading, pushing you to set increasingly ambitious volume goals year on year. Over time, I realised that I was deliberately picking slimmer texts to inflate my numbers, a practice that is not in keeping with my personal values. In an effort to rectify this somewhat, I set myself a goal for 2025: each month, I was going to read a book that was at least 500 pages long. I would use this as an opportunity to read some of the lengthier tomes on my list and attempt to decouple my reading habits and identity with quantity-based metrics by literally forcing my quantity of books read down.

The good news is, I did it! I successfully managed to read twelve big, fat books in 2025. The results, however, weren’t quite as expected. For the curious, here’s what I read:

• January: Middlemarch by George Eliot

• February: The Nix by Nathan Hill

• March: The Priory of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

• April: A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

• May: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

• June: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• July: Ulysses by James Joyce

• August: The Overstory by Richard Powers

• September: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

• October: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

• November: The Book of Dust: The Rose Field by Philip Pullman

• December: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I tried to get a mix of things in, from classics to contemporary fantasy. There are a few really big pulls for me here — Middlemarch, Ulysses and David Copperfield are ones I’ve meant to get to for a long while.

There were a few things about this challenge that I enjoyed less than expected; firstly, it’s surprisingly difficult to get over the quantity-based reading model if you’ve been lost in that particular sauce for some time. There was a real feeling of discomfort there that I do think was worth sitting with and examining. Was reading the big books just another performance? For whom? Do I need to be the very cleverest all the time? Do people need to see me being clever? I suspect I was just converting the usual volume of books into another kind of display, hoping people would think I was very smart for reading such big books, an almost infantile desire, like wanting to show your parents how high you can jump when you’re three. Some things are worth discussing with a trained professional, I think.

On the other hand, this project disrupted the flow of my reading this year so badly that I fear it impacted my enjoyment of reading in general. I am hopelessly bad at dual-wielding books, so most of my other reading was contingent on my big book getting read each month. This meant either regarding my other books with a degree of FOMO whilst I slogged through my big book that month, or postponing my big book until it started to become an anxiety-inducing race against time to finish it by the end of the month.6 The overall effect was that I felt like I was in a constant, low-level reading slump, even when the numbers didn’t support it.

So, the takeaway is maybe that this wasn’t quite the right goal to repair my relationship with reading — after all, it was still metric-based. Maybe I need to get off the tracking sites and write down my reading on paper instead.

All of this aside, I’m still glad I did this experiment. I’m now someone who can say they have read Ulysses. I used to be someone who said they would probably never read Ulysses, and yet here I am. I think one of the most important things you can do in adulthood is challenge unquestioned facets of your own identity. For example, I think if you thought of yourself as unathletic in childhood, one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself is sign up for a 10km race. Similarly, taking up swimming in 2025 was incredibly valuable not only because it reassured me that I can, in fact, swim, but also because it chiselled away a chunk of self-doubt I wasn’t conscious I was holding onto. There is very little about ourselves that is immutable.

I’ve set myself no particular reading goals for 2026.

My throat. The answer is my throat. A therapist I saw a couple of years ago was a big fan of this question. I suspect she knew it would make me cry, and that was good because that was a feeling. Joke’s on her — there are few easier feats. The Muppets Christmas ad for Facebook Portal, where Kermit can’t make it home for Christmas, reminds me so viscerally of the Covid year I couldn’t get home that just describing the advert to others makes me dissolve into heaving sobs.

I don’t think this therapist and I were compatible. This wasn’t her fault, primarily because I wasted a lot of money by not telling her that I needed to break up with my boyfriend at the time.1 But there was also the maine coon.

This particular therapist lived just below street level, with a small, unruly garden out front. She conducted her sessions from a cream sofa in front of a big bay window. Not every session, but most sessions, a truly spectacular maine coon would strut past the window, completely derailing my train of thought. This visibly frustrated my therapist, which is where I think we came to an impasse; I don’t think someone who wouldn’t also recognise the need to remark upon the maine coon has any business trying to interpret my psyche. There was also a time when she told me to step over a golf ball-sized iridescent beetle on her doormat as if it wasn’t a fucking nuts thing to see in South London.2

Anyway, once the cat had trotted on, I could answer her question — and where do I feel that in my body? She’s just drawn attention to the massive throat bolus of anxiety I’ve been ignoring until now, periodically swallowing it back like that day-glo green catarrh you get at the end of a nasty cold. The thing about always feeling feelings in the same part of your body is that you start just lying for variety, chucking in a ‘stomach’ or ‘in my shoulders’ for variation. If I sound cynical about this kind of therapising, it’s because I find it very hard not to be — unfortunately, the Good Work is on the other side of cynicism, so I’m trying this thing where I just engage in earnest with everything as a sort of therapy elimination diet. Not that, next. Like trying to figure out if any of the batteries in the battery drawer aren’t dead.

