01. Spring! (see ya, winter).

02. Have been catching up on my Edinburgh International Book Festival viewing. This week I have watched:

• Cory Doctorow discussing Enshittification – basically everything he spoke about was terrifying. He wasn’t being alarmist and I think that’s why it was terrifying. Instead, he laid out events in recent history (all well-known) to explain ‘why everything suddenly got worse’, particularly online – “We need to fix the system not replace the person doing the damage.“
• Ann Patchett on Whistler – Ann discussed the themes in the book, specifically about how ‘autobiographical’ it is – “…autobiography in fiction is not what happened to you, it’s what you think about. It’s what you’re afraid of or what you long for…”. And she delivered some golden nuggets – “What crushes people? Cruelty without hope…” and “Once we’re comfortable with death, we’re better at our lives.”
• Douglas Stuart – I already loved John of John, and now I love it and Stuart even more. Sometimes an author talk doesn’t add much to what you already know about a book – the opposite was the case here. Stuart discussed how he chose the setting (he wanted a different aspect of time and chose a ‘…place with a long memory’).
  “I could get away with creating a book where men wouldn’t say the truth and they wouldn’t confront their feelings but I couldn’t place a woman, a Scottish woman, in that context and expect her not to know everything that was going on… The whole novel was about the truth slowly dawning on the men… I had to think about how to make Ella an outsider.”
• Oliver Bullough on his book about global money laundering, Everybody Loves Our Dollars – this grabbed my interest after recently seeing the documentary, The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. At the crux of the discussion was the idea that ‘…money is global but laws are local…’ so money will always move.

03. My wonderful friend went to great trouble to get us team Esprit windcheaters (if you know, you know). We are all thrilled.

04. The Italian Film Festival program is out. Quite a few I want to see, especially Holy Cannoli, Sweetheart and La Scala.

05. And speaking of things Italian, I don’t have many coffee table books, but acquired this beauty (it’s swimming spots and recipes!).

06. Watching: DTF St. Louis (HBO) – don’t normally go for crime shows but this one doesn’t follow the normal script, and it’s funny and oddly tender.

07. Cooking: freckle cookies.