Most wine falls apart within a few days of being opened; Madeira gets more interesting the longer you neglect it. A 1792 vintage, bottled in 1840, was still in fine condition when it was opened for Winston Churchill in 1950. He insisted on pouring it himself, asking everyone: “Do you realise that when this wine was vintaged, Marie Antoinette was alive?”1 Very Churchillian.

The fortified wine comes from the Portuguese island of the same name, but where port avoids heat and oxygen, Madeira is built on both: deliberately warmed and deliberately exposed to air. It can run from bone dry to lusciously sweet depending on which of four grapes went into it – Sercial at the dry end, then Verdelho, Bual, and the sweetest, Malmsey.

Madeira became America’s favourite wine because of a tax loophole, not necessarily a preference. When Charles II married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in 1661, Madeira wine was granted an exemption from the Navigation Acts, the law requiring European goods bound for Britain’s colonies to pass through a British port on a British ship first.2 Colonists got a European wine without the British markup, and drinking it came to feel a little like defiance: one importer has called it “America’s first tax loophole.”3 The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both toasted with Madeira, and George Washington reportedly drank a pint of it with dinner most nights.4

The wine itself was shaped by the same voyage that made it legal to buy. Barrels crossed the Atlantic and the tropics as ballast, cooked slowly by heat and the ship’s motion, and came out the other end tasting richer and more stable than when they left. Rather than treat this as spoilage, producers started doing on purpose what the ocean had been doing by accident. Everyday Madeira is heated artificially in tanks called estufas. The good stuff, labelled Vintage or Frasqueira, is aged the slow way instead: left in barrel for at least twenty years in warm lodges, the temperature swinging with the seasons, a method called canteiro.5

I don’t know anyone who drinks Madeira. These days it earns its keep in the kitchen more often than the glass: Diana Henry uses port, Marsala and Madeira interchangeably in her fig and honey cake, and Scott McComas-Williams’ duck rotolo uses half a cup to deglaze the pan, the same way you’d use any other wine. If you want an excuse to actually pour a glass instead of cooking with it, Martin Benn suggests serving his Lisbon Chocolate Cake with a glass of Madeira to finish a dinner party.

Mulled wine is one of the many joys of the winter months.

The first record of wine being spiced and heated turns up in Plautus’ play Curculio, written in the 2nd century BC.1 But the recipe we’ve actually inherited comes three centuries later, from Apicius’ first-century cookbook: conditum paradoxum, wine warmed with pepper, honey, bay and date, kept ready in a jar for whenever the cold demanded it.2

With the Middle Ages came hypocras, wine steeped with spices and strained through a cloth bag – apothecaries nicknamed it “Hippocrates’ sleeve” and sold it as much for its supposed medicinal virtue as for pleasure.3

Germany, meanwhile, gave the drink an object. The oldest surviving Glühwein tankard – a gold-plated, lockable silver vessel – is dated to around 1420 and belonged to a nobleman who was also among the first to grow Riesling grapes. It didn’t attach itself to Christmas until the late 1800s; it’s been a fixture of outdoor Christmas markets ever since.

By the time it reached England as wassail, the drink had picked up another job: hot spiced wine or ale traditionally passed hand to hand on Twelfth Night (5 January), and poured over the roots of orchard trees to toast the coming harvest. Wassail comes from the Old English phrase waes hael, meaning “be in good health”, and we also still use the word “mull,” also Old English, to mean mix or muddle.4

In Scandinavia, they have glögg. In Brazil, they drink vinho quente during the Festa Junina. Different cultures, different names, same instinct: spice, heat, something to get you through winter.

Given that lineage, a slow cooker kept topped up on the counter all evening is about as close to the Roman method as you’ll get without a toga. If you want a tested version rather than a Roman guess, the New York Times’ five-star mulled wine recipe is worth bookmarking; it largely cooks out the alcohol, making this a warming tipple rather than a burning blaze of a drink. A nip of brandy is optional for extra heat.

Mulled wines and ciders should be served in mugs, I think. This sweet vintage tankard would be my choice, but I love these modern glass ones too. And while it looks lovely in photos, leave the fricken cinnamon sticks in the cooking pot!

I don’t often rewatch anything, and it’s been 15 years or so since I watched the first season of Downton Abbey, which is just as delicious (yet far more syrupy) as I remember it.

In one of the episodes, Anna is talking Molesley through the wines to be served at dinner:

ANNA
Mr. Carson likes to serve two white wines... A light one for the hors d’oeuvres, then a heavy one with the soup. Keep that going for the fish, and then change to the Claret... There’s a pudding wine, and after that whatever they want in the drawing room with their coffee.

MOLESLEY
Blimey, it’s a wonder they make it up the stairs.

ANNA
They don’t drink much of any of it.

After dinner, the men would have enjoyed port, whisky and cigars (yes, whisky and port) at the dining table while the ladies left for coffee, sherry or a liqueur like Chartreuse or Benedictine.

Setting aside the weird gender politics, the weird class systems, and everything else you need to mentally separate, what I love about this is the after-dinner ritual.

As the evenings become dark and cold so early, I’ve been looking to my small collection of fortified wines. My grandparents would always have had a bottle of “sticky” open for guests, but the ritual has completely fallen out of trend. I see people think nothing of drinking sweet cocktails with their dinner (mind blowing), so it’s curious to me why dessert wine has almost disappeared from vogue.

A high-quality dessert wine is rich and viscous – it’s all raisins and toffee and orange peel and roasted nuts.

So let’s bring it back.

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I was in Rutherglen about 18 months ago visiting a (rather far-flung) client, and popped by Stanton & Killeen afterwards, now in its seventh generation of winemakers, led by mother-and-daughter duo, Wendy and Natasha.

We bought three bottles home, including two vintage fortifieds, which I’m going to dive a bit deeper into next week. But what I want to talk about today is the muscat.

Muscat of Rutherglen is considered one of the world’s most prized dessert wines, and “some of Australia’s greatest gifts to the wine world”, according to Jancis Robinson, who should know.1 There are more than 200 varieties in the Muscat family, but Rutherglen uses only one: Muscat à Petits Grains Rouge (known locally as Rutherglen Brown Muscat).

Muscat of Rutherglen is mostly blended using a modified version of the Spanish solera system. In the classic form, several tiers of barrels sit together. The youngest wine enters at the top tier. Each year, wine is drawn from the oldest row on the bottom for bottling, and that row is topped up from the row above it, which is topped up from the row above that, and so on. Rutherglen producers don’t always run this rigid tiered architecture; instead each classification (Rutherglen, Classic, Grand, Rare) can have its own solera and the annual additions are done based on tastings for house style. Still, wine can take 20+ years to migrate through the whole system.

In the northern hemisphere, Muscat is quite rightly associated with Christmas pudding, which makes it a wintery treat best enjoyed mid-year in Australia (ie. now). In my household, I’m talking about a little wedge of blue cheese and a small pour of muscat by the fire to round off the evening. Please pass the decanter.

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A few ideas to bring Muscat into your life…

• If you’re new to dessert wine, buy a bottle of good Classic Muscat of Rutherglen, the “Goldilocks” tier as Stanton & Killeen calls it. Go down to your local bottle shop and have a look – I bet there’s a whole section of them you’ve never noticed!

• Remember that Muscat is fortified – therefore higher in alcohol than other wines (around 18%). Treat it like a light cocktail or a very heavy wine, and serve small pours. This is a great chance to use those little vintage glasses you can pick up for peanuts in every op-shop.

• While Grand and Rare Muscats are best enjoyed at room temperature, Rutherglen Muscat and Classic Muscats are lovely chilled, so keep in the fridge or pour over ice. Rutherglen Muscat on the rocks is a lovely aperitif, especially in warmer weather. Or experiment with swapping out vermouth in your favourite cocktails.

• Cheese is a classic pairing, but the sweetness of Muscat is also divine with crème brûlée and sticky date pudding. Just thinking about it makes me crave a slice of pecan tart. Or an affogato with Muscat poured over vanilla ice cream instead of Baileys. Or instead of dessert, serve chunks of the best chocolate you can find on a board with a knife, pot of French Press coffee, muscatels and a glass of muscat.

• In winter, create a dedicated tray or trolley for your after-dinner moments, a place where your decanter of Muscat and glassware live. Long live the sweet trolley!

• A bottle of Muscat is a fantastic hostess gift instead of flowers or a random bottle of Shiraz. There’s a bottle at every budget.

If you were browsing through my small collection of wine, you’d have to listen to me make excuses for the lack of Riesling (truth is, I drank it all), share had-to-be-there anecdotes about the purchase of this bottle or that, hear my running shopping list for what I would like to add next...

But when a wine lover can order a mixed case of ready-to-drink wines online and have it delivered just a few days later, the interesting question is: what even is the point of a wine cellar?

Here’s what I think.

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Reason #1: Thrift

The first reason is simple: we cellared because we had no choice.

People have been burying food for centuries. Without necessarily understanding why, they knew that cool, dark and humid environments kept it for longer. The earliest dedicated wine cellar was discovered under the ruined palace of Tel Kabri in modern-day Israel. It’s estimated to be from c.1600BC. It was the Romans (c.27BC-476AD) who standardised subterranean storage on a massive scale for their vast quantities of grain, olive oil and wine (a people after my own heart).

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, sophisticated engineering faded in Europe but Christian monks kept viticulture alive. Monasteries were the agricultural corporations of the Middle Ages – orders like the Cistercians and Benedictines built the cellarium, buried or semi-buried stone warehouses. The cellarium was considered so vital that monasteries appointed a high-ranking monk as “cellarer” to manage inventory and hold total economic control over the food, ale, and wine supplies.

