A big WELCOME all new January subscribers1, it’s so good to have to here. If you’ve found your way over by some miracle (someone forwarding this to you!) but are not yet subscribed, here, let me help you with that:
Friends,
It’s almost February. I hope this email finds you tearing up those January resolutions and focusing on rest instead. (☁️✨)
Without further ado here’s 10 Useful and/or interesting things that found me this past month.
2023 was a magnificent year for reading books.
I watched an incredible documentary on the plane about two brothers in New Delhi, India who run a bird hospital dedicated to rescuing injured black kites2. It made me ugly cry (that could also have been the altitude) but don’t let that stop you.
If climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro is on your list of things to do in 2024, here’s a comprehensive checklist for you.
Dear Lee and Michael, (the funniest thing I read this month)
And at times, like today, as I look out at the English sea, stormy and crashing, and see the people on the seafront straining against the freezing wind, or when I am approached by an Australian on the street and I keep them talking just for the melancholy pleasure of hearing their accents, or I smell a Eucalyptus tree (they have them over here!) and remember the glorious, abrasive, garrulous Australian bush, I find myself quietly pining for Australia because, well, deep down I miss the bloody place — the nature, the people, my mother, my family. And then it passes, this bitter-sweet temper.
So, Mathew and Annie, I am an Australian living in England, with a wistful yearning for the place of my upbringing, but knowing I have become part of, and been shaped by, somewhere else too — Britain — and mostly I am happily reconciled to that.
Love, Nick
Speaking of. On winter.
“We are now in winter, the nighttime of the year. Winter is the season of utmost Yin. It is the Earth’s time of utmost rest, utmost darkness, and utmost conservation. Nature requires it. It is from this fertile silence that spring is born; it takes this period of consolidation to regenerate the burst of Yang that will crack the seedling and push it up through the soil to reach the sunlight at winter’s end.”
Paris is ALWAYS a good idea. Also related.
One of the easiest and tastiest cakes I’ve ever made - Citrus, olive oil and yoghurt cake via Carter Were.
The kites are crucial to Delhi’s ecosystem, as the species eats about five tons of garbage every few days. Without them, the landfills would be sky-high.
Oh, so many good things here! I love the look of that cake recipe. I need straightforward ones like that for my kid who is just learning to bake. We’ll give it a try. 😋