Life in Retrograde

Soldiering on with pie-topping crunch, a mini skirt, carnelian beads and a deep dive into how Brat Green became Brat Green.

Highly Enthused is a newsletter, once a podcast, concerning all the best things to consume in life. It’s written twice per month by Sophie McComas-Williams and Sophie Roberts, and today’s dispatch is written by SoMo! The majority of each newsletter is free, but there are five extra recs in each for paid subscribers. That’s often where the gold nuggets lie. Thanks for being here!

Anyone else feeling this Mercury in retrograde like a slap in the face? I’ve eaten shit in all but literal ways in the past week, thanks in no small part to some respiratory bug we all acquired in Bali. It rendered my head so heavy with gunk it was a true struggle to keep my eyes open let alone nail my return to work or parent two similarly sick boys who hacked away into the night so hard the baby retched with the effort and spiked a 40 degree fever. I proceeded to bleed through my pyjamas the first night of my period, improperly sealed a 120ml bag of painstakingly pumped breastmilk which then leaked and subsequently froze into a milky river all through the freezer, endured what felt like a weekend-long meltdown from our three year old, had puree flung at my face and basically just felt like a hunk of chewed-out gum on the bottom of someone’s Sambas all week.

On Friday night I woke at 3am with night sweats completely soaked to the bone and felt the virus vacate my body at the same time, leached from my skin onto the bedsheets. I woke weirdly refreshed, feeling like I could make it to the dinner we had planned that night (Attenzione, yum! Get the chicken skin and smoked trout thing), and it was fun! Today is Monday and this week is going to be better, guys. If you’re in the shit with me, soldier on. Retrograde ends on the 28th.

I have the best pastry trick for you to top any kind of pot-style pie! In my case it was a chicken, leek and mushroom filling using leftover rotisserie chicken (yarm) but I imagine this would work with any kind of filling, even sweet? Instead of using puff pastry, I tried that technique where you brush sheets of filo with olive oil, scrunch them up and arrange them on top of your pie filling so there are peaks and valleys. Baked in the oven (20 mins or so at 200C) all those folds crisp up into toasted, golden shards which makes for an impossibly crunchy pie topping. So so good, and lighter than puff if you care about that. Try it.

I was carrying round an A.P.C. tote bag on holiday and my friend Andrew (seeing my novel inside the bag) joked, “what does A.P.C. stand for, Ann Patchett Club?” You should have seen my face!!!! I’m putting that on a cap. State of Wonder had been sitting on my bookshelf for months, I think I went on a bit of a Patchett bender after loving Tom Lake so much, and so I packed it last minute hoping to find some snatches of time to read it on the Island. Oh man, it’s so good. An American pharmacologist goes missing while on assignment in Brazil studying the long-lasting fertility of a tribe deep within the Amazon. His colleague, Marina, is sent down there to find out what happened to him and she’s immediately tangled in the snares of the jungle and its secrets. It’s such a lush escapist novel, sensory and otherworldly. An excellent holiday read.

I spent a long time hunting for the right loafers to get me and my toes back into an office mindset. They couldn’t be too chunky, they had to be real leather, and they couldn’t be too pointy at the toe. In the end it was a close race between the Florence Loafers by Nelson Made (obsessed with this brand), and these patent Yasmin beauties by Alias Mae. The slightly crinkled Yasmins won and will carry me through spring into Summer. They’re a fun excuse to start building out the jaunty sock collection too, COS always has the best ones! For the mini skirt rec in the pic above, you’re gonna need to scroll down to the Fast Five, sorry.

A quick-fire rundown of the miscellaneous finds we’ve loved this month. In this edition: A little black mini skirt, a manicure with STAMINA, a run-down on the marketing behind BRAT, a bedside bookshelf made from a dish rack and the beaded necklace in my cart.