The cellarium was the start of cellars as valuable spaces, and there continue to be many companies from whom you can rent space to keep your wine collection safe. In fact, to fund the maintenance of the Brooklyn Bridge, the city government made the large vaults under the bridge’s anchorage available for rent.1 They were in constant use in the early 20th century to store wine, as they stayed at a consistent 16°C.2

With the arrival of the electric refrigerator in the 1920s, homes no longer required a damp, cold hole in the ground to keep food fresh and wine stable. Cellars were deep-cleaned, insulated, and renamed “basements”, now used for laundry rooms and the bedrooms of teenage sons.

So if we no longer need a cellar, why do we still have them?

Reason #2: Status

Collections of any kind are a social document that shows your taste, your knowledge, your wealth. Prestige has undoubtedly played an enormous role in why we cellar wine.

Throughout the 19th Century, the market for claret took turns in popularity – the United States was the best customer in the 1850s, then Argentina for most of the 1860s through to the 1890s – but always, always the English, where “untold tons of the top growths found their way … into the cellars of private houses, wine merchants, and ancient colleges.”3 Such was the volume of wine being imported that the original owners often died with vast cellars that even their children and grandchildren couldn’t get through (or weren’t interested in). By the 1950s, “England and Scotland had come to be riddled with underground repositories of precious old vintages.”4

This is a core reason why wine auctions took off in the mid-20th century, and it became the perfect performance of wine cellaring. Catalogues of private cellars were published, showing the world (or the wine-nosy world) what you had been buying for the past 50 years. In the late 1960s, Michael Broadbent created for himself a job at Christie’s, effectively reinventing the secondary market for old wine. A magnum of 1864 Lafite sold for $225 in 1967, and went for $10,000 in 1981 – mostly driven by American demand for vintage wine that would line their cellars, only occasionally opened.5 In 1997, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 18,000-bottle cellar was auctioned by Sotheby’s for more than $6 million.6 Last year, William Koch realised $28.8 million at auction with just 1,500 lots.7

We haven’t progressed far here – modern high tech cellars are just as much status symbols, almost regardless of the wine in them. Wine collectors now build state-of-the-art, climate-controlled custom cellars using metal, glass, and dedicated cooling units to mimic... well, the humidity and temperature of ancient limestone caves.

I’m not jealous at all.

Reason #3: Faith in the future

Like gardening, wine collecting is an act of faith in the future. The third reason I think we build cellars is to craft the world we want to see, even if just in our own homes – a cellar of excellent Champagnes for all the celebrations of the future, a collection of Barossa Shirazes before the climate changes too much, early sparkling wines before the new regions take off and become unaffordable.

"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow."
— Audrey Hepburn, who owned a vineyard in Cecchina, just outside Rome

But lying wine down for keeping is a relatively new concept. Before durable glass and reliable corks, it was incredibly difficult to age wine on purpose. It was mostly drunk young because the alternative was, well, vinegar. The cellar was about slowing decay. Once the English produced a strong dark bottle that could lie down and be sealed, only then does cellaring become about cultivating the future rather than just postponing the loss.

Apart from a few rare cases of using amphora, into the 1700s wine had, “for centuries, been fermented in barrels or wooden vats and the finished wine kept in barrels.”8 Wine from France, for example, would leave in 63 gallon (approximately 288L) “hogshead” casks. But, crucially, this wasn’t about ageing. Wine was not intentionally kept in barrels to improve flavour or to see the wine evolve, a practice that would come about a century later.

Now we use bottles in our cellars as a form of museum – we buy a case of a child’s birth-year vintage, bottles to celebrate future victories, bottles that remind us of something or someone. Bottles we grow out of, or allow to grow too long in the tooth awaiting a special enough occasion.

Our cellars become a letter to a future self. What you keep says everything about who you are.

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Many people don’t realise citrus is best (and cheapest) in winter. Especially in Australia, we have so many summer memories of mandarins in lunch boxes, lemons squeezed over prawns, refreshing orange juice on a hot morning. But now is the best time to stock up and preserve however you can for summer, when prices will double.

Here’s some of the things I love about citrus’ history, as well as some favourite things to do with it.

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Citrus is extraordinary.

It is native to Asia (specially South and East Asia), Melanesia (the islands to the north-east of Australia), and Australia itself. Indigenous people in these areas have used and domesticated various species since ancient times. We have at least seven native citrus fruits in Australia, including the finger lime with its caviar-like pearls.

In c. 3000-1500 BC, it spread into neighbouring Micronesia and Polynesia, and then to the Middle East and the Mediterranean via the incense trade route. Finally, it made its way into Africa, Europe and the Americas.

The depiction of lemons and oranges in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (c. 1495–1498) is a well-known historical anachronism. Citrus would have been entirely unknown in the Holy Land or Europe at the beginning of the first century. When da Vinci was painting the mural in Milan, citrus had become prized delicacies in wealthy Italian households. It’s thought that the depiction of citrus in this painting is either a nod to his wealthy patron, or as a satirical symbol of gluttony. Perhaps both?

Anyway, skip forward another century and you have the British building their empire and their navy. In 1601, Captain James Lancaster, in command of the first East India Company fleet, conducted an experiment. One of his ship’s crew received routine doses of lemon juice while the others didn’t. Guess what happened – the poor fellows without lemon juice contracted scurvy.

But although British sailors and naval surgeons were increasingly convinced that citrus fruit would cure scurvy (the French were finding success with horse meat), the physicians who determined medical policy dismissed it, as it didn’t conform to their theories of disease.

So it wasn’t until two hundred years later that lemon or lime juice was part of British sailors’ daily rations – leading to the nickname “limey”. As being in good health became an advantage in naval battles and exploratory missions, citrus allowed the British Empire to expand and explore throughout the next century.

But for most people in the north, citrus was still so rare that it was given as a Christmas gift. The orangerie – a greenhouse prototype – became an aristocratic status symbol. The Parisian Musée de l’Orangerie – now home to Monet’s monumental Water Lilies – was originally constructed for Napoleon III in 1852 as a greenhouse for the Tuileries Palace.

The Scots are credited with making marmalade into a breakfast spread with Seville oranges, which are full of natural pectin. According to folktales, it was good for curing seasickness, and the name was coined when Mary, Queen of Scots’ maid whispered Ma’am est malade (’Ma’am is ill’) when dispensing it to her.

So let us rejoice that it is now so abundant and affordable for us, and make the most of it this winter.

Some of my favourite things to do with winter citrus:

1. dehydrate them for future citrus wheels

2. have friends over for a rainy day winter brunch – make an indulgent baked brioche French toast with a citrusy punch to drink alongside your French press coffee

3. make a batch of limoncello for summer drinks

4. preserve whole organic lemons for sprinkling over friands and summer salads or making into a compound butter for your roast chicken

5. infuse some peels in a batch of magnesium bath salts

What about some of yours?

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I had something similar, except it was a $40 vintage dish that ended up being about half the size I expected. Still, it remains one of my favourite things:

I cackle with glee every time an unsuspecting guest goes to spear the ceramic olive.

Design is serious. It’s not made for laughing at.
Except for trompe l’oeil. Which is why I love it so much.

Trompe-l’œil (French for ‘deceive the eye’; tromp-LOY) is a technique of optical illusion – often of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. It tricks the viewer into perceiving something as real. Like magic tricks, I find myself completely enthralled by trompe l’oeil designs, clapping my hands in delight like a happy baby. The whimsy, the fun!

The phrase started with the artist Louis-Léopold Boilly, who used it as the title of a painting he exhibited in 1800 – although the technique dates further back, often in mural painting used to depict a non-existent exterior view or internal hallway that suggested a much larger house.

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Here are some of my favourite examples.
May you too relish in some whimsy this weekend.

Renaissance artists, such as Hans Memling, started to play around with a hand or an object resting on the frame, a style Ben Cowan nods to in “Memling Folded Hands and Eye”, 2026:

The drapery behind the chaise is actually painted onto the wall:

A beautiful use of colour as well as “dead” space:

I love how modern artists play with trompe l’oiel is a much more impressionistic way, so it’s not so literal":

I would love one of everything from Hermes’ 1952 collection, photographed by Gordon Parks:

There are no actual delft tiles around this fireplace:

Interesting cookies for a Christmas cookie exchange:

Cedric Grolet’s cakes have a firm, well-established place in my algorithm:

Donald O’Connor’s extraordinary athleticism in this Singin’ In The Rain (1952) dance scene is comedic genius with a bit of help from trompe l’oeil:

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One of the design world’s favourite sources of this warm glow is the Akari.

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In the spring of 1951, in post-war Japan, American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi was travelling through Gifu on his way to Hiroshima. Gifu was traditionally the manufacturing city known for its paper lanterns and umbrellas, and as the story goes, “The mayor of Gifu, to whom Noguchi was introduced, appealed to him to help revitalise the lantern industry and offered him a commission.”1

Straight away, Noguchi wanted to re-design the traditional lanterns to use electricity instead of candles. His other innovation: flat-packing. The Akari lamps can be disassembled and collapsed for shipping.2

The result, he called “Akari”, which means “light” – as in illumination, glow – in Japanese. For Noguchi, it was also a play on words: light as in weightlessness. They were handcrafted by Ozeki & Co using traditional methods and materials, including mino, a paper that can be traced to the 8th century and is in itself designated as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.

On release, the art world spent much time wringing its hands, trying to decide if this was art or design – “a distinction Noguchi sought to disrupt”.3 In fact, he saw his light designs as sculpture from the beginning.

There are now over 200 Akari variations – ceiling lights, lamps, floor lights – more than 100 of which were designed within Noguchi’s lifetime. The handcrafted lights have become the archetype for “silent dialogue between Japanese tradition and modernity”4 since their inception, but perhaps more famously a “shorthand for taste but not flashiness”.5

Despite being copied around the world (most notably by IKEA), it remains an icon of mid-century design. There’s something about glowing light that changes a space, something that can’t be captured by a camera. A light that makes you pour another glass, stay a little longer, sink in a little deeper.

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Further links you might enjoy:

• The Strategist was doing the lord’s work when they asked 41 stylish people for a photo of them with their Akari at home. See them all here.