I recently listened to Dr Kirren Schnack’s Ten Times Calmer on audiobook. Other than the fact that it was ill-suited to audio,3 I admired the relentlessness of her advice. So you’ve been doing that breathing exercise three times a day — what if you did it fifteen times? Then it might work. I was, if nothing else, entertained by the idea that perhaps the only way through is to bring the battering ram of square breathing to the gates of your mental illness as many times as it takes.

Horchata

I’m mostly just pleased that this one worked out. I tried horchata for the first time last month at Taquiza in Peckham.4 Horchata tastes like what you imagine eggnog tastes like when you’re eight and eggnog has not yet had a chance to disappoint you. I made it using this recipe at My Latina Kitchen. My only advice is to either blend the almonds and rice down so, so fine, or to get something a bit wider in weft than your standard cheesecloth, because I can’t believe how long I stood over my pitcher trying to massage liquid out of the cheesecloth bollock of mostly-solid almond-rice paste. Reader, I got it everywhere.

Two notes:

• I apologise to my boyfriend for using the water jug as a horchata vessel. He keeps almost filling his water bottle with it.

• It’s vital not to try to tip cinnamon out of the jar directly into your glass. You can’t do it. Enjoy your glass of cinnamon over ice.

From a young age, my mother instilled in me the importance of bringing a big bag of crisps with you to a party. That or a bottle of wine, but a share bag of Thai Sweet Chilli Sensations was the bare minimum. You can imagine my shock when I got to university and found that this wasn’t the norm, so would sit with my G&T tinnies and starve whilst staring at the unopened bag of crisps.1 I used to live in fear of my late twenties, but now I know my best chip and dip years are still ahead of me. I owe a lot to the girls who brought back the charcuterie board — nibbles are back, baby.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that my mental health has recently taken a bit of a battering. Historically, I’ve been quite reliant on exercise as an anxiety management tool, but having to clock in at 8 a.m. has made my pre-work runs a thing of the past.2 Despite managing the occasional pre-work swim and post-work run, I’m now doing much less exercise than I was before the summer. My boyfriend and I were brainstorming ideas for new hobbies I could take up to simulate that same meditative state that I get into on a long run. The main issue with this is that I’m a little time-poor, given that my new job requires me to be in bed by 10 pm. I realised that I do most of the cooking anyway,3 so why not lean into that a bit more? Chopping garlic is the closest I can get to the flow state of weaving between pedestrians in the home stretch of my run, shy of the real thing.

This Substack has been part of that venture, giving me a platform to celebrate the more successful recipes. I’m finding that my confidence has grown around improvisation with things like seasonings, combining two or three to replicate another herb or spice I don’t already have in the cabinet. It wasn’t until my mum called to ask if she should bring down a vegetarian haggis that I considered cooking for anyone outside my household.4

FLASHING VIDEO WARNING:

I am no stranger to hosting a party. I might be one of the world’s few party-planning librarians. The photos at the top of this post are from a Christmas party that my flatmate and I hosted in our final year of university. I had received a decent camera for my 21st birthday six months earlier, but to this day, I can only accidentally take a good photo with it. That evening, I thrust it at my photographer friend, Terry, and asked him to change the settings so that the warm, low evening lighting didn’t look so fuzzy. The camera then found itself in the hands of another friend’s tree surgeon boyfriend, who ended up taking some of the most gorgeous photos of that party. They all have the blurry warmth of a rose-tinted memory.5 I didn’t change the settings until last year.

I’ve always been a timid party chef — previous Burns Nights have seen me go no further than mashing potatoes and microwaving haggis.6 Everything else has come out of a packet. My ego is a touch fragile in this area; a studious child, anything less than an A would result in floods of tears the second I got home from school. A fear of falling short of excellence in a new skill or hobby is a childhood neurosis I can’t recommend clinging to in adulthood.

I’m not sure if it was securing my veggie haggis ahead of time that had me feeling so bold, or having free rein over my own kitchen for the first time in my life, but I decided to invite my old flatmates and one or two other pals to our house for St Andrew’s Day dinner.7 The whole thing started quite simply with haggis and mash, then eventually spun out into something more elaborate. It started with half a head of uneaten cauliflower and a block of mature cheddar cheese; my confidence with eyeballing a bechamel is another thing I can thank my mother for. Cauliflower cheese, sorted.8

Then I decided to make a cranachan, a much more straightforward dessert than I had anticipated. I followed Peter Sawkins and Clan Broonford’s instagram recipe. Something they don’t mention is that the oat mixture will bake itself into a loose flapjack in the oven. Let it cool and harden, then smash it up with the bottom of the bottle of wine you’ve got for mulling.

