• Naples

• Heirloom tomatoes

• Green nail polish, especially Essie’s Off Tropic

• Clothes by Phoebe Philo

• Honey badgers

• Danny Dyer

• Deserts

• Louise Bourgeois spider sculptures

• 1980s Toyota Land Cruisers

• Knees

• Brutalism

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• Beautiful, well-worn table linen

• A mix of utterly familiar and just slightly challenging tastes

• To finish, dessert wine and madeleines

• Conversation

• Slow-roasted lamb

• Exactly the right condiments

• A cheese platter

• Several simple side dishes, including a green salad and, when they are in season, a dish of tomatoes with olive oil and the merest dash of sherry vinegar

• Candlelight

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• Being able to be your own travel agent

• Pinterest

• Getting to follow Luca Turin on this very platform

• Google Maps (admittedly, for road trips I always have a map book in the car too)

• Music streaming, because making playlists is fun

• Being able to order groceries for delivery

• The Poetry Foundation website

• Text messaging and (good) group chats

• Emojis

• Wikipedia

• Hipstamatic

• These epic single-ingredient food columns

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• Table lamps

• Richard Ayoade

• Giving flowers

• Arthur Miller’s letter to Marilyn Monroe on the subject of kissing her in the kitchen

• Norah Jones

• Tennis – especially mixed doubles

• Ticking

• Diana Vreeland’s “Why Don’t You?” columns for Harper’s Bazaar

• Clips of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together

• Nicky Haslam’s “drying up cloths” featuring his lists of things that are common

• Bjork in the video for “It’s Oh So Quiet”

• Judiciously paid compliments

• The Great British Bake Off

• Jonathan Anderson, in every single one of his roles as a designer

• Stephen Mangan

• Pearl rings

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• Stanley cups and other fancy water containers

• Gift vouchers

• Ear buds with plastic stems

• Followers

• Black skinny jeans

• Tea towels or aprons with “wise” or “witty” sayings on them

• Leaf blowers

• Lindt Lindor balls (they aren’t truffles so I’m not calling them that)

• Hot tubs

• Self-help books

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• Look at a view

• Absolutely nothing at all

• Late at night, make toast, and eat it standing up in the kitchen

• Stomp in rain puddles — gumboots preferred, but optional

• Play entire albums you like, in full, and explain (slightly incoherently) why you are so fond of them

• Absolutely nothing at all

• Plan a road trip

• Touch them the exact way they like to be touched

• Take an afternoon or early evening stroll

• Look at art

• Talk about the weather

• Watch Bullets Over Broadway, Moonrise Kingdom, or Midnight in Paris

• Absolutely nothing at all

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• Chicken roasted on a bed of cabbage (use Helen Rosner’s recipe, as detailed by Smitten Kitchen)

• Lentil soup

• Chocolate

• Red wine

• Chicken liver pâté studded with green peppercorns (My recipe: gently fry half an onion, chopped, in plenty of butter, then add 250g free-range chicken livers and season with salt and a little freshly ground black pepper. Fry until just cooked, allow to cool slightly, tip into a blender. Add another 100g or so of butter and a tablespoon of brandy, blend until smooth. Check seasoning, scoop into a bowl and fold through a couple of tablespoons of green peppercorns. Refrigerate until set and spread onto freshly toasted bread or melba toast, maybe with a few cornichons on the side)

• Quite a lot of emergency cheese (iykyk)

• Homemade dal topped with butter / garam masala / chilli oil, to taste – but always served in a deep bowl and eaten with a spoon

• Thick slices of toast with a lot of butter

• Brandy

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• Red shoes

• Marc Bolan

• Weddings

• A 2026 Italy Originals T-shirt

• The video of Rosalía’s song, “Berghain”

• Being on the cover of The Gentlewoman

• Oysters

• Thundercat’s “Walking on the Moon” and “This Thing We Call Love”. Oh, and “Funny Thing”

• The shrugging emoji

• Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

• The Alhambra, Granada, Spain

• Beck’s album, Midnite Vultures

• Victoria sponge cake

• Heath Ledger

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• Water

• Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) by Luce Irigaray

• Multigenerational households

• Patti Smith

• Plants, especially vegetables

• The SCUM Manifesto (1968) by Valerie Solanas

• Washing machines

• The 1970s Wages For Housework campaign in the UK

• All of Jane Campion’s films, but especially Bright Star

• Fay Weldon’s novel, Puffball (1980)

