Pilgrimage

The brain thrives on little doses of novelty

Dear Reader

Over September and October, I travelled to England and Scotland. We went there for family,¹ for some medieval history for the teenage son, and for some ancestral research² for me. I also went there to see eccentricity in the domestic - which I think about a lot. Houses and gardens completely giving in to joy and play.

This year I am also chasing winter (I am like Isaac Mizrahi³). So, I left Australia’s winter before spring could start to be in Scotland for its already-quite-cold autumn (“Don’t be morbid, life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall”⁴). And, at the end of the year, I will be leaving Australia’s summer for winter in Vietnam. Several people have said to me not to travel to Vietnam in the winter because it can be drizzly - people, I love drizzle! - the last thing I want is an even more intense humidity. Come on.

Speaking of being free of humidity, I spent the entire trip in England and Scotland achieving perfect hair with minimal effort. What a pleasure. Me, feeling relaxed. Me, with a little bit more free time each day. Further to that, with a nice collection of scarves, gloves and jackets I also got to have an easy kind of elegance all the time. I loved it.

By the way, for stylish muddy boots I recommend Australia’s Merry People. (Not a paid endorsement). In this particular newsletter you get a bunch of my other recommendations for England and Scotland.

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York

There are lots and lots of beautiful cities in the United Kingdom but some of them are being loved to death. (Alas, poor Edinburgh). But, York? York I feel is still being itself. I really enjoyed this city and would have liked longer to explore it.

A few reasons to love it:

• York is a walled city (love walled cities)

• the amazing York Minster, which is one of the biggest religious buildings in Northern Europe. Its proportions are … awe-inspiring. I kept thinking what would it have been like to be a peasant in the 1400s, living in Northern England and then coming into York and seeing this for the first time. I am agnostic, but I can see that it is a manifestation of God, of something extraordinary. It would be literally beyond your wildest dreams.

• My best friend went with us to York and she adored all the crying baby statues in the Minster. What is going on with you, poor babes? Whereas, my son and loved the Doom Stone. The cauldron of doomed souls to remind you that what happens in the dark shall come to light. With its devils, toads, temptations of slutty women⁵, and the men about to meet their fate for the sins of extreme wealth⁶. It is a message for the times.

• the Shambles - an ancient medieval street, which you can have to yourself, if you’re willing to go there after dinner instead of during the day.

• this city loves afternoon tea.. with cake.

• also, York has a little-known cafe up on the city walls - the Gatehouse Coffee!

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We Love You

England is in the biggest doldrums. It has forgotten how beautiful it is.

(It does need some fiscal policy attention though).

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Sissinghurst Castle

This place feels enchanted. Being in the garden was one of the happiest feelings I have ever had as an adult and I felt teary thinking about how I’d like to share it with everyone I love.

The place was created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and it is everything you hope for when artists and writers garden.

A few reasons to love it:

• one of several walled gardens I visited in Britain, and I am obsessed with walled gardens - it makes such an occasion out of visiting the garden

• rooms and rooms of gardens - all of them magical and playful

• the garden rooms spring out from axial walks

• the tower includes a writing room for Vita (at one point she said that she wanted to live alone in the tower with her books, and only her dogs allowed up there to visit with her - highly relatable content)

• a writing studio/memorial for Harold Nicolson built by his sons and built to have the exact dimensions of the Apollo II lunar capsule

• their garden includes a ‘white garden’ - so does mine

• Vita’s blue glass collection

• she nicknamed paying visitors to her garden, “the shillingses” on account of them paying entrance fees

• it is an iconic site for the queer community -“By Easter there will be rivers of lesbians coming through the gate"!

• hidden statutes.

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Charleston House

Visit this house to explore what it would be like if you and your closest friends all lived together and made art or economic theories to change the world with. Like the Heide in Melbourne though, it is also the story of artists really fucking up the lives of their children. But leaving that aside… part of my pilgrimage to the Bloomsbury Group was about getting to see the environment in which my grandmother was born into. She was raised in East Sussex and grew up to be also a little, fuck what happens to the children.

Also, another walled garden. Lovely.

A few reasons to love it:

• not unexpectedly, their art collection is superb - and includes many terrific small pieces, which is good for everyone to see because most of us cannot afford big pieces and don’t have the homes to display big pieces and the right small pieces are just as good. It also has some lovely, lovely portraits and I am currently drawn to portraits.

• creativity, like the colander lampshade (everyone loves it) and the nude painted on to the bathtub (why have boring bathtubs?)

• rooms that are lived in (this is why we are currently obsessed with maximalism and eclectic and bowerbird styles, because with all this AI we need to see proof of life)

• a living room where people paint and drink and talk. Note that it must include, as this one does, a very large, erotic male nude

• one of the nicest kitchens I have ever been into

• writing desks with views (Keynes changed economics forever on a very spare little writing desk looking out on to the garden and probably listening to people fuck in the bedroom next door)

• rugs (I now think there is a certain income level where people know how to decorate very well with rugs without spending a fortune on rugs, and I would like to learn from them⁷).

