Spa is Life. Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to get really fucking hot. May we accept the wet and dry heat with serenity, And have the wisdom to know when we need to leave the room for a rest break. May we warm the very marrow of our bones and the cockles of our hearts, And as we slough our dead skin down the plug hole, May our skin be renewed with a gleaming vigour. Living for Sunday, enjoying one hot room at a time, Accepting the challenge of the plunge pool as a pathway to health and vitality, Taking its icy embrace like a woman, or man, or themtheyithan. Trusting that the weekly ritual of rest and relaxation Will make all things all right. By surrendering our Sundays to your hot-cold glory, We can be happy on this day, And spend the next six days in anticipation Of
Stokes’ Fig Relish is what Branston Pickle would taste like if Branston Pickle tasted EXTRA nice. Sweet, sticky, smoky, crunchy, chewy, tart. All of the flavours and textures in one tiny jar of glory. Buy and try. You will not regret it.
One of the most beautiful things about nature, is that it forces you to reevaluate what you think you know. For instance, when I moved into my flat, I bought a large rug for my living room. Or rather, I should say I *thought* I bought a large rug for my living room but it turns out that it wasn’t a rug at all. It was actually a large, floor-based, cat scratching pad. Silly me! What did I know in the face of such obvious feline determination to demonstrate how wrong I was. Similarly, the Lidl was recently selling what I believed to be a small bird feeder which sticks on your window. As I have a flock of goldfinches living in the trees by my flat, I naively thought I could use this “small bird feeder” to attract these beautiful little birds closer to my window. So I bought the
Nowadays I don’t think there are many private landlords dumb enough to not protect their tenant’s deposits since the law has been in place for well over a decade. However, just in case your landlord is as much of a slumlord as my previous one, I thought I would recant my experience of successfully doing a deposit reclaim. Especially because I found London Renters’ Union and Shelter to be utterly useless in terms of help and advice. (Although Shelter’s legal website is very useful and informative.) I discovered my deposit was not protected at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. I was living in a house-share and one of my flatmates was a zero-hours contract, minimum wage retail worker. When lockdown suddenly happened, she had enough money in the bank to pay her rent or to eat, not both. Since we had no way of knowing how long lockdown would last
The world is a shit show, capitalism is a ravaging devil, and in the absence of anything resembling democracy in this country – local or national, I remain convinced that the only way to effect change is non-participation. I haven’t quite figured out how to do that (yet), but in the interim, I reckon supporting small businesses is a decent enough bridge towards something better than the corrupt and unequal world we have. Maybe if we all stop working for the man and start working for ourselves, which means buying from each other, we can start making tiny fractures in the oppressive systems which make it hard for ordinary people to breathe. It is for this reason that I support Black Pound Day. Racism is an ever present evil that needs to be fought on multiple levels at every opportunity. Supporting black entrepreneurs is one way we can cut through the