• The inspiration for this short essay came from this Architectural Digest tour of George Nakashima’s home and workshop in Pennsylvania – which features the enormous Akari pictured above. See the full tour here.

• If you find yourself in Kyoto, Gifu is less than two hours away. Spend a charming morning learning about and then making your own washi.

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When I was about 13, I remember going into the big Borders store in Brisbane. Remember that multi-level bookshop with the Mary Ryan’s café underneath? I spent hours in there. My parents could literally have dropped me off and picked me up six hours later and I wouldn’t have noticed they were missing. It is there that I bought a set of books by the designer Kate Spade, and I read this line:

“How about... picking up your aunt at the airport in olive green leather pumps and a camel hair coat.” – Kate Spade, Style

This is everything I wanted to be as a grown up, in one little sentence.

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There are camel-coloured coats, and there are camel hair coats.

Camel hair has been used in textiles for centuries due to its uniquely insulating fibres. It is mentioned as clothing in the Bible1 but it was also used to give structure to tents, carpets and cloaks. Similar to the Kashmir goat, the hair of the two-humped Bactrian camel – native to Mongolia and Central Asia – has both guard hair (the coarse, inflexible outer hair) and an incredibly soft undercoat. Both are collected as the camels naturally moult each spring, although now sometimes the animals are shorn for “efficiency”. Each camel sheds about 2.5kg of hair each year, and only about 30% of what is collected is suitable for apparel.2

It was British manufacturer Jaeger that popularised camel hair3 in 1908 with its woollen thermal underwear, as well as blankets for the war. In 1919, they created the camel hair coat.

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It was polo that brought the camel coat to the US. The Polo Coat was originally the Waiting Coat, as it was worn between chukkers (periods of play in polo). It didn’t have buttons, but just a sash to close it like a dressing gown, and a wide collar that could be flipped up against the wind. It quickly became the unofficial uniform of Ivy League students, whether they played sport or not.

Ralph Lauren built his entire empire on the aesthetics of polo, so it’s no wonder he started his womenswear line in 1972 with a camel polo coat. Laura Lusuardi, Max Mara’s design director emeritus, described the thinking behind the label’s legendary 101801 coat: “It’s about the logic of a man’s wardrobe, but for women.” Designed by Anne Marie Beretta in 1981, it is still the company’s best-seller and hasn’t changed since it debuted four decades ago.4

20 years on from that 13 year old sitting on the floor in Borders, I still don’t own one! I’ve spent two decades wanting the right coat and now that I could buy it, I’ve complicated the wanting further. I still haven’t personally pulled the trigger because Max Mara’s sourcing is really not transparent, and I think that matters for a material like camel hair.

The girlhood dream was running errands in olive green pumps and a camel hair coat. The adult version is trying to navigate the ethics of the fashion world, and schlepping to the airport in comfortable sneakers.

Where to find your own camel hair coat

• Max Mara is the current go-to designer for high-quality camel hair coats. Most other designers are dying wool to a camel shade – which is totally fine if you want the look for a bit less, and aren’t set on the softness of camel hair.

• Vintage options abound on 1stDibs and Etsy.

• A camel hair sweater in the meantime is a practical, affordable proxy.

• And if you need some size 7.5 olive green leather pumps to complete the look, you’re in luck.

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I’ve noticed an aesthetic difference in activewear between my Pilates studio (generally, pretty pastel sets) and the gym floor. Namely: the ruched booty pants.

Well, I keep calling it “ruching” but apparently this technique has a new name: the bum scrunch.

I’m sorry… when did emphasising the butt crack become a thing we did en masse?

The booty riches of my gym make me feel slightly Victorian in my embarrassment, which is fitting – because the technique of ruching is Victorian.

When trying to describe to my partner what ruching is, I came across this contrast of fashion plates:

(Yes, we’re a long way from talking about the gym now.)

These images, side by side, show the change in Victorian fashions from the bell-shaped skirts of the 1850s (mostly supported by a cage crinoline) to the introduction of the bustle in the 1870s to create the new fashionable look: flat at the front, narrow through the hips, with volume behind, “cascading down the back of the dress in an arrangement of ruffles, pleats or flounces”1.

The idea I find myself surprised to be sharing is that ruching has, in fact, been used to highlight the booty for 150 years. Bustles were also sometimes referred to as “bum rolls”... so I guess “bum scrunch” isn’t really that far removed either.

The designers of GymShark have very clearly been tearing through historical fashion textbooks for inspiration. Imagine the moodboards.

I digress.

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There’s evidence of early ruching in 16th century smocks (the basic chemise or shift worn by both men and women as an undergarment), which included embroidered frills across the cuffs and necklines.2 (These frills eventually became their own accessory item: the ruff.)

But despite there being plenty of examples of what we now call ruching, it’s really a few centuries later in the Victorian era that we see it come into its own. Merriam-Webster says the first known use of the word ruche in its current definition was in 1806: “a pleated, fluted, or gathered strip of fabric used for trimming”.3

In Nellie Bly’s account of travelling around the world in 72 days in 1888, she wrote that she packed “a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings”.4 These would have been trims that could be switched out – often hand-tacked onto dresses to “freshen” the look of the dress at the cuffs and collars.

But almost at once, the ruche started to move from a trim detail to the garment design itself.

In this image from 1886, the one from the beginning of this essay, the ruched detail is now on top of the enormous bustle of a faintly equine-looking woman.

The Victorian bustle of the late 1880s is, well… it’s very eye-catching.

A George Du Maurier cartoon in Punch says what we’re all thinking:

Into the 20th century, ruching was further developed as a technique to contour fabrics to the body itself (not to layers upon layers of underclothes structures). “Smocking and ruching helped give form-fitting and stretch to [clothes] before the wide use of elasticised fibres in synthetic fabrics”.5

Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1949 strapless gown is made in silk jersey, which is ruched and gathered in a way that could sit very close indeed to the body.

This (Aussie-made) Bimba bathing costume, made of cotton, features ruching up the two sides as well as along the stomach. It has shirred on the back.

All of these elements combine to turn something as formless as cotton into a swimsuit that hugs the figure. And that ruching technique, of a single line of gathered fabric, often up the side of the waist or along the stomach, is one we start to see more of from here instead of swathes of gathered fabric.

In 1958 elastane (also known as spandex or the brand name Lycra) was invented. But with the invention of elasticised fibres, ruching did not disappear. Instead, designers moved from ruching fabric to give it shape to ruching stretch fabric to make it fit... even tighter, a la this vintage Halson number:

And then… well, then we end up here:

From Victorian trims to mid-century swimwear to Halston gowns of the disco era and now, to the bum scrunch.

The technique – created to solve a specific problem on specific fabrics – outlived its original context. What started as a way to sculpt thick fabrics into form on top of layers and layers of underclothes has become a way of making a stretch fabric fit even more snugly.

But it’s the same technique, used for hundreds of years, to show off a woman’s figure (or her steel and horsehair bustle).

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While it stretches the imagination to think of “craftsmanship” and “activewear” in the same sentence, through the simple history of emphasising women’s bottoms, we can see craft knowledge travelling across material revolutions and decades of fashion.

And now I can’t help but think of bustles attached to the women on the Stairmaster.

Bootifully yours,

I am very often asked a version of “What is the best bottle of wine you’ve ever had?”

I’m not a woman of absolutes, dear reader, but I will tell you about an incredible bottle of wine I’ve had.

David and I were in South Australia for a work conference. We tacked a few days on at the end, which was both a great idea (wine!) and a terrible one (we’d been manning a trade show stall for four days straight and were socially and physically depleted). But we made the most of it, and took the task of stocking our cellar very seriously indeed.

After a day of tastings in the Barossa Valley, we made it to Hentley Farm about half an hour before they closed.

They said of course we could try some wines, but their usual tastings were finished for the day. Would we be happy to stand at the counter?

Standing at the counter was the tip of my expectations. But Hentley Farm is not a standing-at-the-counter kind of place. There, you arrive on time – by helicopter, if you so choose – and take a seat in your designated spot in a beautifully renovated tasting room for what is essentially a degustation. You choose one of the pre-designed tasting menus and leave the rest in their very capable hands: paced for you, with tasting notes and expert commentary.

I hadn’t realised I was asking for something exceptional.

If I’d known, I honestly wouldn’t have gone, being the people-pleasing goody-two-shoes I am. One mustn’t ask for any special favours.

But everyone seemed happy enough to let us sip a few wines, standing at the till.

We bought a couple of bottles (we bought a case.)

As we were packing up, our hostess asked if we had a couple more minutes – she wanted to check something.

She returned with a decanter containing perhaps half a glass of the 2021 Clos Otto Shiraz. Someone had left their bottle unfinished; she wanted us to try it.

Oh, that wine.
Those blackberries, those cherries.
A gift of a few sips, and I’ve told you a whole story about it.

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The cellar door experience has shifted – from counter pour to reservation-only degustation – over about twenty years, but not uniformly.

Within fifteen minutes of Hentley Farm – where reservations are (I now know) essential and timed, and the offering fixed – is Rockford Wines, famed for its Basket Press, one of the country’s most collectable Shirazes. If you want a bottle, you either buy it from your local bottle shop at a substantial mark-up, or you can buy three bottles from the cellar door, in person, no delivery.

The Rockford cellar door is centred around the original 1850s barn. The floor is brick. The posters on the wall are fading. Apart from a wood-burner filling the small room with heat and scent, there’s only the counter. You wait for a spot to open up, sip some wines, purchase your favourites, and move on.

In the Hunter Valley, the contrast is just as sharp. There’s Mount Pleasant’s $4-million refurbished cellar door, with its commissioned art, stiff Chesterfield sofas and floor-to-ceiling vineyard views; and there’s Tyrrell’s, a small corrugated tin shed so rustic it may as well have wood shavings on the floor.1

All four of these wineries produce wines that win major awards and sell for hundreds – sometimes thousands – of dollars a bottle.

