The Simple Things April 2022

Spend an evening making a takeaway from scratch and invite friends over to join you Set aside an hour each week of this month for a hobby that you love Go guerrilla gardening and tidy up a scrap of earth no one cares about Learn the lyrics to a song you love so you’ll always be ready for a sing-a-long (or just belt it out in the shower) These are just a few enjoyable things we came up with. Write down your own below and try to make them happen this month IMAGE: CHIMES WALLPAPER IN RESERVATION, MISSPRINT.CO.UK…

When we’re worried and the world does not seem a good place, it can feel difficult to enjoy life as much as we’d like, which seems especially cruel in springtime when nature, weather and sunlight collaborate to brighten our days. But being taken out of our comfort zone, because of a challenging time or just through doing something new, makes us look more appreciatively at what we have and where we live and can spur us to acts of kindness to those less fortunate. It acts as a reminder that we should celebrate not just the special or different, but the regular, the commonplace, the everyday. And find joy in small things; the way the earth smells after an April shower, the first holiday weekend of the year, cake baked…

A life in the countryside Leaving their home in London for a slower paced life in Somerset, bloggers Kathy Bishop and Tom Crowford have built a smallholding around their stone cottage, complete with vegetable garden, a gaggle of geese, hives of bees, free-roaming sheep and a multi-coloured flock of chickens. The pair then use their homegrown produce to create seasonal recipes that taste of their surroundings.theseasonaltable.co.uk The first harvests Spring has arrived in a flurry of colourful flowers, orchard blossom, and dusky sunshine. The swiftly lengthening days bring new life at every turn. Frogspawn floats at the stream edges, butterflies and bats emerge, and garden birds flit past the windows, collecting nesting materials and insects from the cobwebbed tangle of roses that scramble up the cottage walls. Our geese and chickens, similarly enthused by…

A flurry of bright green seeds with pink centres pours down, disturbed by a pair of wood pigeons who are gorging on them in the branches above. The wych elm comes into seed before any of the other trees nearby, so is an early-spring favourite of the local wood pigeons. I watch as they stretch their necks to access the seeds, looking as if, at any moment, they might overbalance and fall to the ground. Instead, they gracefully continue their feeding frenzy, reaching upwards, side to side, even hanging almost entirely upside down. Despite being the largest UK pigeon species, wood pigeons’ bodies maintain impressive balance. The pair are almost identical, although the slate-grey female is slightly smaller and duller in colour than the male. Their breasts are a dusky rose…

THE RIGHT NOTES This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music Edited by Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon ➛You may not know all of the musicians in This Woman’s Work but you’ll recognise the passion, playfulness and political stalwartness that underpins these exhilarating essays. From author Anne Enright being rendered speechless by an encounter with Laurie Anderson, to Maggie Nelson on her brilliant friend Lhasa, from Jenn Pelly’s lonesome take on the work of Lucinda Williams to Fatima Bhutto on songs of exile – there’s a vibrant sense of a world resonating with connection and recognition. Celebrating the pioneering practitioners who pushed boundaries in a male-dominated industry; this gets to the heart of why music matters. (White Rabbit)…