I then felt brave enough to eyeball a gravy, which ended up being the surprise star of the evening.9 Here’s roughly what I would do to recapture the magic:

Red wine gravy

To make enough for 6:

• A small brown onion, or half of a large one, sliced

• A large red onion, sliced

• 1/2 tsp thyme, dried or fresh

• A generous pinch of salt

• An Oxo cube (or another dried stock cube)

• a tablespoon of brown sugar (all I had was golden, we move)

• 600 ml boiling water

• a 175ml medium glass of shitty red wine, and a glass to drink while you cook

• About a tablespoon of cornflour dissolved in a water solution.

Heat a glug of oil in a pan and chuck in your onions. Salt and then, after a little time has passed, add the thyme. Allow to cook down on a low heat for about 45 minutes, stirring from time to time to make sure it doesn’t burn to the bottom of the pan. Drink your glass of wine. Boil the kettle and measure 600ml of boiling water into a jug. Then, instead of making a stock to pour over, what I prefer to do is open up a stock cube and empty the dry powder into the pan, stirring to coat the onions. I’d then do the same with a tablespoon of brown sugar. Then, with all that mixed, I add the boiling water and the red wine. Leave this to simmer on a medium-low heat with the lid on for about 20 minutes. When it has started to reduce a little, add a little of the cornflour mixture at a time. Wonder why it isn’t thickening until it suddenly turns into a jelly. Salt to taste and then decant into a jug. Serve or refrigerate and reheat in a pan or the microwave.

2026 New Year’s Resolution: cook for other people more often!

other small delights: this interview with chelsea fagan, this interview with kate evans about her new graphic biography of jane austen, and this asmr video, for those that way inclined.

I love an improbable statistic — they’re great party small talk fodder. Much better than discussing dream meanings or star signs. Like, can you believe that almost 90% of British women who marry men will still, to this day, take their partner’s name? This isn’t a judgment on my part — I understand the practical reasons for doing so, though the older I get, the more immutable my name seems to me. I say this with full awareness that I’m writing this substack under a partial nom de plume. It’s more the fact itself that is surprising. In this day and age, ninety per cent.

Another one that got me was from a friend of an ex who was working for BBC Sounds.1 I can’t remember the exact number, but he told me that something like 95% of Brits are still considered regular radio listeners. I found this fact pretty baffling because I couldn’t quite account for it. Were they counting people who listen to playback radio shows as podcasts? Then you can count me amongst their number. I go hard for a good Desert Island Discs.2 Then you start to add in plumbers, painters, car commuters and hairdressers and it starts to come together a bit. Still, 95% — that’s insane.

I was recently at a creative writing prompt night run by the lovely people at page of wands where we were asked to respond to the sound of a radio being tuned and retuned to different stations. This is my response, I suppose. It was funny, observationally, to watch everyone react to the music-crackle-weight loss discussion-crackle-interview with lead singer of Madness-crackle-news about Russia-crackle with occasional laughter. This is a mixed-age group, but I would say most of us are in our twenties and thirties; the perfect age group to have experienced a much more radio-centric world, but unlikely to have become attached to it as a medium. It was a nostalgic kind of laughter — like yes, this is what that was like, I can’t believe it’s still like this.

In my teenage years, I had a romantic view of radio. I was a dedicated listener of the Radio One chart show in the Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates years, motivated by a desperately uncool urge to keep up with my classmates. Only a true dweeb would treat the BBC Top 40 show like a study session. The chart show would be followed by BBC Switch and The Surgery, a teen advice show which I used to listen to very quietly on my TV in my bedroom, lest my parents hear me listening to Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw talking about losing your virginity.3 These shows were lost to BBC cuts, alas, though the Slink video archive still exists as a kind of shrine to late noughties teen pop culture. Sadly, the videos require Flash player to watch. 4

My attention shifted to podcasts. In much the same spirit as my chart listening in my preteen years, I forced myself to listen to a couple of the big true crime pods to try and keep myself zeitgeisty. The trouble with true crime, other than the pretty insurmountable moral qualms I have with it, is that their format relies heavily on making court documents suspenseful, which results in a 40% ‘what happened last time’, 10% actual content, 10% ads for Blue Apron, 40% ‘coming up next time’ format that makes me want to hurl myself headlong into the Thames. Following this period, I experienced a renaissance of enthusiasm for radio and, at university, I became quite preoccupied with the idea of listening to the late-night poetry show that a guy in the year above me would present at 11 pm once a week. I say ‘the idea of’ because I spent my second year of uni in a fug of post-fresher’s flu delirium that meant I rarely, if ever, knew what time it was, so I would usually forget to tune in. The few times I did, it was like listening to the last man reporting from the end of the world.