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Houghton Hall

This is something of a secret. My first cousin, once removed had never heard of the place and she is English, and has lived in England her whole life, and she likes to constantly trip around the United Kingdom visiting places of historic significance.

But, I am here to tell you that Houghton Hall is truly a wonderland. You must!

A few reasons to love it:

• this is what a place for someone with lots and lots and lots of money should look like⁸. It has a herd of White Fallow Deer - a literal, living Victorian indulgence. Deer are beautiful enough, but why not have fantasy-level deer if money is no object⁹?

• Houghton Hall is also where I learned what a ha-ha is - basically, the infinity pool design invention of the 1700s. Say you have your own Palladian style country house (and I will note that the English use the term ‘country house’ with quite a degree of understatement), and you like to gaze from your bedroom (with its canopy bed and enormous wall tapestries) out over your thousand acres of grounds and watch your fantasy deer herd. Are you with me? The last thing you’d want is for your gaze to be interrupted by a fence or two. Yuck, yuck. Ugly. Too contained. You’d want the appearance of infinity, but with the practicality of not having the deer up near the house crapping all over the lawns where you stroll. So, you need invisible fences. You need a ha-ha.

• next in the list of things a place should have if you have lots and lots and lots of money is an insane collection of marble statues, including all over your roof. Also, a very slowly diminishing collection of Old Masters - Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck etcetera - that you sell along the way to pay inheritance tax and maintenance. Fair’s fair, as long as the White Fallow Deer stay.

• then, and this is the best bit, you host an annual sculpture exhibition in your grounds. (I really wish I had gotten to see the Antony Gormley exhibition). During these exhibitions, sculptures are hidden/placed in the walled garden (walled gardens - ah!) and also, in the little woods you’ve created and then, across the sprawling lawns and down the precisely angled avenue of trees and then, even in the deer park. Anywhere, everywhere. Like an adult treasure hunt. (Separately, I also found a huge actual fairy circle).

• Can you picnic here? Yes, of course you can, just don’t sit right in front of a sculpture. Can you bring your well-behaved dog? Listen, it is England, obviously yes.

• It will surprise you not at all to know that Walpole was an extravagant (some might say, intense) host and liked his parties to go for weeks, not days. Absolutely nothing in moderation, including your unresolved childhood loneliness.

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Prospect Cottage

If you want to get a glimpse of why Derek Jarman’s cottage and garden are so moving, you can see it in Simon Schama’s Story of Us (2025) documentary series (which includes the gorgeous Jarvis Cocker, too, talking about working class art). In that little doco series you see Jarman talking about the way gardens personally craft our sense of time, with seasons of creation and destruction and legacy. See, this is why I had to see England’s gardens. They are obsessed to the point of transcendence. It’s very good for the soul.

A few reasons to love it:

• the way he collects driftwood and seeds and stones and sea glass

• making a sculpture with found objects (my teenage son and husband really loved this cottage and garden because it was all so imaginative and humble)

• his beloved hag stones, arranged like rosary beads

• that he created the garden while he was dying, and that he had moments of failure with his garden as he learned what he could grow there

• Derek Jarman talking about creativity and, inevitably, his garden

• you can catch the world’s oldest public miniature railway to the cottage, and the teenager absolutely loved it. I mean there are even little railway stations to catch the train at, it’s so cool.

• no fences (really no fences, not even ha-ha invisible fences)

• black painted houses and also, poetry written on the outside wall of the house

• seeing inside his cottage is quite difficult because it isn’t open a lot through the year and you are not allowed to take photographs inside, but if you want a little look then there’s here or here. I am about to do a secret make-over of my teenage son’s room for his Christmas present and I am using Prospect Cottage as a reference point.

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Inns

Everyone travelling in the United Kingdom should stay a night or two in some of the old inns, they’re a treasure. And, at some point you should have a meal with the other guests. One of the best bits is potentially joining a conversation with the others or just nosily listening in.

We stayed in one that would have been perfect for a game of Dungeons and Dragons and another that was like the setting for an Agatha Christie. They are also quite reasonably priced because they are a bit out of fashion with the locals.

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Square Cottage

I stumbled upon a cottage belonging to the Ogilvy family and we rented it as a base for half our time in Scotland. I know, right.

Lady Ogilvy (or Tarka to her friends) likes doing the interior decorating in their homes, and I love her aesthetic. The cottage, which is not the castle featured in that piece, but which is on the same grounds as that castle, is the essence of scholarly comfort and pastoral charm. Accordingly, the cottage was full of great books. I ended up reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and my god, how grim Holly Golightly’s backstory is. Believable, but grim. This one is for you, Holly¹⁰.

Anyway, I liked Lady Ogilvy’s taste in books, too, so we could be friends, I am sure. Apparently, if you rent the cottage over Christmas it comes pre-decorated for you and I am dying to know what her aesthetic in decorations is!

This location also provided us with a private glen to hike, which was one of the highlights of our trip.

