Unrequired Reading, 002

I tried a new hobby this week, making chocolate bonbons. Painted the moulds with cocoa butter I bought a few colours, shelled them with tempered chocolate, filled them with curd and sealed the whole thing with another layer. It was fiddly and messy, I did Apple and blackcurrant for the first batch, then a lemon that came out wincingly sharp against sweet Belgian chocolate. I made quite a few mistakes but it was nice to do something with my hands. Some of them even turned out nicely.

Watching

Invincible Series Four was really good, if you can get past the gore it’s moral quandaries that superhero fiction rarely touches. Questions about violence, legacy and whether you can break a cycle you were born into are not things you expect from an animated show.

Reading

Detour Currently about 20% into this and enjoying it. A police officer saves a billionaire from an assassination attempt and ends up on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

Lenny Rachitsky’s demandingly chill life
Lovely and insightful interview, the contradiction at its centre is someone obsessively committed to quality while genuinely wanting a calm life, and the piece makes a convincing case that one enables the other. It feels good to have people like this in the industry who are about balance over hustle and are still successful.

Writing

Capture for Obsidian
Really enjoying this as a quick way to add tasks and updates to Obsidian. Hit a keyboard shortcut, type, and it lands in your vault without ever having to open the app or navigate to a file.

A letter from a father to his wayward son

This letter from the book Dear Lupin makes me laugh every time. Dear Lupin is a collection of letters from Sunday Times racing journalist Roger Mortimer to his son Charlie, spanning about 25 years from the late sixties. Charlie was, by his own admission, feckless. He bounced between careers, continents and scrapes, and his father responded to every disaster with dry wit, exasperation and deep affection in equal measure. While the whole book is a bit too much of the same note across its length, individual letters like this one are such a wonderful insight into parental conversations.

Chateau Gloomberg
Sunday
Dear Lupin,

I trust your stomach is more or less under control and that you’re deriving a modicum of benefit from those expensive pills.

It is cold and damp here and both boilers have been behaving in a typically erratic manner. I did some baby-watching for the Bers last night — the baby is 11 years old — and your mother departed for a vino at Inkpen. I think gin was in fairly abundant supply there, and it had the customary effect of making your mother behave like Queen Boudicca on her return home.

There are now three deaf people in the house: Moppet, Pongo and myself. It is sometimes fortunate that I’m unable to catch everything said to me. Your mother is still convinced that a poltergeist whipped away a sausage she was cooking, and I expect she will call in the Reverend Jardine for consultation.

A lot of policemen descended on Mr Luck’s house yesterday, but I’ve been unable to ascertain why. I thought I had the cottage sold yesterday, but your mother interfered at the last moment and now I’m somewhat doubtful.
Your Aunt Barbara is going to Jerusalem for Christmas. That ought to precipitate a new war in the Middle East. Aunt Joan is going into hospital tomorrow. I imagine David Willet is having an exciting time in Persia. My godson Richard Rome, married to a Persian, is there too.

Newbury is full of people from the council estates in Thatcham doing their Christmas shopping. It would hardly be true to say that they add charm to the town. The tall woman with bandaged legs in the chemist’s in the Mall is going into semi-retirement — a sad loss, as she is easily the most reliable medical advisor in this area, particularly sound on skin blemishes and diarrhoea.
A man was killed on the road at Beacon Hill on Friday. Road conditions were disagreeable at the time.

Mrs Cameron stayed on Thursday night. She and your mother talked incessantly. Neither listened to a word the other said, which was sensible, as neither was saying anything worth listening to.
I had a long letter from your Great-Aunt Phyllis but could not read a word of it beyond my own name and her signature.

Your affectionate father,
R.M.

P.S. A long article on Dr Phillips in the Newbury News. A man from Ginge has bought Brigadier L’s house. The bearded man in the Newbury bookshop claims to have flogged 150 copies of my book, which would be good news if I happened to believe it — which I don’t. The rather lanky young woman who worked in Jackson’s in the afternoon has disappeared. I’ve kept a first copy of The Times for you; it might one day be valuable. Colonel Mad has been banished from Lambourn — some say to jail, others to the looney bin. Nick Ghastley won a nice race last week; there was a large photograph of him in the Sporting Life. Mr and Mrs Seel are off to India for two months. Mrs Randall is giving her relatives potatoes for Christmas.

I have given up smoking.

Yours refreshedly,
Matt