Just finished reading ...

"Our church was so big we called it The Repentagon" says Jia Tolentino in this book of essays as she recalls her Texan upbringing in a vastly wealthy Christian community. Nonconformism however is her true vocation and she uses this book to dismantle reality tv, the internet and all its horrendous abuses, patriarchy, campus rape, sexual abuse, marriage, and her own tenuous grip on reality. She has lived and thought a lot in her thirty years making this required reading not just for millennials but also for sixty somethings like me and everyone else beyond and between. I had never really thought about the toxic pond that today’s thirty somethings were born into: a time of economic collapse, the loss of privacy, the consumption of selfhood, the apotheosis of consumerism, the cult of the influencer, the rebirth of fascism, the toxicity of patriarchy in a world gone mad ... great book. Ghastly, funny and depressing. 

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We had a nice day. Put up the gazebo to give us a bit of extra shade.Thirty plus degrees again, lazy morning just chatting as a family in the garden, walk in the afternoon. Heather Farm cafe again, we’re practically living there at the moment. We drank iced coffee and mango smoothies and talked, then stomped back home through little trod paths with ripening wild blackberries and glorious purple heather.

I’m very lucky.