I have to say, in the years since, the radio has become something of a peripheral novelty — something painters and plumbers play out of their phones during jobs, something you might hear in the back of a taxi. There was, however, a brief period of time a couple of years ago that I’d find myself in the car or the kitchen whilst ‘Elaine Page on Sunday’ was playing. If you’re unfamiliar, West End legend Elaine hosts a two-hour theatre and Hollywood show on Radio 2 (the least pigeonholeable of all the BBC’s Radio stations) each Sunday. Tuning into this show in media res can result in some great serendipitous delights — there’s nothing like the Fraggle Rock theme tune cutting through the frost of a recent argument, or spending five minutes listening to a recorded tap dancing break in the middle of the song, thinking, “This isn’t exactly the medium for this.”

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Leek and Blue Cheese Spaghetti

If you ever think ‘Ellen, that’s going to overpower the dish with blue cheese’ about my cooking - yes, exactly.

You’re gonna want to start boiling yourself up a you-sized portion of spaghetti. Yes, this is an obfuscation — I don’t think anyone can confidently guesstimate the portion size of spaghetti, much less find a good way to balance and weigh it on kitchen scales. Get that going. If you’ve got some broccoli,5 add that to the mix when the spaghetti has softened and submerged. I think it’s good if you can sort of balance it on the top of the pasta water rather than mixing it in — you get more of a steam than a mushy boil on the veg that way.

In another pan, melt a knob of butter and add a diced clove of garlic and a thinly sliced leek. Let that do its thing for a couple of minutes, add some salt and some chili flakes. Then add the dust of half an oxo cube to the mix, dry and coat the leeks in it, before adding a slosh of pasta water and a generous glug of single cream. Then crumble in a wodge (technical term) of blue cheese — I want to guess about 30g, but maybe even a little more. Allow all this to reduce down until creamy, then mix through the pasta and broccoli. Serve with a little parmesan. 'Tis the season for double cheeses.

When I was about thirteen, my school acquired a new building and, consequently, a swimming pool. I’m not sure if there’s a long German word for the initial period of enhanced care you take to preserve the newness of something — ‘actuallyusingthecaseformynewglasses’, maybe. Gesundheit.

Anyway, in this spirit, my school went through a phase of absolute swimming cap enforcement, terrified that a stray hair in the filter was all that stood between them and the ruination of the new pool. Unfortunately for tiny 2009 Ellen, I was put on this earth with a prodigiously large head and thick, lush hair.1 These were the days before swimming caps were manufactured with inclusivity in mind and , as such, getting one to stay on my head was a herculean feat. On one occasion, my P.E. teacher called me over to the poolside to chastise me for my lack of swimming cap (in my hand, rather than on my head). She had me press the front of the latex to my forehead whilst she yoinked it over my skull. The strain on her face is amongst the most vivid of my early teenage memories. When she released it, my eyebrows shot back towards my hairline and, lo and behold, I think I swam two widths before the thing pinged several feet into the air, landing with an unceremonious plop some distance away.

This is not the only woe that dogged my early swimming journey. I was also predisposed to infections that would leave me deaf in one ear for the back half of every summer holiday. Additionally, I had my first period a few months shy of my twelfth birthday, and my ‘early bloomer’ status made every trip to the pool feel like a potential confessional. I didn’t understand what I saw as the very American Judy Blume attitude of celebrating your first period at the time, because, to my knowledge, I was alone in my plight.

So I stopped swimming. From the age of fourteen to the age of twenty-eight — with the exception of one abortive attempt at the age of twenty-one, when I got spooked by the presence of some handsome lifeguards — I don’t think I swam more than a single length.

I’m not sure what made the attempt stick this time, but it stuck. I ordered some prescription goggles (something that was only within my budget because my prescription happens to be the precise same, full point in both eyes. If you’ve got a .25 prescription, prepare to fork out), a new swimming costume, and a swimming cap.2 My employer at the time offered free staff swims on a Saturday morning and so one sunny weekend, I forced myself to go. I told myself that all I had to do was get in the pool — this, it turns out, was a hurdle. The pool didn’t have a ladder to enter and exit by.3 If you’ve ever suffered from chronic anxiety, you might be familiar with the full-body irrational panic you feel when you have mentally prepared yourself for one set of circumstances and find yourself in another, however trivial the difference is. Still, I managed to get in eventually. I swam something like five half-lengths, too scared to find myself in the literal and figurative deep end. Over the course of the summer, I would discover that I could, in fact, still swim, and by late July I managed a 1250m session. This sounds like an arbitrary distance, and maybe in the grand scheme it is, but anecdotal internet stories told me that that is the aquatic equivalent of a 5km run.

