Hello again! I am back from my holiday in Spain, all rested and prepped for the coming academic year.

Julia Child always reminded people to never apologise for the food you are serving. Even if it didn’t quite work out the way you wanted it to. They will never know that it is not how you anticipated it would be…

Swimming in the lochs in summer.

Things to make this week: plum tart, marbled banana bread, chocolate wheaty biscuits.

‘The traditionally low number of women in non-fiction, especially history, invites many questions about the kinds of discourse we consider useful or true’. You need to read this. It is a fascinating account of hierarchy, ideas, and who has the right to say certain things. It is necessary to know if we want to see more things by women writers.

On inconspicuous consumption.

Food writers who teach us how to live.

Over the holiday I finished two books. The first, Floating, is a(nother) swimming memoir. Joe Minihane, the author, follows in Roger Deakin’s Waterlog footsteps, swimming his way around Britain, finding all of Roger’s swimming spots in an attempt to quell his anxiety and help his depression. Joe writes: “Nestled deep in this Dartmoor valley, […] I remembered that true escape was the essence of wild swimming: escape from needless worries and anxieties, from fear, from being hassled“. I loved this book. It is honest about a struggle with mental health issues, and working to find various solutions to help them – be it swimming in the wild, or the community that develops around the swimming, or the meditation of swimming. Swimming memoirs have framed my year this year, and helped me encounter the water in a new way. (Including a fairly long swim at the weekend, in a lake where the water temperature was 15C!)

The second book I finished was actually a re-read of something I first read as an undergraduate, The Bone Woman. This is the story of a forensic anthropologist’s experiences of mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. It makes for hard reading but I think it is important to find out about what happens to bring justice to families after a war.

Back-to-school food guide and a fall dinner guide.

If you read nothing else, read this Twitter exchange between the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. Sheer brilliance.

That is it for this week chaps! Have a good one! x