The new dining out
On Saturday, restaurants in England will reopen and I will celebrate my birthday. What brilliant timing. When I found out, in the moments after this became official, that my friend D had already booked a table for eight people at my favourite place, happiness rose inside me like mercury in a thermometer. But then I got to reading the new rules. The huge, retro pink napkins I often long to pinch will not, it seems, be on the table when we arrive, nor any of its hefty cutlery; these things will be delivered to us only once we’ve ordered from our disposable menus. Mustard will come in a sachet, not a silver-plate bowl. There will be no piano, nor any smoky-voiced singer.
Taking this in, I remained buoyant; grittily determined, even. Only when I reached the bit about how people from no more than two households can eat together did I wobble. I’m not sure anyone is going to buy the idea we all house share, though admittedly my lockdown hair is beginning to shout “commune”. It seems we’ll have to divide ourselves in two, each half of the group occasionally waving (and definitely not hollering) at the other across the space between.
Writers, lost and found
In her afterword to a new edition of Bette Howland’s 1978 story collection, Blue in Chicago, Honor Moore writes of “the exhausting formulaic epithet” that is “a lost woman writer”. I know what she means. All my life, “lost” women writers have suddenly reappeared, brought down from the attics where they languished, yellowing quietly. When I was young, I found this exciting: the green spines of my Virago Classics transmitted to me nothing but energy and pride. But with every year that passes, the idea of the lost woman grows more wearying. It’s not only that there are so many. The gap between disappearance and re-emergence is shrinking, something that suggests, at best, a certain collective carelessness on our part and, at worst, that the patriarchy is still snoring quietly away in its favourite library chair.
I have a grim feeling that, one day not too far in the future, I’ll read of a “lost” woman on whose books I grew up (Margaret Drabble, say, or Edna O’Brien), at which point I may have to drink from my proverbial poison ring – that or climb on to a burning pyre of books by Martin Amis and John Updike. Still, it’s wonderful that Howland is back in print, a woman who, having received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1984, would never publish again (she died in 2017, the author of just three books). Her prose is cooler than a cocktail and sharper than a Japanese knife. It’s zippy, witty and sometimes deeply sad: Nora Ephron meets Lorrie Moore, which is about as good as it gets.
Back to Ingleborough
On the radio, I half-listened to a discussion about how to keep cool in a heat wave. A frozen water bottle? Cold water sprayed on the joints? Peppermint applied to the temples? All perfectly good ideas, I’m sure. But I spent my sweatiest hours last week periodically looking up from my desk and gazing at a tiny watercolour of Ingleborough in Yorkshire by a little-known artist called May Furniss. Its damp brownness is just the thing for heat stroke and, even more soothingly, as I stare at its misty expanses, I can tell myself that very soon – just days now – I’ll be able to visit it, and all my most beloved places, once again.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