It’s the hospitality that couldn’t be more different.

Two philosophers have theories about hospitality that sit usefully in tension with each other.

Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, argued that exchange between people creates obligation. For Mauss, there is no such thing as a free gift. He cites the three duties: to give, to receive, and to repay.2 The winery gives you a tasting so that you buy wine. Then they offer you a membership or an exclusive so you buy more. The cycle continues.

Jacques Derrida argued that hospitality must always come with conditions. Truly unconditional hospitality – giving your guest everything, including the home itself – becomes a paradox: in giving the guest everything, the host gives up the very capacity to host. For Derrida, unconditional hospitality is impossible.3

But neither of these frameworks can account for the sips of Clos Otto, which were given after we’d already paid, when there was nothing left to receive in return.

Which is where xenia comes in – the code of guest-friendship – which shares Mauss’ reciprocal structure and Derrida’s conditional logic, but adds something both of them exclude: generosity.

In ancient Greece, hospitality toward guests and strangers was a moral obligation, understood as a duty to honour Zeus Xenios, patron of strangers and travellers.4 Homer is full of it. Eumaeus feeds Odysseus before he knows who he is. The Trojan War itself was justified as a violation of xenia – Paris was a guest of Menelaus, but seriously transgressed by, you know, abducting his host’s wife, which is why the Achaeans understood going to war over it as a sacred obligation, not just a political one.5 In a belief system where gods walked among ordinary people, the risk of offending one was entirely real. So, just in case, you be nice to everyone.

Stripped of the theology, xenia contains two basic principles: the respect owed from host to guest, and the respect owed from guest to host. It combines the reciprocal and the conditional – be a certain kind of guest, arrive at a certain time, purchase something – with generosity, regardless of whether you’ve arrived by helicopter or you’re just curious, a little rain-sodden, and pleased to be here.

Something does fall away when the counter pour becomes a reservation-only tasting: spontaneity. But the stumble-in surprise only happened because the rest of the operation was running at a level that could afford it.

I couldn’t have had those sips of Clos Otto without the full Hentley Farm apparatus making them possible.

The well-educated, well-trained hostess knew what she was pouring because she worked somewhere that takes wine seriously. Where a $250 bottle gets opened for a guest and left unfinished. The ceremony of the degustation experience – the fixed menu, the timed arrival, the price – is the infrastructure that sustains generosity. Is it possible, in this moment of the hospitality industry, to offer one without the financial security of the other?

Danny Meyer, in Setting the Table, draws a distinction between service and hospitality.6 Both are necessary. I think we would all love to see improvements to basic service in most of our local venues – efficient and polite staff who know what they’re doing and perform their tasks to a standard befitting the style of the business.

But it’s hospitality that finds you where you are, reads you correctly, and offers something you didn’t ask for. The Hentley Farm hostess read us. She offered that wine to people she’d correctly identified as interested, curious, not experts but genuinely engaged with what was in the glass. That instinct – recognising the guest who will appreciate the gesture – is the human element (the hospitality) no tasting menu can plan in advance.

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When people ask me how to learn more about wine, my advice is always simple: drink more of it. And one of the best ways to learn is through tastings.

I’ve been fortunate to go to cellar and distillery doors all around the world. Some are highly polished and exclusive. Some you knock on the door and hope the winemaker is home today. Some become lunch invitations and friends. There’s room for all of it, but I know which I’d choose.

So go to your local wine region, jostle for space at the stand up counter, ask interesting questions, buy a bottle or two, and show your appreciation.

Now, to answer your initial question – what is my favourite wine?

Well, Clos Otto is my favourite wine I’ve had three sips of.

There’s something in my kitchen drawer I reach for every day. It’s a spatula-stirring-spoon sort of thing. (A spatu-spoon?)

When I have reason to go to Hobart, I collect a few more for the friends I’ve made since the last trip – and every time I give one away, I get a text a few weeks later saying it is the new favourite utensil.

(I do tend to be friends with people who have favourite utensils.)

I try to make an effort to go off the beaten path when I travel. Salamanca Place is very much the beaten path, but during a trip to Hobart five years ago, I didn’t have time to go further and wandered into Tiger Ina Papera Unique Woodcrafts (no website) for some souvenirs.

That $15 price tag is the same, regardless of the timber you choose – huon pine, sassafras, blackwood, myrtle etc. And it is one of the rare occasions you’ll find huon pine the same price as other options.

I remembered recently that the lady at Tiger Ina Papera had mentioned something about huon pine being preserved under water. One of those facts, placed in some corner of my mind, that randomly resurfaced. My partner and I were talking about that huon pine spatu-spoon thing and…

Wait, how and why and where is it preserved under water?
Neither of us could remember.
Did we even ask?

While trying to answer that question this week, I stumbled across Recoil by the Tasmania-born, London-based designer Brodie Neill.

There is 3.5km of timber veneer in this spectacular tabletop, coiled into a concentric design, with each wrapping around the last. There’s a visual echo of a tree’s annual growth rings, but the oval shape adds a design tension that takes away anything so obvious.

It was shown at London Craft Week in 2021 with the support of the Tasmanian Government and Lark Distillery (only in Tassie would this be a funding partnership). The National Gallery of Victoria acquired it in 2023.

It’s not on display.

The NGV has it in their collection – which is not the same as being able to see it, let alone use it, let alone stain it with red wine circles as is my wont. A table, by definition an object of use, made from the most slowly accumulated material on earth, preserved alongside the paintings.

The table's trajectory feels like a diagram of something: a public material that begins common, becomes celebrated and precious, and ends up behind closed doors. Unreachable, but saved.

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The timber veneer for Recoil was sourced from a company called Hydrowood.

In the 1980s, the Pieman River on Tasmania’s West Coast was dammed to generate hydropower, flooding thousands of hectares of rainforest. The trees didn’t disappear. They’re still there, standing upright in the lake bed – dead now for more than 40 years, but centuries old when they drowned.

What I had misunderstood was that huon pine isn’t intentionally kept underwater; the submerged forest is a remnant, not a reserve. It is illegal to cut living huon pine, and Hydrowood’s proposition is that the timber in Lake Pieman is a recoverable resource. And so, they harvest it.

“The trees are dead … the water replaces the sap in the trees,” Hydrowood’s Project Manager Darryn Crook told the ABC in 2015. At that time, he was hopeful about what they’d find:

“You’ll get eucalypt, myrtle, black hearted sassafras, normal sassafras, a bit of celery top pine, if we are lucky we’ll find some huon pine.”

A specially-designed hydraulic harvester cuts the trees at the base rather than pulling them out, causing minimal disturbance to the lake bed. It took three years to go from concept to first tree felled. You can see the machine in action in this video.

Hydrowood makes an environmental case for their work: the decaying trees release methane, which traps heat at 20-30x the rate of carbon dioxide, and recovering the timber interrupts that process.

It reads like a media release. It may also be perfectly true.
These things are not mutually exclusive.

The argument is doing more than making an environmental case – it's providing cover. Beautiful objects with ethical stakes have always needed a provenance story; something that lets the buyer, the designer, the institution feel on the right side of history. Hydrowood's methane argument is exactly that story. It is what lets a designer use ancient timber and call it a waste material, what lets a gallery acquire the result and call it conservation.

It’s not necessarily incorrect that Hydrowood is a waste material they are salvaging; it’s not necessarily unethical to harvest it, use it, admire it. But it’s complicated, isn’t it?

We’ve become accustomed, broadly, to the idea that timber is the ethical material. Choose wood over plastic; choose natural over synthetic. And there’s truth in that, for fast-growing, abundantly sourced materials. But huon pine takes a thousand years to reach maturity.

The design world’s appetite for beautiful, storied timber is not the same thing as a preference for sustainable materials. The distinction rarely gets made, because the provenance story smooths it over.

The forest was flooded in the name of clean energy. The recovered timber becomes veneer (pardon the pun) for a luxury object that a gallery acquires. Journalists have focused on the clever mechanics, but that complex legacy doesn’t get named in the discussions of Hydrowood I’ve read.

The forest was a public resource. It is now harvested by a private company. The table is institutional property.

Huon pine is not actually a pine at all, but a conifer native to the wet southwestern corner of Tasmania – one of the rainiest places on earth. It can take 1,000 years for a tree to reach its full height of 30 metres. The trees recovered from Lake Pieman are estimated to be between 200 and 2,000 years old.

A 1996 research paper found that the oldest living specimens “provide a summer temperature reconstruction extending back beyond 800 BC”.1 The rings of a huon pine are a climate record; a cross-section tells the story of more than two millennia of Tasmanian summers.

The spoon in my kitchen drawer might be from a tree that is “only” 200 years old, and it was likely considerably older. That faint smell when I hold it – the natural oil that makes huon pine resistant to rot, that kept the Lake Pieman trees intact for decades underwater – has been accumulating in that wood since before European settlement. Probably much longer than that.

The $15 price tag of the spatu-spoon is an anomaly; a moment in time. The material hasn’t yet fully registered its own scarcity in the market for small pieces made from unused off-cuts. But markets catch up to scarcity. And the design world has already begun the process of storying this material – celebrating it, making it desirable, giving it the kind of cultural weight that makes it worth acquiring.

When a material becomes storied enough, something happens to it: it gets elevated out of use. The Recoil table shows this beautifully. One of the most celebrated objects made from huon pine is a table no one eats at, in a collection no one can visit.

Is the logical endpoint of our admiration an object that can no longer be touched?

The material will go one of two ways from here: into institutions as significant acquisitions, or into the hands of people who can afford to own significant things. We are probably the last generation who will own a huon pine spoon casually, staining it with bolognese sauce. The $15 spoon is a relic of the brief window when this material was still, briefly, democratic.

