The Weekend List: No. 16

This week's Weekend List is dispatched from Berlin. I've only just arrived and am already doing that typical (creepy) thing of transplanting my life into somebody else's space as we're renting an apartment through Airbnb, which we clearly chose for this explicit purpose. The kitchen floor is painted bright green, and positioned above the table is a painting of a friend egg. A balcony just about overlooks the canal, and all of the cheese plants in the living room (obligatory feature, tick) are in much better nick than mine. My snakeskin boots are in the shoe rack, and there's a sky blue 1970s Ford Cortina parked outside, which I'm pretending I own. I keep walking between rooms nodding to myself like yes, this is my alternate life for the next week. I am going to read all of the books on my bedside table and eat all of the falafel and return a better person. Lo! We'll see how that goes. Without further ado, the latest Weekend List. Pop the kettle on, and maybe Beyonce, which is the view from here.

Images: Holly Blues, Roisin Kiberd, Prada x Dancers of Tanztheater Wuppertal as part of AnOther's MOVEment project, The Bookery Cook's Instagram, Gutting a Squid via Good Good Girl. 

Life

• "For decades, pop culture and media have set up a clear binary between single women and their coupled counterparts... Single women? They drink whiskey at the bar alone and have the power to swing elections. Coupled women plan "compromise" vacations and buy a lot of cleaning products." I feel like Ann Friedman collected my thoughts and current brain debris for: Honorary Spinster: Can I Be A 'Single Lady' Without Being Single?
• "You have more rights to your image on CCTV than you do your Facebook photos." Roisin Kiberd walked around Dublin, using an app to take control of public CCTV cameras, and take selfies.
• "I don't want women to go through life responding to compliments about their work with, 'Oh it's just a thing, it's not that great.'" How To Take A Compliment. (Thanks Sim for emailing me this link this week.) 
• I've had lots of conversations recently with former bloggers, and readers of blogs. We've spoken how the medium has changed, and how we crave the sort of blogs we used to read, which have since become defunct. It feels like there are less blogs updated with as much frequency and 'honesty' (I know, whatever honesty actually is..) as there were in say, 2009. I know that's because lots of the bloggers I once followed were teenage. Now everybody has grown up, we want to stretch ourselves, to write in other places. We also have to make money, and the time spent working is what often stands in the way of blogging in a regular, and satisfying way. Sometimes people can't write in the same way now that they're employed and obliged to be accountable. That said, I still relish blogging here, and these conversations have led me to dig around for new blogs to read. One of my new bookmarks is Holly Blues, and I like it very much. Holly is 25 and writes about family life in Falmouth. She blogs about bringing up two small children, getting caught in downpours on the way to the shops, watching her family as they snooze, frugality, making things and how very, very tiring parenting can be. What she shares feels very generous and full of love, and I like reading about her life, which feels very unlike my own, but not so dissimilar in other ways. 

Culture

• "Now sounds like always being connected together people online, I think it sounds like economic uncertainty, it sounds like post-WikiLeaks... Multiple browser windows open...everything jammed together but on an equal playing field." I found watching musician and sound-artist Holly Herndon in conversation fascinating. 

• AnOther Magazine's MOVEment project explores the intersection between fashion and dance in a beautiful series of collaborative films.

Food

• Good Good Girl's Shit You Should Know series continues with How To Gut And Clean A Squid. (which led me too..)
• The Bookery Cook, excellent food blog run by three sisters. Follow them on Instagram for photographs of gelato, Mexican beer and bowls of insecty snacks. 
• A short film about chef Margot Ferguson.

Listening

• There are lots of Philip Glass-related happenings on BBC Radio 4 this week. There's a play about the time Philip Glass and Steve Reich ran a removals business, and Glass' memoir Words Without Music, has been serialised as Book of the Week. 
• Bring a Plate. One of my new go-to podcasts. Last week I listened to this episode while I walked my recycling to the bank and fully gave myself to Laughing Out Loud. Don't ever let a fear of other people ruin your podcast guffawing, especially when you're listening to Peter and Bec re-telling the narrative of Save The Last Dance. 
• Cheryl Strayed's advice column Dear Sugar, turned into radio form.
• Do You Love Me?, 1978 hit by Lebanese family band Bendaly Family.

Snacks

• An invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century.
• It's lambing time. More reason to follow writer and sheep farmer James Rebanks on Twitter, as he posts updates from the Lake District, of Hawthorn greening and slippery newborn lambs. 
• Ruby Tandoh speaks to ethical clothes brand Birdsong London.