If you, like me, interpret any external stimulus whatsoever as a Pavlovian prompt to pick up your phone, I can recommend swimming — even over running, which offers the option of listening to a podcast, music or audiobook. I’m definitely an advocate of brute force habit intervention — my advice to people looking to get more reading done is to do it in a data dead-zone, like an underground train, or that one room in your house that you can’t take a call in, rather than simply putting your phone out of reach, which to me is ‘Frog and Toad eating cookies’ levels of effective.

Swimming is the same kind of thing, for obvious reasons. It’s brute force mindfulness — can’t scroll, can’t even listen to music.4 All I can do is focus on counting how many lengths I’ve done, which I do by simply repeating the number over and over in my head, and trying not to swallow too much public pool water. If you struggle with the whole ‘observing your thoughts neutrally’ part of meditation, I can recommend mentally chanting the same number on repeat as an alternative. An unchecked thought in this situation, and your whole count goes out the window.

I’ve started booking a 6:30am swim every week, which you’re free to interpret as some kind of humblebrag. I don’t swim fast, nor far, though I am pleased to say I recently graduated from the slow to the medium lane (eat my dust aqua joggers!), though I imagine my pathological aversion to freestyle may stunt my progress. The fact of the matter is that the early start time of my new job has demolished my ability to go for a run before work, and for various tedious reasons, swimming is logistically easier. There’s a lot of cynicism about the mental health benefits of exercise, but as I’ve aged I’ve found that it’s a load-bearing pillar and removing it gets riskier with every passing year. I can also vouch for the mental health benefits of spending £8 on a coffee and pastry before work and then complaining about how five years ago you would have change for a fiver for exactly the same. Snacks and catharsis, innit.

There’s a puddle outside our house that we use to tell the weather; a useful pothole that kids scoot through on their mini micros. When the nights draw in and the sky is an obscure puff of light-polluted night, we recognise the rain by its pit-pats in the puddle. Jacket on, jumper too, maybe.

I’ve been anxious recently. And tired. I’ve been curling up into a ball and deriving comfort from it until my back and hips ache and I have to get up again. I’m becoming more invested in cooking, because the time is already there for it. I’m going to learn to make horchata next.

More than three weeks have passed since I spoke to the mental health trainee practitioner. I’m trying to kick the cynical voice that sees leaflets, so many leaflets, in my future. Maybe even a workbook.

It’s six months until my thirtieth. I hope I’m shucking something.

Something like a saag paneer

The first thing you’re going to want to do is pretend you haven’t noticed that you don’t have enough time to make this before yoga. Then you want to feel a little guilty about taking a place and not showing up, before reminding yourself that, actually, those yoga classes are best when a couple of people don’t show up. They always over-book the studio.

Feel a little consternation over the rice cooker, then just get a pan out and heat up a little oil, coating the rice in it until you worry you might burn it or something. Sprinkle of salt, turmeric, and boiling water.

Empty what remains of the bag of spinach into the colander in the sink. Sniff it to check that it doesn’t yet smell like horse. You will feel sick for the rest of the night if it smells even slightly like horse. Pour two kettlesful of hot water over it and then squish it down a bit with the back of the wooden spoon to get the excess water out.

Heat oil in the pan. All the recipes say ghee but only your boyfriend has the presence of mind to buy ghee. Coat the paneer in a mix of turmeric, smoked paprika and cayenne (since you somehow missed chilli powder on every recipe). Wait til it browns on every side and then set it aside.

Do that thing where you chop garlic, ginger and a chilli into a big pile and then fry them up with half a diced onion and the dregs of the paneer spices. Peel the ginger with a teaspoon, like people have been telling you to do for years, but for some reason you haven’t done until now. Realise that sometimes advice is good. Fry it for about ten minutes, add a splash of water, and a teaspoon of garam masala. Grumble inwardly at the inequity between the number of recipes which call for garam masala and the scarcity of supermarkets stocking it.

Chop up the spinach. Check that the rice hasn’t burnt to the bottom of the pan. Okay, good. Add the spinach to the onion mixture and splash a bit more water on it. Put the paneer in to heat up and mix through. For some reason, feel compelled to add a splash of cream. It’s probably sacrilege, but it works. Serve with the rice. Miss your yoga class. Book it again for next week.

Take a few bites and then think about taking a photo.