How do we admire extraordinary objects without the admiration itself creating loss? I don’t have a clean answer. The more we understand what huon pine is – what it holds, what it took to form – the more we participate in the process that prices it out of reach.

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The Recoil table in the NGV collection. The spoon in my kitchen drawer. Both made from a tree that takes a millennium to grow, that functions as a climate archive, that the law now protects precisely because we nearly lost it.

We craft from it because it’s extraordinary; its extraordinariness is partly because we nearly destroyed it. That’s not a comfortable loop to sit in.

But the protected living trees will outlast us. In the Huon Valley, there’s a short walk to a stand of huon pine that was old before the logging, old before any of the decisions that nearly ended them. You can walk in and stand under one and smell it. That same sweetness – still there, still accumulating, going back further than any of us can hold in mind.

And it belongs to anyone with the time to get there.

Is there a hierarchy of guilty scrolling?

TikTok at the top (I am not on TikTok, so it must be true), followed by Instagram and Facebook, then perhaps… YouTube?

The point of this question is to assume we are all on the same page that Substack scrolling isn’t a problem.

Anyway, recently during a Substack scroll, I saw an image that stopped me in my tracks.

Using Google’s reverse image search (a technique I think I learned from … on Substack), I pulled the image to find out where I might find such a vase for myself.

Ugh, dear reader, why must I have such good taste?

The vase featured on Storm Journal’s post was in fact a bronze Just Anderson vase, valued north of $1,500.

So, down a rabbit hole I go...

Or, so I tried.

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I thought, really, I could just do a bit of desktop research and whip together a bit of history on Andersen for us all.

I was wrong.

This is partly because my Anglo-dominant brain assumed the entire world’s archives are written in English... but even when I self-corrected that, I could find very little in Danish either.1 His work seems to be admired in the US – and increasingly appreciated in his home country, where the prices are rising – but all I can find is a general, surface-level knowledge of his life and career.

Why do we know so little about him?

Does the information exist but is not digitised?
Does it exist but my researching skills need sharpening?
Does it exist but no one so far has been particularly interested in collating?

I need to know more!

Justice for Just!

Here’s what I’ve managed to piece together:

Born in 1884, Andersen started to train in silversmithing in the early 1900s. His wife Alba introduced him to Mogens Ballin (one of the forefathers of Danish Art Nouveau) and then he worked with the revered silver firm Peter Hertz.

In 1918, he opened his own studio with Alba in Copenhagen, where he produced silverware, but increasingly also objects of pewter, bronze and his own alloy, disko (sometimes Anglicised as “disco”, which, while funny, doesn’t accurately link to Diskobugten, the namesake bay in Danish Greenland where Andersen spent childhood summers).

By the 1930s, in addition to work in his own name, he was designing for Georg Jensen. He had showrooms in Berlin, London, New York and Los Angeles, and his designs came to span Art Nouveau, Scandinavian neoclassical and Art Deco.

He was well-regarded in his day, as this excerpt from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin shows:

“Another notable example of contemporary Danish decorative arts is a handsome bronze vase by Just Andersen of Copenhagen ... Bulbous in shape, with a long tapering neck and wide flaring lip, it has fine style of a simple, solid variety. By means of a superb patina of autumnal greens, reds, and browns, the artist has enlivened the austere form without in any way cheapening or confusing it.”2

Andersen passed away in 1943, and Georg Jensen eventually bought his firm from Alba, who had continued the business for some time after Andersen’s death. My assumption is that Georg Jensen now owns the proprietary alloy recipe for disko – although I can’t find anything about that. Where did this material go?!

Disko could be Andersen’s main legacy. An alloy like bronze – but made of lead and antimony instead of copper – it was easier to work with and cheaper to produce.

What is interesting about this is that Andersen wasn’t just a designer that made nice things cheaper, but one working at a moment when luxury stopped being just about material.

Art Deco (and Art Nouveau to a lesser extent) wasn’t just about glamour; it was about manufactured glamour. It was about making modern life feel elevated through materials that weren’t traditionally precious. This was a time of (slightly nutty-looking) chrome, stainless steel, glass, and nickel silver.

It was also the time of Bakelite, an early plastic that could be shaped easily and inexpensively with moulds. It was often reinforced with fillers such as wood flour or asbestos, and then dyed a dark colour to hide them. The result could resemble timber – like in this now-classic design, the ECKO AD-65 radio, which looks almost as if it has a walnut burr case:

What is striking is the contrast to the preceding Gothic Revival and Arts & Crafts design movements, which were obsessed with the trueness of materials. The materiality of a space or an object was assigned the role of propriety. According to John Ruskin, a leading thinker of the Gothic Revival, anything clever (such as “painting of wood to represent marble”) was a “surface deceit”:

The rise of “honest imitation” in the 1930s – where disko was not pretending to be bronze, but still gave the experience of bronze – may be a version of engineered stone versus marble debate we have now.

Is the imitation material lesser than or “tacky”?

Certainly not in this case, where Andersen’s diskometal pieces are now valued just as highly as his actual bronze pieces.

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While there’s quite a popular market for his work, there’s so little I can find beyond the pieces themselves. I’m so curious as to why this attractive, inexpensive alloy died out. And what happened to the archives of Hr. Ib Just Andersen?

Please share any intel you have! I’m dying to know more.

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While at first the $1,500 seems outlandish, now I realise his significance, it starts to seem reasonable... and sensible in the face of an inevitable revival. What I’m hearing actually (from my own brain), is that this is a very good investment:

David will be thrilled.

Auntie Lou-Lou (as I’ve always called her) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, completely out of the blue, at 54. All funds raised go to the Shake It Up foundation, which ensures every single cent donated goes straight towards research to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Enter the raffle

April has arrived with that distinct shift in the air. The mornings and evenings are properly crisp here in Toowoomba now, but the days still open up – windows thrown wide, sunlight streaming in, just enough warmth to linger a little longer outside.

We somehow went from having no backyard to a fully landscaped one in about four weeks, thanks to the energies of my stubborn determined partner. Despite the cool, we are out there several evenings a week with the fire pit, and as I write this, our new 8-seater outdoor table has just arrived. I’ve already planned menus for long, lazy Sunday lunches that stretch into the afternoon (bring a jacket). This is my favourite kind of in-between season. Not quite cosy yet, not summer either. Something fresher, sharper. Crisp.

I kept coming back to that word – crisp – and realised it was everywhere. The crunch of gravel underfoot. A lettuce leaf. Driving through the country with the windows down, cool air rushing in. Fresh bed linen, still faintly warm from the sun. Bringing an extra layer so you can stay outside just a little longer.

We’ve had guests upon guests these past few weeks, and there’s so much to cook right now. The last of the tomatoes, but roasted instead of raw. The gentle return of puddings – I made a sticky date over the weekend that was so simple and such a hit (I can share the recipe if you like). Long lunches in the sun, followed by lighting the fire as the temperature drops.

So this month’s theme is CRISP. A collection of things that feel clean, bright, and quietly energising – for this fleeting window before everything turns properly cosy.

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Here are some links and ideas for this month:

1. A Spotify autumn playlist for cool weather, soft layers, head-clearing walks and coffee-in-hand energy:

2. The Trudon Abd El Kader candle is on my wishlist for my new “salon” room. Crisp, but with more personality. Mint, ginger, tea and tobacco gives it that brisk, energising, windows-open feel rather than a sleepy, heady autumn scent.

3. From the Essays of Fritz Kocher in The Paris Review has gorgeous autumn language about fresher air, sparkling mornings and chilly nights.

4. The crisp snap of a cheese bikkie – nibbled while reading a book by the fire pit with a glass of wine – may be heaven itself. Here’s a recipe if you don’t have one in your family (you will now).

5. There is nothing quite so crisp as a dry riesling. This one is super well priced, from one of the world’s best producers.

6. I used to write notes and cards and letters all the time, but now it’s mostly (sometimes) thank you notes for family Christmas presents. This post from has spurred me back into the world of crisp notecards. Please let me know your favourite brands – I’m on the hunt!

7. There’s nothing like opening the crisp pages of a new book. I am tearing through Iluka by Cassie Stroud currently, and thoroughly loving it after a bit of a reading stalemate. Here’s some of the titles on my TBR pile:

• Howards End – E.M. Forster

• Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Near to the Wild Heart – Clarice Lispector

• Seven – Joanna Kavenna

• Frenchman’s Creek – Daphne du Maurier

8. I understand that most of us are actively trying not to go for long drives right now, so while I think an Autumn drive through the country is one of the pleasures of life, perhaps we should swap it out for a long walk through the countryside. Find a new bushwalking track and get yourself out into the fresh, crisp air.

9. With the landscaping project comes a new veggie patch, and I’ve loved literally getting my hands dirty after a three-year gardening hiatus. I can already taste the crisp lettuce leaves. My goal is to ultimately be self-sufficient in herbs and salad leaves, and Happy Valley Seeds is running a crazy 50c/$1 seed pack discount currently.

10. Here is the link to that raffle for Parkinson’s again. If you can, we would appreciate your support so much. (Except hands-off my book pack prizes please! ;)

Image credits

Row 1: Classic Scarf | Ellei Home | Autumn Picnic

Row 2: Lettuce | DIY ‘Cheers’ Linen Napkins | Swedish Death Cleaning

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Nothing catastrophic, nothing specifically wrong (in my life) – just a kind of background weight that makes everything feel slightly harder than it should.

So this week, I wanted to keep things light.

Not in a frivolous way, but in a grounded, practical one. A few things I’ve genuinely loved this month – things I’ve used, cooked, read, or returned to – without turning it into another overwhelming list of recommendations.

Right now, I personally don’t need more things to consider. I think we just need a few things that are actually worth keeping.

