5 Things I’m Doing In September
Everything I've been reading, wearing, watching, drinking and listening to this month
Greetings! As always, here’s everything I’ve been up to this month. Hope you’re all having an excellent week. Gillian
READING
If you’ll excuse the plug, I implore you to check out Senators Don’t Kill, a new Substack by the NYT bestselling crime writer Tom Folsom (he also happens to be my husband). The title is a play on Kay’s famous line to Michael Corleone in The Godfather - “Senators and presidents don't have men killed”, to which Michael responds, “Who’s being naive, Kay?”. In fact, throughout our entire relationship Tom has taken to calling me Kay after I object when he reveals some dirty truth about how the system really works. And that’s what his Substack will do - explore the shadowy nexus where gangsterdom and criminality meets espionage, highlighting forgotten (and sometimes classified) stories about the American underworld, the CIA, and all the major heists and hits. His first story is about a 1950s French film that inspired a real-life CIA heist job.
If that sounds like your thing, do subscribe, and if you know someone who might like it, please forward it on! Aren’t we adorable with our her ’n’ his newsletters: me for lifestyle, him for underworld crime. Just call us the Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi of Substack.
*****
I’ve also ordered Emily Witt’s new memoir Health & Safety: A Breakdown, which chronicles The New Yorker staff writer’s experience of rave culture and drugs in NYC, against a backdrop of the Trump presidency and the breakdown of her relationship. I’m dying to read it after devouring this lengthy extract in The New Yorker, The Last Rave, which I highly recommend.
WEARING
Alexa Chung’s longstanding relationship with Barbour has produced some of the most trusty and stylish items on my coat rack, ones that especially come in handy when it’s raining, which in the UK is obviously all the goddamn time. Just this past wet Monday morning, as I prepared to take my son to nursery, I pulled on a wax rain hat and a white and black checked raincoat, all from Alexa’s previous collaborations with the English heritage brand over the years. I was the chicest person at the nursery gates on that particularly damp morning. Thank you, Alexa.
Having last worked together in 2022, Alexa has a new collection out with Barbour. It has some brilliant coats and shoes, as well as knitwear. Alexa is one of my closest friends so I was kindly gifted something and, because I’m quite well set up for waterproof outerwear (although I was very tempted by the Liam and the Natalie), I decided to opt for the Gail, a beautiful cable-knit lambswool cardigan in woad blue, which I’m also wearing in the short video below (Substack got video! I’m experimenting!). It’s my perfect autumn transitional piece. There are a great many reasons to be friends with Alexa - she’s just as charming and funny as you might imagine - but she will also make sure her pals never go wet or cold. What a babe. Barbour’s new collection ‘The Edit by Alexa’ can be found in full here.
PS Last week Alexa also threw the most fun dinner to launch the collection at Brat x Climpson’s Arch in Hackney (a sister restaurant to Shoreditch’s Brat, both named LONG before that Brat), which, despite not being far from my house, I’d never been to before. The food was absolutely outstanding and I can’t wait to go back. Very much worth checking out if you’re in the neighbourhood.
WATCHING
Urgh I love an excellent action movie, it’s the most fun you can have watching a film (but good ones only, not ones with needlessly high body counts or Jason Statham). The genre gets extra bonus points because it makes up a sizeable section of the Venn diagram overlap of what my husband and I will happily watch together. I’m a fan of the modern(ish) classics: the Bourne series, Taken, Die Hard, The Fugitive, Heat, Con Air (sorry but it slaps, just as anything with Nicholas Cage does). All this is to say that I was very excited to sit down for Rebel Ridge, Netflix’s latest action thriller which currently (and quite rightly) has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
I was gripped from the horrifying opening scene, in which Terry (Aaron Pierre in a star making turn) is violently thrown off his bicycle by some cops in a small Louisiana town, who then take the money he was going to use to bail out his cousin, an entirely legal process known as ‘civil forfeiture’, which means cops can confiscate cash if they think something shady might be going on. A man-against-the-system story follows that includes police abuse (Don Johnson plays a seriously nasty police chief), corrupt small towns, racist cops, justice, and obviously some ass-whooping. The big reveal that Terry might actually have a very particular set of skills, skills he has acquired over a very long career, is perfectly played out. It’s moody and tense and, as with all good action films, there’s room for some excellent one liners. I loved it.
Streaming on Netflix now.
DRINKING
New favourite cocktail alert. My husband has started making me The Pegu Club cocktail and it is the perfect transitional (there’s that word again) cocktail: it has remnants of summer, but it demands to be enjoyed inside with a record on. And a fire if you have one (sadly I don’t). It was the house cocktail at the Pegu Club in Myanmar in the 1880s (Paul Theroux visits Pegu Club in his travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar) and later at the legendary Pegu Club in New York’s SoHo district, which ran from 2005 to 2020 and became famous for leading the craft cocktail movement in NYC. Anyway, it is absolutely delicious and not something you see on menus much so worth trying out at home. Technically, The Pegu Club cocktail part of the margarita family because it is a combination of spirit, orange liqueur and citrus but, because it uses gin, it feels like the perfect seasonal version of the classic marg, which should probably be left in summer.
The Pegu Club Cocktail
2 ounces gin
¾ ounce Cointreau
½ ounce lime juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup (optional, we just use agave syrup)
Dash of Angostura bitters
Dash orange bitters (I’d say this was optional - although purists might tell me off - but don’t skip the Angostura)
1 lime wedge
Add the gin, Cointreau and lime juice into a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe or an old-fashioned glass over ice. Add the bitters. Garnish with the lime wedge. Yum.
LISTENING
I have mixed feelings about Jeff Buckley’s Grace. On the one hand I think it’s hard to argue that it’s anything other than a bonafide masterpiece. On the other, it has slightly become a victim of its own legacy, with its accessible elegies for tortured young people. The album was certainly the soundtrack to a lot of my own heartbreak (we all go to cringe places when dealt that hand). Either way, I loved listening to Jeff Buckley Forever, a two-hour special on BBC 6 Music to mark the 30 year anniversary of the album that gave us such songs as “Lilac Wine”, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and “Last Goodbye”. Narrated by Guy Pearce, and with contributions from the likes of Patti Smith and Phoebe Bridgers, it is a hugely fascinating and emotional look at the life of the songwriter, who tragically drowned in 1997 at the age of 30. Grace was the only album he ever completed. You can listen to the special here.