SUNDAY MORNING was spent on the sofa with a 15-minute sheet mask on, poring over the FT Weekend. There was an interesting article about the concept of time, and how not to waste it by using the time you have now to do at least a little of what you care about, instead of banking on finding time for it in the future. That novel that you always wanted to write? Now is the time.
IT IS A BANK HOLIDAY weekend here, so today is essentially a holiday, but since we feel like we've been holiday-ing quite a bit already in these last summer weeks, it felt good to get back into routine with Weekend Links, workouts and other Monday essentials. This weekend, also finished the Sylvia Plath book I was reading and have started on David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, a much more difficult read, for certain, but an important one, I think. The weather has turned chilly with cloudy skies and showers, and soon it will be cable knit jumpers and tall leather boots in place of white denim and espadrilles ...
SOME OF YOU are still processing the fact that we are not updating the TIG Instagram account regularly anymore, and if you’re one of the many people who have tried to leave us DMs, unfortunately, we will not get them. A few of you have also emailed to request that we enable comments for articles again, so you’ll be able to leave us messages here instead, if you like ...
WE HAVE BEEN glued to the news detailing the events unfolding in Afghanistan with shock and horror, feeling so sad for the Afghan people desperately clinging to airplanes trying to escape a country that has descended into chaos once again. Sometimes this job is difficult because we know you come here to see the beauty in the world ...
EVER SINCE Edinburgh, we have been off our routines—the workouts, the cardio sessions on the exercise bike, the daily countryside walks. Summer might have something to do with that as well, but it has been a while now that we've not been able to keep all of our Monday, Wednesday, Friday workout commitments. I had thought today might be a start, but in truth, perhaps nothing will be back to normal until September. (Can you believe that it is already nearly mid-August?)
IT HAS BEEN TWO weeks since we took a break from updating the TIG Instagram account, and since then, we have received so many notes and emails from you saying how much you love stopping by the site again. We have so many more wonderful things to share with you here, but things are a little sporadic at the moment due to summer festivals and sunny days ...
It's 9:00 o'clock on a Saturday night and I'm listening to P's grandmother on the phone telling me about a program she's about to watch on channel 5 called Meghan: The Climb to Power (or something like that). We've just had the most wonderful dinner of cod filets with a parmesan parsley crust and Moules-frites. There's a bottle of cava chilling in the refrigerator ...
THE WEATHER has been beautiful, so on both Friday and Saturday, we took our new folding bicycles out for very long countryside rides through hilly landscapes filled with roaming sheep and giant bales of hay framed by rambling stone walls covered in moss that have been there for hundreds of years. There were castles and viaducts and cosy country pubs along the way where we would stop for a drink and mingle with the locals ...
WE HAVE BEEN reminiscing about our former life in Spain and all the summer mornings spent eating sandía on the back terrace in the sun, the terracotta tiles warm under our bare feet. We've been craving gazpacho, which is proving difficult to find here in the English countryside ...
THIS PAST WEEKEND was filled with sunlight and pink roses and late, late nights. We ate crab cakes and went for long countryside walks and took a bicycle ride to the pub up the hill overlooking the river. We read books and listened to the rain in the evenings and drank red wine to old music ...
THIS WEEKEND I decided to try Gigi Hadid's recipe for Spicy Vodka Pasta that everyone has been raving about. It's an occasion when I actually cook, for I don't do it often and it normally never turns out (which is why I don't do it often). P is the one who makes all the gourmet meals now that we live in the countryside and don't have access to takeaway food delivery services ...
WE'VE JUST RETURNED from some time back in Edinburgh, where we revisited old haunts, found new ones and had a prosecco picnic in the park. We ate great food and had to deal with the change our old hometown has undergone in the six years that we've been away. It was bittersweet to see some of our old favourites closed down and some under new management and changed drastically ...
YESTERDAY WE went on a long bicycle ride in the countryside, up and down hilly roads past wild roses and babbling brooks all the way to the castle ruins. It's only our third or so time out on our new folding bikes, and I've discovered that I have an unrealistic, romanticised version of what it might be like to go riding in the countryside: I would wear pretty things and not get hot or tired and arrive at our destination looking perfect.
P'S BIKE IS in a storage unit in Spain, and has been for the past two and half years, so during the lockdown that was 202o, I sold my Buckingham Black Pashley Princess Sovereign to a woman in London. We had been hoping to buy two folding bikes in their place, but did not anticipate all the folding bicycles in England to be completely sold out for an entire year...
AFTER WHAT meteorologists have been calling the wettest May in 160 years, the rain finally stopped, perfectly in time for the Spring Bank Holiday weekend. We spent as much time outside as we possible could, both of us getting blinded by the sun, which we hadn't seen in months, both of getting a little sunburned, so unaccustomed was our skin, despite being coated in SPF30 ...