LINKS

Beauty & Personal Care

• Bondi Boost brush

• Mecca SPF50+ Brightening Serum

• Heatless curling rods

• Heatless curls tutorial:

Books

• Wuthering Heights

• John Ruskin (Selected Writings)

Home & Lifestyle

• Candlesticks

• Koala Eco cleaning kit

• Country Road jumper

Food

• Smitten Kitchen crispy pan pizza

• Piment d’Espelette

• Mimi Thorisson cookbook

• Jane & Jimmy Barnes’ cookbook

Watch & Listen

• Mr Inbetween (Binge)

• LRB Podcast (Early Modern News episode)

• Marketing ATM podcast

Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase – at no extra cost to you.

The internet has a strange definition of taste.
Apparently, it means knowing what to buy next.

Scroll for a few minutes and you’ll see the pattern.

Someone recommending the perfect linen trousers.
Someone else sharing the five books you must read this month.
A skincare routine you didn’t know you needed.
A home aesthetic you’re suddenly convinced your house lacks.

Taste, according to the algorithm, is a constant stream of upgrades.

Better objects. Better routines. Better versions of your life.

And because the algorithm is very good at what it does, the recommendations are often excellent. I do want those trousers. Those books do seem like my style.

That’s what makes it dangerous.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is never neutral; it’s shaped, learned, and reinforced by the environments we move through. Which makes it all the more fragile in an environment designed to constantly override it.

When every scroll presents twenty new possibilities, taste shifts from something internal – something built, tested, refined – to something external.

Instead of developing preferences, we start collecting them. And eventually, everything begins to blur.

Wardrobes full but unsatisfying.
Reading lists a mile long.
Homes filled with things that once felt right, but now feel strangely random.

A life assembled from very good recommendations… that could belong to anyone.

It took me a while to realise that the solution didn’t lie in buying more things, things that felt even more “me”. It was a lack of subtraction.

Because you don’t refine taste by adding more, you refine it by removing what doesn’t belong.

Don’t get me wrong: subtraction doesn’t mean deprivation. I love beautiful things — clothes, books, furniture, stationery, art. The problem isn’t wanting things, it’s in wanting everything at once – for a hypothetical life.

When you remove the noise, something surprising happens: your preferences stop competing with everyone else’s. They start to emerge.

And that’s where taste actually begins.

Step one is identifying which parts of your life are out of alignment or overwhelming you. For most people this tends to be a few obvious categories:

• your wardrobe

• your home

• your digital world

• your reading list

• your hobbies

Anywhere you feel slightly paralysed by choice.

Once you’ve identified the area, ask a deceptively simple question:

What is this actually for?

What do you want your wardrobe to do for you?
What do you want Instagram to do for you?
What do you want your reading to do for you?

Until you answer that, everything feels equally important and you don’t have a filter to make decisions through. But once you have the purpose, you can reverse engineer the decisions.

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Digital Inputs

My biggest source of overwhelm was social media, email newsletters and subscriptions. There were simply too many people in my eyes and ears at all times.

Recommending products.
Sharing routines.
Suggesting books.
Selling aesthetics.

Even good recommendations become noise once it was at scale.

So I did a serious unfollow audit.

Now the accounts I follow are all genuinely inspiring to me – no news (I get that through podcasts), no accounts that just encourage mindless spending, no accounts that make me feel negative.

Now when I scroll Instagram, I get inspired – which often gets me off my phone and doing something (sometimes with a tape measure, a sight that fills my partner with dread).

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Wardrobe Overwhelm

Interestingly, I have the opposite problem to many women: I under-buy clothes.

I wear things until they are threadbare… which sounds virtuous, but actually isn’t how I want to present myself.

And I realised earlier this year that the real issue wasn’t actually the shopping – it was decision fatigue. There are simply too many options.

So instead of wandering through shops hoping inspiration would strike, I built a framework for this coming Autumn season.

I started with the outfits I actually need (mostly working from home, to be honest!), and then used Pinterest to find outfits I wanted to be able to recreate in my own way.

I then compiled them into a list of individual pieces, many of which applied to 3-4 outfits – for Autumn, items like fitted knitwear, dark wash jeans, and ballet flats.

Then I looked at what I already owned, and what I was missing.

From there I created a simple list of priority purchases – the items that showed up the most in the “outfit formulae”. Now instead of buying randomly, I chip away at the list.

And items that aren’t on the list don’t get bought at all.

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Content Consumption

The same thing happened with reading.

For years my bookcase, StoryGraph and library holds list were chaos.

Books I wanted to read.
Books I felt I should read.
Books recommended by other people – mostly on social media and emails.

I will not be able to read every book I want to if I live to 200, but my study sprints give that consumption a structure.

Books, essays, lectures and documentaries are chosen because they help answer a particular question.

(Yes, I absolutely still read and watch just for the sheer joy of it too.)

Hobbies

The same principle applies to hobbies. I’m interested in many things:

• embroidery and tapestry

• home and garden

• cooking

• calligraphy

• writing

• and so much more

But trying to pursue all of them simultaneously turns everything into background noise. So I focus on a couple of specific projects at a time.

Right now, for example, I’m surrounded by gardening books. The focus for this season is making our backyard usable.

If I wanted to do some calligraphy, I’d set myself a project to complete. After I finish that project, I can work on a different hobby or a different calligraphy project.

Everything else can wait.

Subtraction isn’t just about having less; it’s about making room for the things that matter most. When you reduce noise:

• your taste becomes clearer

• your priorities become visible

• your decisions become easier

Taste doesn’t emerge from abundance. It emerges from clarity.

If you want to try this approach, start small. Choose an area of your life that feels out of alignment or completely overwhelming.

Ask yourself: what do I want this to look like?
What do I want my wardrobe to do for me?
What do I want Instagram to do for me?

And then make a plan to reverse engineer that. AI can be a great tool for this if you don’t intuitively know (or are battling overwhelm).

This week I’m doing four simple acts of subtraction:

• continue to unfollow accounts and unsubscribe from newsletters that add noise rather than inspiration

• choose one priority purchase from my Autumn wardrobe list

• not borrow any books from the library until I’ve finished my current reads!

Nothing extreme. Just enough pressure to make my choices clearer.

• In last week’s vlog, I shared plenty of home updates – new antiques, my freshly painted “salon” room, ideas and plans for the backyard

• On Instagram…

  • I shared some of the objects I reach for every single day (all linked here)

  • I named three pieces of artwork on my wish list

A little life catch-up this week: a trip to Brisbane, a long lunch at Aunty off James Street, and some very satisfying progress at home.

In this vlog I share a few recent house updates as it all slowly comes together — including a beautiful antique table find, a family heirloom cabinet, and the beginnings of what David has started calling my “salon”.

There’s also a look at some recent reading (from Agatha Christie to art history and psychology), a couple of skincare and hair products I’ve been trying, and a peek at the backyard plans as we start dreaming up the garden.

It’s one of those in-between weeks — a bit of work, a bit of rearranging, a bit of reading, and a lot of ideas (with next to no execution).

Timestamps

0:00 Early start and a trip to Brisbane
3:18 A family heirloom wardrobe moves into the room
4:26 Why I chose a round table for the space
7:46 Exploring Empire Revival (Paddington Antique Centre)
9:27 Finding the perfect antique table on Facebook Marketplace
12:20 Future backyard plans
13:10 Three new antique pieces in their new home
19:00 The newly painted green salon
20:14 Recent Mecca skincare and hair products
23:58 Current reading: art history, psychology and novels
33:08 The finished study room tour
35:23 Vintage Marie Claire prints from France

Links

Aunty
Empire Revival (nee Paddington Antique Centre)
The Rest Is History podcast

Mecca To Save Face SPF 50+ Brightening Sun Serum
La Roche-Posay sunscreen (not tinted!)
Oribe Anti-Humidity Hair Spray

Falling Rocket — Paul Thomas Murphy
The Life You Want — Adam Phillips
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case — Agatha Christie
Possession — A.S. Byatt
The Secret History — Donna Tartt
Peacock & Vine — A.S. Byatt

You don’t take off by rushing. You take off by clearing space. For me, March is going to be about readiness, not acceleration.

Here are a few links and ideas I’ve been collecting this month under the theme “clear the runway.”

Not in the hyper-productive sense. More in the quiet, practical sense: removing a few small frictions so the week (or the season) can begin with a bit more space.

Some of these are beautiful things. Some are useful rituals. A few are ideas that have been rattling around my head lately.

All of them, in their own way, help create a little room for take-off (for me this month, take-off includes my 33rd year!)

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Here are some links and ideas for clearing the runway this month:

1. Tomorrow I’m posting on IG about how to make your weekends feel longer, and spoiler alert: the solution is not spending all of Sunday doing a reset for the week ahead.

2. I have been making this recipe once a week since I found it. It is so incredibly easy, absolutely foolproof, and delicious for a weekend dinner for two people. We top it with whatever is already in the fridge. One less dinner to think about (after you’ve chosen a bottle of red to accompany it on the couch).

3. I love both of these Emily Dickinson lines – although I admit that I find them much more joyful on their own that in their original context!

The Truth must dazzle gradually;
Or every man be blind.

I am out with lanterns
Looking for myself.

4. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes series captures where sea and sky meet in a perfect horizon line. Pure visual reset.

5. I have always tried to set aside an hour at the end of my workday as a “Power Hour” to finish off random emails and things. But my friend Monique swears by starting her day with a Power Hour to clear everything so she can focus. Something to experiment with!

6. While you’re at it, cannot advocate enough for spending two minutes at the end of your day planning our tomorrow, and 10 minutes cleaning your kitchen before going to bed. Both perfect runway clearers.

7. Minimalist piano and electronic build. This song just feels like you’re preparing for something…

7. Clearing the runway often means saying “no” – so it’s worth revisiting the work of the Queen of No, Jenny Odell.

8. And while we’re on The Guardian, it’s worth re-reading Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life.

9. I’ve been thinking about a few items I’ll need as the weather starts to cool (not a March problem when I lived in Brisbane!) and thinking in outfit formulae has been a bit of a game-changer in removing decisions. is the go-to source if you need some inspiration here.

