Forty Things I learnt this year

From Apricity to Bronzino , lost gloves to lip gloss .

1. Do something new every day. It doesn’t have to be earth shatteringly novel ; it could be as simple as having tea instead of coffee or taking a different route to work, or listening to a different radio station, put your phone in your pocket on the tube and watch your fellow passengers. Read a book in a genre you have always avoided. Go to the choir that meets every Monday. Be the person in the meeting who says nothing until the very end. I find these tiny incremental changes that tug me out of my routine are almost like going on holiday, you find yourself noticing things and time becoming something that be enjoyed instead of passed.

2. Use a pen . I am typing this now, but when I take notes I always write by hand. It helps me remember things, and I can see instantly from the shape of my handwriting how I felt at the time. It doesn’t even matter if you lost the notes, the point is to write them down. It’s the only way to lodge them in your synapses.

3. Elective foot surgery is almost always a mistake. The foot is the most complicated piece of mechanical engineering in the body and you tamper with it at your peril. I had a bunion done twenty years ago and while it makes wearing shoes easier, it has affected my balance in an insidious way.

4. If you are going to buy one pair of boots ever buy these Chelsea boots from the celebrated Australian shoemaker R. M Williams. I bought mine in Adelaide last spring and I have hardly taken them off since. They are comfortable for people with problem feet without looking orthopaedic, they have enough heel to look good with every trouser length and they have a crepe outer sole which means you can walk miles in them.

5. If you meet someone who has clearly lost weight , by all means tell them they look great but please try and keep the astonishment out of your voice. Everyone who loses weight deliberately thinks they look better thinner, but they don’t want to wonder just how bad you thought they looked before their shrinkage.

6. Even more important, do not under any circumstances ask a newly slender person how they lost the weight. If they want to they will tell you. Otherwise it is none of your business. I have written about my weight loss so I feel I am fair game, but even I bridle a little when giving a talk about Queen Victoria, or Maria Callas and the first question is about the side effects of Mounjaro.

7. Stop spending a fortune on non alcoholic potions like Botivo or Seedlip or the GABA one. . They are all wildly overpriced and not that nice. My favourite non alcholic drink is tonic water with a dash of Angostura bitters, ice and lemon. Feels like a grown up drink and has no weird after taste.

8. Put airtags or equivalent on everything you own. It save all the time one wastes hunting for keys, wallet, make up case etc before leaving the house. The only thing you can’t airtag is the phone itself. I wear an apple watch simply because it will make my phone make a noise if I can’t find it. Also vital to remember to change the batteries on said air tags…

   

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9. Sadly I haven’t found a geolocator that works on gloves. The misery of losing one of a pair of delicious gloves is profound – do you throw it away or do you hold onto it in the hope that one day the other will turn up? I recently bought a pair of gorgeous burgundy long gloves from these people, not only because of the beauty of the gloves but because they will sell you one glove if you lose the other one. I also buy gloves from SchwarzVonHalen because their leather gloves are invisibly touch screen compatible which makes them doubly useful on a cold station platform ( and right now they are having a sale).

   

10. Shucking oysters isn’t hard if you know how. First of all get the kit – chainmail gloves ( gardening gloves at a pinch) and an oyster knife. Make sure you have the protective gloves on before you go near an oyster and then hold it in your left hand with the pointed bit nestled in your palm. Then take your oyster knife and try and find an opening at the ten to two position on the oyster a few millimetres in from the edge of the shell. Wiggle the point of your knife until you get some purchase and then insert the tip and twist. Be careful as you open not to spill all the precious oyster liquid . As you open the shell cut the oyster away from the top shell and then sever its root from the bottom shell and flip it over. Serve on a bed of ice ( very important) with lemon, tabasco ,shallots in vinegar, or a mixture of lime and mirin. Then tip into your mouth and swallow. Heaven.

11. Always have a jar of chickpeas in the house in case of an unexpected vegan. Even if you just drain them and cover in harissa, or paprika or cumin and then roast at a high heat for twenty minutes with or without some dark green veg like cavolo nero or something chunky like carrots and lots of olive oil , your vegan guest will feel loved and appreciated.

12. A tin of anchovies is another thing that you need about you at all times. Everything from chicken liver pate, to any kind of mince based thing, salad dressings , broccoli, artichokes , even figs benefit from the alchemical properties of the anchovy, which makes everything taste like more than the sum of its parts.

13. 

    If you haven’t already, take a boxing lesson. Nothing better for managing the kind of suppressed anger that otherwise can boil over into the kind of irrational outburst that can ruin your or worse still someone else’s day. Yoga is all very well and brilliant if you are half way relaxed, but sometimes downward dog just won’t cut it. Hitting something really hard can turn anger into exhilaration.

14. Don’t go on auction sites after midnight, or after a negroni. You will place bids on things that you can barely see, that you don’t really want , and which you definitely don’t need. The ratio of winning bids is in inverse relation to how much you want the lot. The next day when you receive an email congratulating you for winning the thing you really didn’t want that much and you realise that the auction house is somewhere handy like Perth, you will wonder why you didn’t listen to your own advice.

15. I lose lipsticks almost as often as I lose gloves. So I have doubled my order for Violette Nectar and Plumage. The nectar is a tinted lip oil that moisturises, goes on effortlessly and looks great. I have one in Dahlia Noir in every bag and pocket. The Plumage gives a bit more coverage in really sexy colours. Best all day lipsticks I have ever used

    

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16. Adopt a work of art and make it part of your life. Spend time on a regular basis with the same work of art in a museum, and you will find that your perception of it changes as you age. There is a Bronzino painting of a young man in the Frick collection in New York that I first saw as a student – I was intrigued by the hooded eyes, the supreme confidence of the way he gazed out at the world. I always visit him when I go to New York, and forty years later I see the stare as more defensive . Now to me he looks like a young man putting on the swagger in a world where looks are everything. The same thing goes, of course, for fiction. I must reread Austen pretty much every three or four years and every time I notice something different. There is something invigorating about reading a book you haven’t looked for decades, it is a way of engaging with your younger self. I remember reading The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth one summer in Italy when I was twenty one, and when I re read it recently I could feel the heat of the railway station outside Rome where I waited for a train that was two hours late. Wonderful book

    

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17. If you are embarking on some kind of writing project – novel, play, script whatever, and feel overcome by the insuperability of the distance between your idea and its completion – aim for quantity not quality. Before you start to write decide how many words or pages and don’t allow yourself to stop until you reach the magic number. Don’t worry whether its any good, just get it down. By all means revise your work but only when you have hit your word count. It’s a technique that always get me through the difficult first steps into a project when my self belief is shaky. Get to the end, or even halfway through before you start deciding whether it is any good.

18. Uniqlo heat tech socks are every bit as good as they claim to be. To have warm feet on a cold day is one of life’s hidden pleasures.

19. Apricity meaning the warmth of the sun in winter is a word I learnt this year. I just hope I have occasion to use it.

20. IV vitamin drips are a waste of money and time. The only vitamin you need to supplement is vitamin D. Everything else, unless you are actually dehydrated, is just adding supplements to the water supply.