Sunday Best is a brand new feature here at TIG that we plan on making a recurring one. Each Sunday, we will bring you a cross-section of interesting articles, links, ideas, music, culture, and anything else we think might be interesting or entertaining⏤the perfect supplement to your Sunday and one we hope you will add to your routine.
April is the cruellest month because we are stuck. We’ve stopped dead and we’re going rotten. We are living in the demesne of the crippled king, the Fisher King, where everything sickens and nothing adds up, where the imagination is in shreds, where dark fantasies enthrall us, where men and women are estranged from themselves and one another, and where the cyclical itch of springtime—the spasm in the earth; the sizzling bud; even the gentle, germinal rain—only reminds us how very, very far we are from being reborn.
WE JUST DEACTIVATED the TIG Twitter account a moment ago after thinking about it for awhile. It seemed like a good way to remove a bit of chaos from our lives while we figure out the best direction to go from here, and we might even get a little time back from our mornings ...
IT'S BEEN WILDLY blustery for days now, leaves blowing everywhere and here, cosy with candles and a fire all weekend long. We watched an old Italian giallo film from the sixties. It wasn't nearly as good as Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) but it was entertaining and interesting, as I'd never watched anything in that genre before.
WAS READING an article about 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books and realised that I'd started most of them, but actually did finish one them⏤Thomas Piketty's 2013 masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century⏤all 600 pages of it, and enjoyed it so much that I'd considered picking up his follow-up while at Waterstones recently. Last week we introduced new candles at The Shop and we had no idea that they would be so wildly popular so soon after launch. Today, two new scents have arrived, just in time for upcoming festivities: Cranberry and Chestnut ...
NEVER REALISED the need for outdoor curtains until coming across it again and again, mostly in archways and doorways, sometimes from the windows of juliet balconies on old apartment buildings and saw how utterly charming it is ...
HAD FORGOTTEN to mention that a couple of weeks ago, we saw the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. It was a bit crazy, a little hard to follow at times, manic and funny and perhaps worth it if only for the wildly romantic line, "...I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you."
HOW IS YOUR long weekend going? It's an official bank holiday here in England, so some things are still closed and there are no parcel deliveries, which means that everything we've been expecting will have to wait until at least tomorrow or later. The weather was perfect! Warm and springlike, sunny and filled with cherry blossoms and the last of the daffodils ...
RATHER THAN sit around watching the terrible progression of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and waiting for the awful news that seems all but inevitable, we're keeping ourselves busy with work as the distraction of choice. It's also made us realise that we've haven't had a chance to visit any places in Eastern Europe yet, despite the fact one of our writers was from Ukraine...
IT HAS BEEN amazingly blustery for the past two days and nights, the beginning of two separate storms set to hit England this weekend, we're told, so the desire to stay in and avoid being blown away has been strong this week. To encapsulate the vibe that is this time of year, we've created a moodboard for cosy February days ...
THIS WEEKEND WE were glued to the news, trying to find more information about the missing van-life blogger Gabby Petito and the generally strange circumstances surrounding the entire case. Coincidentally, we had been talking about the whole #vanlife phenomenon which has swept social media the past few years, because P had been watching videos of tiny homes and the algorithm began throwing converted vans across his path ...
‘Why do different cultures respond differently to depression?’ The question is typical of Matthew. The assumption embedded in it creates rhetorical tension, pulling you on to his intellectual territory, forcing you to take a position. At the same time, it sounds like the beginning of a joke.
THERE HAS BEEN a definite shift in the light since spring has arrived—not just since the clocks have gone back, but also with the amount of sunny days there have been. The clouds of winter days seem to have faded into clear and bright skies and everywhere ...
THIS WEEKEND WE watched Rebecca, the 2020 adaption of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel recently released on Netflix. It's directed by Ben Wheatley and stars Armie Hammer, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas. We'd plan to watch this film last week, and I was so excited ...
The nostalgia at the heart of ‘Summer Of Now’, the final track from James Blake’s new EP, is something that we all seem to be yearning for of late. The track’s narrator repeatedly references the summer of 2015, in this context a happier, almost rose-tinted time, comparing themselves unfavourably as “the summer of now”.
