I must have been about four when we drove to buy a dog. The day is now only a haze of Sunday afternoon impressions of rain and green, of the muddy track somewhere in the Stirlingshire countryside, a room, a log fire, and the two chosen puppies who would be the confidants of my growing up.

AWOKE ON SUNDAY morning believing that it was Monday, already in the sleepy morning cobwebs of my mind planning ambitiously, the week ahead before P let me know that it was Sunday. Immediately all thoughts of industry were forgotten and an easy, somnolent mood set back in. It’s all mindset, you see, and for some inexplicable reason, I’d lost an entire day and gained it back again just in time to fully enjoy an “extra” day of the weekend

Sometimes an advertisement is so perfectly tailored to a cultural moment that it casts that moment into stark relief, which is how I felt upon first seeing an ad for the mega-best-selling writer James Patterson’s course on MasterClass a few years ago. In the ad, Patterson is sitting at a table, reciting a twisty opening line in voice-over.

In a few weeks, the Australian synth-rock veterans Cut Copy will follow up 2017’s Haiku From Zero with a new album called Freeze, Melt. Frontman Dan Whitford, now living in Copenhagen, wrote most of the new album, and he returned to Australia before the pandemic to record it with his bandmates.

Last month, as Spain lifted its lockdown, a string quartet took the stage at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre de Liceu. They played Emilio Puccini’s I Crisantemi, or The Chrysanthemums to a packed audience of 2,292 plants: Not shadowy spies or shills or Bloomberg supporters, but the leafy kind made up of cellulose and sunshine.

This week’s Style Icon is American Actress and model Marisa Berenson. Born Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson in 1947, she was the granddaughter of couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. She has appeared on the covers of Vogue and Time, and won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Natalia Landauer in the 1972 film Cabaret. Berenson was one of the highest paid models in the world in the sixties.