10. This is a Substack rabbit hole. mentioned this article by , which quotes ’s article:

These five prompts come from Grace Clarke’s brilliant annual planning guide, which includes AI prompts as a tool for inner work, not just output. It’s worth saving, you can find it here. Grace thinks about AI differently than almost anyone I’ve found (she also recommended WORKWORK by Erin Falter).

Creative Currency

Prompts to help you think more clearly

Most AI prompt content is about doing more, faster. But you can also use it to know yourself better…

Read more

6 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Bianca Wendt

Image credits

Row 1: Vintage Air France poster | Marina Zhukova | Hiroshi Sugimoto

Row 2: Canva | Once Wed | Karen Bloomfield

Row 3: Kelly Love | Orient Express | Cocktail Shaker

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For a long time, I thought calm was a personality trait. (One that I did not possess.)

Some women just seemed naturally composed. Unbothered. Organised without effort. The kind of women whose homes were tidy, whose bodies were lean and strong, whose finances were handled, whose days appeared to unfold without (too much) friction.

I assumed they were simply wired differently to me – me, whose hands were so firmly holding the steering wheel of life that they were starting to lose circulation.

When I look back at the periods of my life where I felt the most anxious, it wasn’t because I was doing too much. It was because I was doing too much without structure.

Ambition without scaffolding.
Desire without scheduling.
Spending without tracking.
Learning without boundaries.

So much anxious energy. Almost no focus.

From the outside, it looked productive, I think. From the inside, it felt like chaos.

Brianna Wiest writes that many of the most accomplished people in history adhered to rigid routines. I think we’ve probably all come across a version of this.

I would wake up at 5am, do some yoga, try journalling… for about two days, before burning myself out/getting bored, and going back to over-planning (flailing).

I remember Tonya Leigh saying that a woman who is calm about money is disciplined about money. And I 100% agree with her – but I had misunderstood discipline. What I didn’t understand is that discipline isn’t about control – it’s about containment.

My mind, left alone, is not serene. It is opportunistic. It will persuade me I need to research one more thing. Buy one more thing. Commit to one more thing. Start one more thing.

When I don’t decide my day in advance, my impulses decide it for me. And impulses are noisy.

I’m finding that my (new found) calm doesn’t come from softness – it’s not matcha, linen notebooks and silk pyjamas – it comes from knowing.
Knowing what I’m spending.
Knowing how and when I’m training each day.
Knowing what I’m studying each week.
Knowing when I’m done for the day and can stop working.

When I don’t know, I feel it physically.

Unstructured ambition has been one of my biggest sources of anxiety. I want to be stronger, wealthier, better read, more stylish – but wanting without architecture is exhausting.

What I realise now is that the calm I admire in other women is not passive. It’s built.

If calm is built, then for me it needs anchors.

Not dramatic reinventions. Not entire personality shifts. Just small, repeated structures that hold the week in place.

Financial Discipline

Money has always been a source of tension for me.

I have never, in my entire career, had a permanent, full-time job. And this had led to a fluctuation between panic-checking my bank accounts every few hours (even though I knew nothing had changed) to avoiding it altogether and just hoping it would all be fine.

Neither is great.

Now, every Monday, I sit down and review my numbers. Not with shame. Not with panic. Just with attention and gratitude for how far I’m come. Investments and transfers are all automated so I don’t rely on motivation or finding “the extra”. I’ve defined what discretionary spending actually is, instead of letting it blur into everything.

Nothing magical happened; I just stopped guessing.
I’ve never felt more calm about money in my life.

Time Discipline

I used to wake up and decide my day based on how I felt.

If I felt focused, I studied.
If I felt motivated, I trained.
If I felt social, I reached out.

Now, I plan my week before it begins. Priority projects and tasks are set. Gym sessions are locked in, study blocks are defined. Thursday and Friday mornings are kept as clear as possible, to allow for spill over.

This all exists whether I wake up inspired or not.

I don’t find this structure restrictive. It feels relieving. I don’t spend the day negotiating with myself anymore. The decision has already been made.

Environmental Discipline

I underestimated how much visual disorder unsettled me.

A sink full of coffee cups. A cluttered desk. Too many tabs open. It’s subtle, but it accumulates.

I’ve started doing a two-minute office shut down and a ten-minute reset at night. Just cleaning the desk up so it’s tidy when I start the next day, and cleaning up the kitchen and laying out the coffee equipment each night.

It isn’t about perfection, but I know that when I come down to a clean kitchen in the morning, my first coffee just tastes that much better!

Social Discipline

I like saying yes. I like being invited. I like being in motion.

But I’ve noticed how long emotional residue lingers when I overextend myself. An event I didn’t need to attend. A commitment I agreed to out of politeness.

So I’m practising fewer commitments – and leaving earlier than I used to.

It feels uncomfortable sometimes, because as the eldest daughter, I like making the effort. I like being the one to help clean up at the end of the night. I like being helpful and attentive.

But it also feels steadier to just have fewer things in my calendar and more energy for what remains.

None of this is dramatic. It’s just friction being removed.

And the less friction there is, the less my nervous system has to brace.

I don’t want to become more rigid, but I do like feeling that calmness is my choice. I am trying to enforce ways that make calm more likely. I’ve shared four examples in this week’s video, but here are a few quick ones.

This week:

• set three main projects or priorities for the week and block out sessions in your calendar to work on those things

• block out other things that are important to you – exercise, study etc.

• phone goes away at 8pm, no screens at all after 9.30pm

• do a money review – commit to tracking what’s coming in and out, and planning for purchases ahead of time

• do a nightly ten-minute house reset before bed

No edit this week, as there’s a moodboard coming out this weekend. Next week’s Substack and video will be more vloggy and chatty too – I have a bunch of house updates, some book recommendations, and I’ll share a bit about my current study sprint.

Maybe you pick up a copy of The Unfinished Palazzo. It’s glamorous and tragic and full of gondolas and genius. You read about Peggy Guggenheim, this woman with extraordinary taste in art and catastrophic taste in men, and you think, I must know more.

So you borrow her memoir from the library, which leads to a Jackson Pollock rabbit hole. You download Katy Hessel’s Death of an Artist for your next road trip, feeling very pleased with yourself. You can now say things like, “Well, of course, Pollock owed his whole career to the women around him.” Look at you. Cultural. Curious. Alive to nuance.

And then something else comes up. A new book. A new podcast. A new obsession. Off you go.

(This is an anecdote dressed as a random, nameless example to make me feel/look better; I have done exactly this.)

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A week – or a rabbit hole – later, the details blur. The ideas sit politely in my mind, unconnected to anything else. I’ve nibbled at them, but I haven’t metabolised them.

That’s when I started noticing the difference between reading and studying, a subject I wrote about last week.

Reading is exploratory. It’s flirtation. (And it absolutely has it’s place. Please don’t stop reading novels or memoirs or wildly niche essays. The world would be unbearable without them.)

But studying is commitment.

It’s deciding, I’m not just interested in Peggy Guggenheim, I’m interested in how art patronage distorts the myth of the lone male genius – and wait, has that changed in the 21st century? I wonder…

Now instead of drifting from memoir to podcast to whatever the algorithm serves next, you begin to circle the same problem from multiple angles. Biography. Cultural history. Primary sources. A lecture. Your own notes. You start mapping names. Timelines. Influence. You begin to notice patterns. You start to develop a point of view.

It’s harder than watching reality TV on a Tuesday night, or even reading a single book you’re interested in. There’s no constant novelty hit of being “done”.

And it’s entirely, utterly optional.

When I came across ’s Lifelong Learning Compass, it forced me to confront something slightly uncomfortable: I don’t really have depth of knowledge in anything.

Sam Rinko’s Lifelong Learning Compass:

• Mastery: 1-2 fields you want deep expertise in

• Erudition: 3-5 areas you want to be genuinely learned in

• Range: 6-8 subjects that give you broad exposure across disciplines

• Rapid Acquisition: practical skills you need for work or life

When I spent time thinking about it, I know that cultural history is something I want to have significant depth of knowledge (mastery) in – I literally want to be able to write books and produce films about it.

I want to have a much deeper understanding (erudition) of design and art history and 20th Century wars, for example. And I want to be able to speak about political theory, economics and philosophy (range), but have no desire to be the most educated in the room on those subjects. And at the moment I’m learning about editing video, swing trading, and veggie gardening (rapid acquisition) for my day-to-day life.

I would LOVE to know yours:

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That clarity changed how I allocate my attention. Because what I absolutely don’t have any interest in is housewives or competitive cooking shows or romantasy or vampiric sci-fi – so the time I should allocate to those things: 0.

So now I’m trying something different: intellectual monogamy.

I choose one question and give it six weeks. I block the time in my calendar. I limit the shiny objects. I go deeper instead of wider.

Inspiration is easy. The world hands it to us constantly. Depth is rarer.

And in an age where every memoir, every podcast, every lecture is at our fingertips, the real luxury might be choosing one thread and actually following it all the way down.

How to Design Your Own Study Sprint

If you’re going to take self-education seriously, you need a container. Otherwise it dissolves into vibes. Here’s the simple framework I’ve been honing.

Step 1: Choose your field

This is the big bucket. Art history. Philosophy. Wine. Economics. Political theory. Gardening. Whatever you genuinely want to understand more deeply.

If you like Sam Rinko’s structure, choose something that sits in mastery or erudition. If Amy Porterfield’s lens feels more natural, ask:

• What am I curious about?

• What do I want to learn?

• What moves me closer to my future self?

Don’t overthink this. When you’re a seasoned self-studier, you can have multiple sprints on the go. For now, choose one thing you’re interested in and move on.

You don’t have to have the one, perfect topic. It’s not the last thing you’ll ever learn.

Step 2: Choose your focus

Now narrow it.

