Add to List - #31 (Italy Edition)

Mountain traffic jams, Bridget Jones and sweet treats

How many times do people give you a recommendation and you say ‘Oh, really? Cool. I’ll add it to the list!’ and then you go away and do not add it to any list anywhere?

Well, I present you with Add to List: the Sunday newsletter containing small things that brought joy, evoked an emotional reaction or became some short-lived stability for me in the past 7 days.

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Obsession

Driving around Italy.

I was always afraid of driving abroad and forgive me for saying this, but I believe the right hand side of the road is the correct one. Perhaps it’s that I’m left-handed and therefore spatially wired the other way? Or just that I am un pilota italiano. I’m a terrible driver at home; one of those people who is prone to taking up two lanes in a roundabout. Yes, I would hate me too. I am a Manouvre-Signal-Mirror type. However, under-indicating and under-cautiously pulling out at roundabouts will get you very far here. Call me, il guidatore fantastico.

I love the feeling of wheeling down the winding mountain road, music on (usually it’s Sunshine pt. 1 by James Smith), with the added percussion of cicadas chirping me on as I wind down the windows and breathe in the renewing mountain air. I will never tire of the way light peeps through the cracks in the trees as I head out for my daily coffee and pastry.

Note: this one was taken on foot. I don’t car and capture.

This week, I also encountered major mountain traffic — my car was surrounded by a bunch of horses! I sat there panicking, edging forwards and backwards slowly (and frantically winding the windows back up). All the car sensors were going crazy as the horses were so close to my vehicle, both front and back. I didn’t want to spook them. This friendly (?) guy came for a nosey. We go nowhere in a rush here.

Did car and capture this one (was stationary — and maybe a tad scared)

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Confession

Giving up Instagram has been much harder than I thought…

..and I haven’t really done it.

I removed it from my phone after my friend left of Wednesday for a couple of days but then I published the below bit of writing on Friday and wanted to share it with my followers. (I think that was a convenient excuse to get back to vino-in-hand-terrace-scrolling.)

After checking my dashboard stats for this post specifically, I saw 160 people opened the email, 27 came direct from Substack and only 10 came from social/direct links. That’s me told. The data doth not lie. Instagram is about to be banished again.

Also, I’d like to take the opportunity to those who open and kindly read my emails every week. Yes, you reading this. I really do appreciate you so much. I mean it. You rock!

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Shook 

Bridget Jones’ weight escapades.

More below.

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Book

Everyone I Know Is Dying by Emily Slapper and Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding

Everyone I Know Is Dying by Emily Slapper

This book initially lured me in with the unreliable narration in the first chapters: “I hope the lights are on when we finally have sex, so he can see how young I am compared to his wife”. Slapper has created unique voice of simultaneous self-grandiose and self-destruction. We follow, Iris, a woman isolated, successful on paper but imploding in almost every aspect of her life. The book deals with depression, validation, female comparison, male attention, disordered eating, family dynamics and ultimately is really about someone in a state of low self-esteem on an unrelenting path of self-sabotage. It is a bleak read.

Iris’ behaviour is unhinged, incredibly frustrating and painful to follow though I believe Slapper does this intentionally to draw us a soliloquy of the modern day, London-dwelling, young professional woman. There is some redemption but it comes very late in the book (maybe a little too late for me looking to relax on my sun-lounger). So, to counter-balance the razor-sharp anguish, I subsequently accessed another internal monologue this week, in the form of the dippy and delightful, Bridget Jones.

Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding

I am doing an alternative wedding reading for a friend in a couple of weeks. Her husband wants something ‘boring and boyish’ about history or war or something of that nature. (It’s not that one from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, I checked). In response she’s going ‘full girly’ i.e. something from Bridget Jones or Sex and The City. I offered to re-read the diary of our dear Bridget to help pull out the bits of note.

Firstly, Bridget is partially an icon; in some ways, she is well ahead of her time. She loves Wendy Cope, realises the real value of long-lasting love can be found in friendship and hates all the paraphernalia around Christmas. (A woman after my own heart).

In light of this sticky, hot summer. I highlighted this section from our loveable disaster-prone girl. She really has it spot for the thirty-something, city-living singletons. It’s similar to what I was thinking about when I wrote 500 Words of Summer.

Feel strange sense of unease with the summer and not just because of the drawn curtains on Sundays and mini break ban. Realise, as the long hot days freakishly repeat themselves, one after the other, that whatever I am doing I really think I ought to be doing something else…The more the sun shines the more obvious it seems that others are making fuller, better use of it elsewhere.

Bridget is, however, utterly MENTAL for hating herself for being over nine stone throughout this book. Commentary such as ‘9st (ughh)’ and ‘9 st. 3 (why? why? from where?)’ is rife in every chapter. Bridget is referred to by both herself and many other characters, including her own boyfriend, Daniel Cleaver as ‘fat’ and ‘squishy’. Jesus Christ. But, let us not judge poor Bridget, let us judge the many people would have been involved in creating this book, publishing this book, and the readers who loved this so much without question in its hey day. It is ultimately a product of the time.

Bridget was heralded as an ‘every woman’. Actually, W.T.F.!? On a re-read, you might just begin to understand why so many millenial women struggle to embrace body positivity when their benchmark was the woman in the pages who intricately shares her insecurity about her weight and survives mostly on cigarettes, wine and smoothies. Bridget is, at largest, nine-stone-four and, at smallest, eight-stone-eleven. Perhaps Bridget nowadays is not the icon for being the ‘hot-mess every woman’ but because she holds up a foil to the ‘thin-propaganda’ we regularly experienced and, our problematic relationships with ourselves through the fear of judgement of others? Still, love her. Still love Helen Fielding for creating her.

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Cook

Sweet treats: nectarines and bomboloni con gelato.

The fleshy joy of a nectarine is unparalleled in this heat. These taste like summer. Their sunny interior is ready to be released with your first bite. In fact, my talented sister wrote a beautiful poem about them. You can read it here.

We also had ‘an apericena’ on the terrace of the village this week before some live jazz in the square. (Something which does not happen very often up here so it was quite the talk of the town. Well, village).

I was out, mingling with locals, drinking myself deep in Chianti and devoured this freshly fried bomboloni fragantly flavoured with lemon zest and served with a scoop of creamy vanilla gelato. A perfect line-up really.

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Can’t Stop Scanning

Olympics content.

I can’t get iPlayer out here, so I’m relying on news articles (and Instagram — another ploy for keeping my recent addiction) for sporting updates. I am SO impressed by these human beings. Nada Hafez and Yaylagul Ramazanova competing pregnant? Simone Biles’ come back? Wow, women are so badass.

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Forward Planning

Words, words, words.

I have been hitting around 2000 words a day of my novel but it isn’t coming as easy as I expected. At the moment, I am doing something I call ‘scene jumping’ which involves writing different scenes I know need to happen to drive the plot of the novel in any given direction. All this is being done in non-chronological order but based off what feels easiest to grasp next. The idea is, once these are firmed up, then I can begin mapping all the in between parts together. However, my ‘voice’ is not nailed. I think it sounds infantile and basic. I keep changing my mind about different elements of the story. I basically hate all the words on the page. But, we press forward anyway. There’s always an edit or ten to help.

I’ve found removing all distraction weirdly feels quite distracting!? The amount of full freedom I have is great for my creative thinking but perhaps harder for my productivity. I’m trying to work on a routine but I also find too much routine pressurising. Any other writers out there feel the same? I’d love to know your top tips.

Anyway, ciao for now. A domenica!