How to buy a ladybird
Just so you know, this email has a couple of photos of bugs in it (specifically ladybirds, dunno how you feel about them - I personally have been absolutely fooled by their PR campaign and distinctive branding into considering them "not really a bug, somehow").
BUG REPORT
I spotted some aphids on my rose bush and googled what to do, and the options were "spray them with a poisonous spray", "spray them with dishwasher liquid and water", and - the slowest, most expensive and perhaps least reliable option - "buy a box of ladybirds from the internet".
My ladybirds turned up a few days later, in two small plastic boxes. One was filled with adults and a little bit of ladybird food to tide them over, the other with tiny scraps of paper and tinier black larvae.
The instructions said to put the ladybirds out early in the evening, when they're less likely to fly away; and to leave them in the fridge for half an hour first, to "calm them down".
My update on this aspect is that the ladybirds did not seem to be very calm about being in a fridge.
The next step was to use something like a pencil or a little paintbrush to coax them out.
Half the ladybirds loved the coaxing brush, ran to it with glee and climbed onto it and just wanted to stay there for ever, had no interest in the aphidy leaves I was offering them; and the other half feared the coaxing brush and ran, hiding and dodging.
But once I got the hang of it, the process of putting them out one by one actually felt really nice! You coax an aphid, you look around for a leaf that you think might suit it, you pop it down and watch while it pokes around its new home. Very satisfying!
Other key parts of the experience:
Dropping a ladybird, getting halfway into the emotion oh my god I dropped a ladybird, what sort of clumsy monster AM I, then seeing the ladybird swerve into the air and fly away towards someone else's aphids (this happened 4-5 times with the same emotional arc each time)
Struggling to open the box of aphid larvae, getting it open all at once, and flicking every single paper scrap and larva over the garden and very much myself
Going back inside, replying to some emails, doing some work, cooking dinner, eating dinner etc etc, and then getting bitten quite hard on the soft inner elbow by a misplaced ladybird who I have to assume had spent several hours exploring the strange terrain of my body and who had no other way to indicate that she now wanted to leave
Strongly recommended if you have aphids and at least £15.99 that you're happy to spend getting rid of them.
BOOK REPORT
If you read my last email you may recall that I was trying to cut five thousand words out of my book. Did I manage it? Uhhh let's say yes! Sort-of! Certainly I managed to add at least five thousand words, which is similar. (I did also delete more than that so it's a fair bit shorter than it used to be, although not quite as much shorter as I'd hoped.)
Anyway as of last night, the most recent version is off with my editors. Obviously I'm new to publishing but the next stage as I understand it is an indeterminate period of self-indulgently wallowing in the fear that your edits have made it terrible, alternating with suddenly thinking of something else you should have changed.
Related: via a friend's cohost account, this article by George Saunders about the process of writing and editing a novel, which is very good, I think, by which I mean that there's a lot of perceptive, specific bits but also that I found it reassuring because it boils down to "idk, takes fucking ages too, I guess you just keep trying to make it a little bit better".
SAGE ADVICE
If you plant a herb garden one of two things will happen:
All the herbs will die immediately; or
Most of the herbs will do fine, except for one of them, which will do way, way, way too well
My little garden has gone for the second option, and the herb that I'm radically oversupplied with is sage, which I only bought in the first place because the plants were £2 each or 6 for £10. I even tried to only buy five but the woman at the counter told me I'd get another one for free and I couldn't bear to say "I know but I just don't want any of your other herbs". I am an instinct-based cook and I have no instinct for sage. It's for... poultry? Pork meatballs? "A little goes a long way", the BBC says, which is a shame because I have a lot and only a very short way to go with it.
I've currently got some bundles of sage hanging from the shelves, which is great in a way because I've always wanted to be the sort of person who would casually have bunches of herbs strung up to dry in her kitchen. However, it is very much just kicking the problem slightly further down the road. If you have a recipe to recommend that uses a whole lot of sage please let me know.
READING REPORT
This week in reading, I kept encountering the word "lanai" which I would have sworn I'd never seen before. Apparently it's a Hawaiian word for a variety of covered or semi-enclosed outdoor spaces. I read it:
In that Caroline Calloway profile that was going around a couple weeks back: "We’re sitting on what Calloway refers to as the lanai, a word I’ve never heard outside of a Golden Girls rerun"
A really surprising number of times in Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man, a 1963 noir in which a wrongfully accused man has to prove his innocence and also repeatedly open and shut lanai doors
In Elaine Castillo's great essay collection How To Read Now, quoting Joan Didion (Castillo does not care for Didion)
Good new word, I enjoyed reading all the things I encountered it in.
Best,
Holly