Art history becomes the Renaissance, American Expressionism or a specific artist.
Philosophy becomes Stoicism, existentialism or Eastern traditions.
History becomes the French Revolution, or the Soviet Union or Japanese Samurais.

Broad fields inspire. Narrow focuses produce clarity.

Step 3: Choose your question

Not a topic. A question. Topics invite summary. Questions require argument.

Instead of: French Revolution
Try: What happened to the Revolution after Louis XVI was executed?

Instead of: William Morris/Arts & Crafts Movement
Try: How are the Gothic and Arts & Crafts movements related?

The goal is not to “cover” a subject. It’s to trace an idea across time/people and emerge with a position.

I’ve tried study sprints without a question. It’s chaos. The focus morphs weekly. The resource list becomes never-ending.

A question is your anchor.

If you genuinely don’t have a question, do a a structured course. An Open Yale lecture series, for example. Borrow someone else’s scaffolding until you can build your own.

Step 4: Choose a timeframe

I prefer six weeks. A month is too fragile when life lifes. A week is just insane self-sabotage. A quarter can feel a bit unfocused at my stage of life, when I have more time I can give to this.

For me, six weeks allows momentum, depth, and the occasional missed session without collapse.

I aim for three sessions per week. If that feels ambitious, go quarterly and commit to 1–2.

Step 5: Design your syllabus

This is the fun part!

My recommendation here is either to use an existing course (such as an Open Yale Course) or to use AI to help you create your structure, questions and inputs. I know, I know – AI is the reason none of us can use our brains anymore yadayada.

But the thing with a syllabus is that you don’t know enough about this subject yet! You likely don’t know the key thinkers, seminal texts or contradicting theories yet. And ChatGPT can structure this for you (with your input).

Using AI, sorry

Here’s a prompt you can use:

Create me a six-week study syllabus to help me answer this question: [put your question in here]

Break the question into weekly layers, ending in Week 6 with full synthesis.

Each week should include:

• A Core Question

• Core Aim (what I should be able to explain, compare, critique, distinguish)

• 3–5 Key Themes

• 3–4 carefully chosen resources (one primary spine, optional contextual support)

• Structured note-taking prompts (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric layers)

• Weekly written synthesis question

Taking notes as you study

The note-taking layers matter. This is based on the Trivium, used in classical education to develop critical thinking and communication skills. Grammar provides structure, Logic ensures sound reasoning and analysis, and Rhetoric enables eloquent transmission of thought. You work through these chronologically, breaking the instinct to jump straight to Rhetoric, where you develop your own opinions.

Grammar: What is being said? Define terms. Identify key players.
Logic: What assumptions are being made? Where are the tensions?
Rhetoric: Why does this matter? What changes because of this idea?

And then, every week, you answer the Core Question directly in 1–3 pages, solidifying the difference between consuming and thinking.

Inspiration is abundant. Structure is rare.

Design the container. Then show up inside it.

This week:

• Choose your field, focus and question – or decide on a pre-set course you will focus on for six weeks

• Block out two or three x 1-hour blocks in your week – give up one TV session, ask your partner to do the dishes that night, whatever you need to free up an hour

• Create your syllabus for your study sprint to start next week, ensuring you have the resources ready for Weeks 1 and 2

• I love searching for my topics on the The Met and the V&A YouTube channels – but that’s specific to my love of cultural history. I’m sure there’s some high-quality channels in your niche too!

• The Internet Archive is amazing for downloading old books, so you (I) have no excuse to just buy yourself a new mini library every six weeks. Also, if you haven’t already, join your local library!

• Yale Open Course is an amazing resource if you’re interested in doing a bit of structured study but not 100% sure what you want to study – or feel like you need a good baseline of understanding in a subject before pursuing more “custom” questions. Also available on YouTube.

• You’ll need a study snack, and I highly recommend it be milk chocolate-coated macadamias from The Source.

I’m standing in front of my bookshelf, confronting the evidence. Beautiful reference books I’ve only ever flicked through. Books I swear I finished but can’t remember a single argument from. Browser tabs breeding by the hundred. A “Read Later” folder that hasn’t been opened since 2022, but gets added to every week.

I’m sure I used to be sharper than this.

I don’t just feel duller — I feel diluted. Watered down by too much of everything and not enough of anything. My attention scattered. My discipline abandoned.

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Tasting, Swallowing, Digesting

In 1597, Francis Bacon wrote in Of Studies: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

I know the flavour of a thousand ideas. I’ve digested almost none of them.
It feels like there’s no shape to what I know anymore. Just scattered facts and borrowed opinions.

Susan Wise Bauer makes a similar distinction in The Well-Educated Mind: being informed is not the same as being enlightened. Classrooms often skip the grammar stage (gathering facts) and the logic stage (evaluating them) of a classic education, and jump straight to rhetoric: forming opinions.

But as recently said, a point of view is not the same as an opinion.

To form a point of view on education policy requires understanding its history, funding models, pedagogy, research. To form one on interest rates requires economic history, monetary policy, inflation cycles, labour markets.

That requires work.

Work I haven’t been doing.

I don’t miss university.
I miss intellectual accountability.

Studying history gave me structure — deadlines, consequences, the obligation to finish the book even when it was difficult. Essays demanded synthesis. Citations had to connect or contrast. Arguments had to hold.

Now? I read something and it evaporates. I move on to the next book, the next article or, more often, the next Reel.

I’ve realised (finally) that what I crave isn’t more information. It’s the ability to form an informed point of view.

Re-learning how to research properly — how to follow a question, evaluate sources, think critically — restores what calls “autonomy over your own mind.” Without it, we rely on commentary and summaries. We outsource our thinking.

Active study vs. passive reading

Susan Wise Bauer writes: “A well-trained mind is the result of application, not inborn genius.” A small consolation!

So maybe I haven’t lost my capacity to think – I’ve just lost the habit of thinking. (Wow, that’s an embarrassing sentence to write.)

Reading and studying are not the same thing. Reading can be passive. Study is active. Studying is thinking. Studying is

• question-driven

• slow and friction-filled

• output-based

It wrestles with ideas instead of absorbing them. It demands notes – real notes, not just Kindle highlights – and questions: What assumptions are being made? How does this connect to what I read last week? Where does it contradict?

Study requires slowing down enough to notice when you don’t understand something, and then stopping to resolve it instead of skimming past or asking ChatGPT. (I’m actually not anti-AI; I’ll show you next week how to use to help with this!) And it requires output. Synthesis. Because if you can’t explain an idea, you don’t know it yet.

Frameworks for Self-Education

I’ve been looking at two different approaches to self-education – one structural, one practical. They sit at opposite ends of the academic spectrum, because I want to show you that this isn’t about becoming a cloistered intellectual (unless that genuinely excites you). It’s about giving your curiosity shape, and your brain fuel.

of the very excellent and helpful approaches self-education through what he calls the Lifelong Learning Compass:

• Mastery: 1-2 fields you want deep expertise in

• Erudition: 3-5 areas you want to be genuinely learned in

• Range: 6-8 subjects that give you broad exposure across disciplines

• Rapid Acquisition: practical skills you need for work or life

I like this because it acknowledges something honest: not everything deserves the same depth. Some interests are lifelong. Some are seasonal. Some it’s fun to be able to talk about, but not be the expert in.

Then I came across Amy Porterfield’s framework for building a personal curriculum. As always, she makes it simple and actionable:

1. Choose a timeframe

2. Choose your 3 categories

3. Choose your topic per category

4. Select 2–4 learning inputs per topic

5. Integrate the inputs into your routine

It’s clean. It’s doable. But this simplicity skips an element of study: What exactly are you trying to understand?

Curiosity needs hierarchy. I’m thinking about narrow my focus in three layers:

Field. Focus. Question.

• A field is broad: history, philosophy, gardening, wine

• A focus narrows it: the French Revolution, Stoicism, biodynamics, Australian wine

• A question sharpens it further: Why did the Revolution radicalise so quickly? What assumptions underpin Stoicism? Would biodynamic principles reduce aphids in winter? How did Tasmania’s convict history shape its wine industry?

Curiosity alone is too broad.

If you want to be well read in classic novels, you can just read a bunch of classic novels. But if you ask: Is Wuthering Heights a good example of a romance novel? — now you have something to investigate. That question narrows your reading, shapes your sources, and determines when you’ve actually learned something.

Without a question, you’re browsing. With a question, you’re studying.

Once the question is clear, “inputs” become far less random. And so does your “output” – because if you can’t articulate what you think at the end of a study cycle, you were consuming, not studying.

Each week I’ll share with you a couple of smallish commitments I’m making towards the purpose of this post. You can follow along and do them too if you’d like!

This week, I’m working on just two things:

• read one long-form essay each day – slowly, deliberately, no skimming

• list what I want to have mastery of, erudition in, broad knowledge of, and what practical skills I most need to develop right now

Next week I’ll show you how I’m adapting these various frameworks into a personal system of study, so you can create your own plan to reclaim your brain too.

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If I once felt intellectually alive and now feel scattered, it’s because I stopped practicing.

Intellectual sharpness isn’t lost. It’s neglected.
It doesn’t disappear. It just gets a bit of rust.

• ’s four-prong approach to self-education is explained throughout his wonderful Substack,

• I enjoyed Amy Porterfield’s podcast episode about her personal curriculum, which offered a much lighter version of the more academic versions I’d been reading about.

• Is French Earl Grey a bit passé now? I remember when I thought it was the height of chic! Regardless, I still love it, and a pot while I study fills the room with a beautiful scent.

• Susan Wise Bauer’s book, The Well-Trained Mind, offers an interesting process for reading classic novels especially.

• I use the Moleskine cahiers for my messy study notes, as they’re easier to move around than the hardcover versions I use for other things. I’ve been a Moleskine girl since I was about 14.

• These are my favourite pens, and I was thrilled when I realised they came in different colours for note-taking!

• How lovely is this Pomodoro timer, for helping you stay focused for a few sessions?