Long live hanging out!

(And we've had a facelift!)

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 SoRo! 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!

Why hello there! Don’t mind us we’ve done a bit of a refresh. After five years (!!) we thought it was time to switch things up a bit here. Like it? Let us know!

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Guys, when was the last time you went away with your friends? Because I just did it twice in the space of three weeks and I’ve got to tell you it is the best?? You get so much unstructured time together? You get to split the work of cooking/playing with kids/figuring out what to do with yourself among many adults? I’d almost forgotten that glorious, in-your-twenties, living-in-a-massive-share house, absolutely zero responsibility feeling of just hanging out with no plans, filling the time with the people you love most.

We cooked elaborate meals in bad ovens, we did tarot card readings, we applied weird Korean charcoal face masks, we played board games, my boyfriend won every toddler in the houses heart by throwing them onto a giant bean bag, we wandered op shops and drank wine and tended to fires and gossiped and spent a solid twenty minutes throwing Nerd Gummy clusters into each others mouths from increasingly large distances. I laughed harder than I have in months, tears streaming down my face, at jokes I couldn’t even begin to explain now.

It’s a high I’ll be chasing forever - I’m already plotting how I can get more of it without having to plow hundreds of dollars into Airbnb. Do I need to found a commune? What I do know is going out for fancy dinners is dead to me - long live lying on the couch talking absolute shit with the best people in the world.

The first time I visited Where’s Nick wine bar in Marrickville was on my first date with Andrew. I didn’t realise at the time that it would end up being my last first date for a long time (maybe forever?), but even if I had I think I would have been pretty happy with the location choice. In the years since we’ve returned to this cozy, low key wine bar on Marrickville road so many times - together on our anniversary, with friends in a big group, with friends one on one, for solo drinks and snacks at the bar. Since moving to Dully it’s essentially become our local, and it’s exactly the kind of place you want within walking distance of your house. The wine list is excellent, natural leaning and ever changing. The service is low key, friendly, funny, and they have an uncanny way of steering you to exactly the wine you want to drink from the long menu. The chefs have changed over the years, but the anchovy crostini (with gluten free option!) and warm fava bean dip are constants and they are crowd pleasers for a reason. They’ve also got a great little wine shop next door if you taste something so delicious you need a bottle to take home. I scoured my photo library for a snap to include here, but I’m honestly too busy having fun and eating delicious things when I’m there to ever document it. If you find yourself in the neighbourhood, wander in and take a spot at the bar - I think you’ll be wishing it was your local too before long.

After reading a few sensible, elegant literary books I was ready for something a little more fun and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, with it’s promise of time travel and romance and government intrigue seemed to fit the bill. This book is a romp - I devoured it in the course of a few days - but it’s also significantly smarter and more complex then the premise implies. Set sometime in the 2030s, it follows a civil servant who qualifies for a mysterious posting as a “bridge”. It turns out the British government has developed time travel and uses this power to transport a number of normal people from various time periods in the past into the present, to study the impact that time travel has on them and see if they’re able to adjust. Our protagonist is assigned to be the bridge for a real-life figure, Comander Graham Gore, a seaman who died on an Arctic expedition in the late 1840s. A lot of the fun of the book is seeing how the characters adjust to the modern world - the things they adapt to, the things they’re horrified by (Tinder, Spotify, bathing, feminism) - but it also expands into an exploration of colonialism and empire, climate change, creeping fascism and authoritarianism with romance thrown in as well. This one truly has it all.

After years of pining after Melbourne’s Sense of Self bathhouse and trekking out to the upper Blue Mountains to visit the Japanese Onsen, Sydney FINALLY has a dreamy bathhouse smack bang in the middle of Surry Hills! Capybara Bathing opened in April, just in time for the deep, dark depression of a damp Sydney winter to hit. Founded by four architects and a ceramicist, the space is as calm, chic and soothing as you could hope for. I’m booked in for my first session next week, and I can’t wait to float between the sauna and magnesium pool (there steam room is getting fixed at the moment) and will dare myself to try the ice plunge or ice exfoliation too.

A quick-fire rundown of the miscellaneous finds we’ve loved this month. In this edition: a new way to buy the good wine at cozzie livs friendly prices, a perfect podcast episode, Gluten-Free pasta that doesn’t SUCK, and the best second-hand shopping spots of my life.