Good afternoon good people, I have some housekeeping! The first item may be of particular interest to those of you who don’t pay for this newsletter and are forever cursing the broken sentence halfway down. The Kindle edition of THE JOY OF SNACKS is 99p for the month of August only. A little snackbreak for your handbag this summer holiday season! £4 a month is quite a lot, but 99p for a whole book’s worth of this business? Bargain! Go get her.
The second item is a trigger warning, because I know reading the [actual] opening line of this newsletter last summer would’ve sent me into a spiral of shame and self-loathing. I was not enjoying anything about the summer holidays, and it didn’t feel OK to me (though it was – and is. They’re not always to be enjoyed). Nonetheless, part of not being in a never-ending, whirling, swirling cycle of doom – for me – is accepting when things haven’t gone to plan with my parenting, and being able to move on from them and still have an OK day, and that also means celebrating the rare moments when things feel good, so I’m sticking with my opening line, but if you’re in a very different place, please believe that noone gets you more than I do. My DMs are always open.
That opening line then.
I was scared about the summer holidays but I’ve been having such a nice week, partly because one child is in a holiday club and partly because it’s been hot. Too hot to be wrestling children into buggies or parading them around animal parks or soft play centres, and that has meant paddling pools, sun cream that smells like pina coladas, cold peach juices, knickerbocker glories and short trundles for giant chunks of watermelon. Summer with a capital yum.
When it’s hot, actually hot, I am all about the children staying up to eat cold cherries until they crash (especially if it means another adult is home to help with bedtime). Summer (even if you’re a child who’s been sent off to a day facility) means freedom and juicy cheeks and sticky fingers and tearing around the place. Dinners with basil and courgettes and parsley and rocket and aubergine. Some nice ricotta you bumped into on your way home. Multiple iced desserts a day. Never mind the strawberries now (although do still mind them) – it’s the peaches and the melons we’re working through. All the melons, you’ve got to try all the melons while you can. Here are some melons for your melon radars:
Snowball Melon, known elsewhere as Matice
On Sunday, we made little knickerbocker glories with almond brittle and raspberry sauce a la Felicity Cloake. I literally died watching Z scrape her bowl and say “you know I want more raspberry sauce because I just love it, does anyone love this sauce as much as I do?”. I have been enjoying these Aldi ice cream balls as a little post-bedtime pick-me-up – vanilla ice cream in an soft, Oreo-ish case. And also the Aldi raspberry sorbet is so smooth and so raspberry-y.
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