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While in Scotland we also stayed a few nights at a sheep farm belonging to an intentional community. We rented this wild little cottage by the loch - the loft where my teenage son slept had an old tree for a staircase. I swam in the loch, which was freezing, but exhilarating. The only heating in the cottage was the fireplace.

For the first night we had no electricity because the farm was somewhat remote and a storm had taken the power out. The community was quite elderly and hermit-inclined and there was a point initially where it was all a bit too forgetful in its arrangements. But, I am a relentless optimist so I can switch easily to make-the-best-of-it and I am also quick to remind those less optimistic, like my husband, that the point of travel is to adventure.

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Observations of England

1. Posh woman’s ‘pink’ in interiors all over Sussex and Kent, and also in Angus in Scotland.

2. Bedlington Terriers are very popular.

3. The migrating ducks really do look like the ‘flying ducks’ wall ornament (which I have in our house)

4. Twittens. So many things I respond to in one concept - private space folding into public space, small spaces, gardens, hidden views.

5. Other places I loved this time and where I would happily spend more time: Lewes, Deal, Hastings, Rye, Menethorpe, Elham, Goudhurst, and the Seven Sisters Cliffs.

6. If you must see a Royal Family castle, then I recommend the French Brothers’ riverboat on the Thames to Windsor Castle. For some reason, hardly anyone seemed to use this option, so we had the boat to ourselves. It’s a beautiful view of the Thames and the homes on it - more sticky-beaking into people’s gardens! And, you can drink a cup of tea on the way there and a gin and tonic on the way back! Plus, as my first cousin, once removed said, “the approach to these castles is the best bit, the tour inside is ridiculously expensive and quite boring - so, skip that”.

7. I like the food at the National Trust tea-rooms a lot. Also, why haven’t cheese and onion pastries taken off properly ever in Australia?

I recently subscribed to Camilla Grudova’s newsletter, which I love and in one of them she was talking about To The Manor Born, a British sitcom from the late 70s-early 80s about old money versus new money. It piqued our curiosity, as people freshly returned from holidaying in the UK. As mentioned, we spent quite a bit of our holidaying visiting or staying in historic homes.

The show is interesting commentary for this time, with all the Brexit-like anxiety about how global trade and new commerce is undermining the identity of England. And the observations about the role the gentry provide for their local communities - how they provide a sort of paternalism for them but one that their communities have mostly outgrown.

Audrey, the ‘old money’ character is still something of an underdog to Richard’s ‘new money’ character by virtue of her sex, so there’s a good bit of sexual tension in the romance, too.

Also, I am really loving Audrey’s outfits.

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Nearly Wild Weaving

I love this little tapestry landscape. I stumbled upon this weaving group when we stayed/were trapped in Fort William in Scotland during Storm Amy. Incidentally, being trapped in Fort William is how we managed to see two fully grown stags. We went out driving along routes we would not otherwise have taken (and finding ourselves at fallen trees and having to turn back, again and again). On each occasion, the stags were only metres from us.

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Gardens

“Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts”. - Mac Griswold.

And in my case, quite challenging. I came home to find all my flower gardens dead from neglect. The house sitters were great with the house and dogs but forgot all about the garden. In the time we were away Brisbane became a burnt brown husk after what had been a surprisingly wet winter. What can I say? This is gardening in Australia. You cannot forget about things for a minute.

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In Praise of a Breeze

Coming from the subtropics, I am obsessed with breezes. In the UK they are obsessed with extreme coziness (some might say, furnace-like coziness). We found ourselves constantly jimmying windows open, especially at night, to sleep, to breathe some fresh air.

The perfect curtain for a breeze.

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Important History

Polari, a secret gay language from the 60s in Britain.

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On Travelling with Friends

We travelled for a bit with some of our most beloved friends while we were in England, including four days on a canal boat in Oxford. How was it?

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh”.

- W. H. Auden

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“You have to be willing to get happy about nothing”.

- Andy Warhol

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Rubbish

I love Suzanne Jongman’s recreation of Renaissance portraits using packaging materials. I especially like the breastfeeding self-portrait with her baby.

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Come to My Garden

How long since you’ve listened to this wonderful song? It’s time to hear it again.

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Finally

English versus Gaelic.

I love you vs The love I have on you (Tha gaol agam ort).

1. My husband is English but also, I met up with some English family I had never met.

2. I am a mix of every part of Europe but I am starting my search at the easy bit with the English, Scottish and Irish.

3. Or Elvira?

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

5. Insert feminist reclamation statement.

6. Not just economically dangerous but a danger to the social fabric.

7. The Square Cottage, mentioned elsewhere in this newsletter was another home with good rugs.

8. It was Sir Robert Walpole’s originally, but was eventually passed along to his granddaughter, who had married into the Cholmondeley family.

9. Alas, money is still an object, as you will see in the paragraphs to follow, but not as much of an object as it is to you and I.

10. Coincidentally, we were at Windsor Castle the day before that happened.