• Deliberately having children

• Deliberately not having children

• Kim Gordon

• Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)

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• Morning Phase by Beck

• People’s faces at the end of a yin yoga class

• The sky, almost all the time

• Oxford

• Substacks about maths or perfume

• Slightly overblown dahlias

• Victoria Bay

• Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, ‘Love’s Philosophy’

• Women surfing small shore breaks on longboards

• Wes Anderson movie colour schemes

• The view of St Paul’s from the Millennium Bridge

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• Rhodia notepads

• Butter

• A comfortable armchair

• Indoor plants

• L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil

• A dishwasher

• Simple, well-designed cutlery that can be cleaned in the dishwasher

• Nail polish

• Grappa

• Good socks

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• The two houses that were just built behind mine, so I can have them knocked down

• An artwork by Paula Rego

• Quite a lot of vintage fine jewellery from @lovewellsourced on Instagram

• Double glazing and new window frames for my house

• A Suzuki Jimny

• For my five dearest friends, their dream holiday

• A very fancy version of this swimming pool, lined with handmade tiles by Wolkberg, Veelvlak, or Akashic Tiles

• A large donation to The Centre for the Less Good Idea

• Fresh flowers from Julep once a week, for as long as the rest of the money lasts

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• Floor-length curtains with tasselled tie-backs

• Campari and soda

• Villa Mabrouka, Tangier

• Pencil skirts

• The Sartorialist Instagram feed

• A very large vase of white chrysanthemums

• Diptyque Philosykos

• Cotton pyjamas

• Bulgari jewellery – especially vintage

• Leather clutch bags

• Cardigans (yes, even the baggy academic ones)

• Green olives

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• Max Verstappen saying ‘Simply lovely’

• Gelato in Rome, with whipped cream on top

• ‘Kantori Ongaku’ by Devendra Banhart

• Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden

• Bad puns

• Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings of angry girls

• Otters

• Extravagant compliments

• Dancing around the house to Beck’s ‘Up All Night’

• The finale of Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1999 fashion show, in which Shalom Harlow’s dress was spray-painted by robotic arms on the catwalk

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• Anything by Isamu Noguchi, but especially a coffee table

• White plastic injection-moulded chairs

• Dieter Rams’ calculator interface

• Vaulted ceilings

• Incandescent light bulbs

• The original orange Penguin paperbacks

• Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp

• The Porsche 911

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• Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader

• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

• Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels

• ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

• Early era Jilly Cooper, especially Imogen

• Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

• EM Forster’s A Room with a View (the film also works but the novel is transcendently good; pick the version read by Rebecca Hall on Audible if you like an audiobook)

• A Wikipedia entry on a subject you’re expert in – so you can add to and edit it forthwith

• Toast by Nigel Slater

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• Flings

• Pimm’s if it’s still light, but absolutely not after dark

• Olives

• Grilled prawns

• Rose’s lime cordial with sparkling water

• Smashed cucumbers

• Bite-sized pieces of fried halloumi

• French rosé

• Fridge-cold watermelon

• This Ottolenghi salad (minus the tomatoes)

• Braaibroodjies made by someone who is a master of the braaibroodjie

• Very good tequila on ice

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• Oversized but perfectly cut trousers

• Sketching

• Keats’s grave in Rome: ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’

• Overnight train journeys

• René Magritte’s ‘Empire of Light’ paintings

• The house in the film of Call Me By Your Name

• The film of Call Me By Your Name

• Kir Royale

• Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

• Knitting

• Alphabet Brush Pots from Pentreath & Hall

• White lace shirts

• Italian gardens, especially Ninfa

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• Ray-Ban Wayfarers, especially these

• Typewriters (including electric versions)

• Men’s golf in the 1970s and 1980s

• Monty Don

• Wearing a men’s fragrance if you’re a woman, or a women’s fragrance if you’re a man

Women: try Eau Sauvage or Cool Water | Men: find a sample of Mitsouko or Après l’Ondée, stat

• Anything to do with Elsa Peretti, but most of all, her Bone cuffs for Tiffany & Co

• Owning a full set of Roxy Music albums on vinyl or CD

• Sun hats – in particular, those created by Crystal Birch

• Konfekt magazine

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