Hello there!

If you’re new, welcome. If you’ve been here before, it’s lovely to see you again.

Behold — the twelfth Meanwhile. Our little newsletter has pirouetted around the sun and landed right where it started.

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.

― Sylvia Plath, Poppies in July

Witches, tides and astrology girlies are kicking off about Jupiter at the moment, and I’m no better than any of them. I’ve been in a complete Moon Tizz for the last three days, which explains the later-than-usual newsletter and a small announcement:

✨ Meanwhile is taking a break ✨

To celebrate a year of newsletters, I’m giving myself a holiday and sparing you any half-baked tat I might have written just to send something out. I don’t have a return date, but I’ll see you on the other side. 🫶

Meanwhile in writing

If you haven’t spent time on Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler, please stop reading and go click that link. For the unfamiliar, the site lets you see which words were added to the dictionary in which year. Some faves:

• Pubes (1568)

• Weekend (1639)

• Tampon (1848)

• Wank (1905)

• Book club (1904) — can only assume G. K. Chesterton’s 1904 masterpiece The Napoleon of Notting Hill was the catalyst for this one. Or perhaps everyone was simply tired of all that faddish wanking — so 1904, darling!

Bringing it back to 2026, the language app Babbel has just crowned the Māori word kaitiakitanga the most beautiful in the world. It was picked by an international panel of linguists, writers and cultural experts, and means guardianship and protection — especially our responsibility to care for the natural world. A very deserving winner, and you can learn to pronounce it here.

Meanwhile in reading

Odyssey this, Odyssey that! You Odyssey the film — unless your taste aligns with that of Emily Wilson, famed translator and classicist (and the first woman to translate the epic into English).

Ugg-boots-hating director Christopher Nolan based his screenplay on Wilson's iconic translation, and she's now slamming everything from the lack of sex scenes to the fact that ‘all the food looks horrible’. Frankly iconic.

Admittedly, Wilson still says the film's worth watching. But as a self-confessed Odyssey addict, that's hardly a ringing endorsement, particularly when she had this to say about Nolan’s Sirens (which in classical literature are women with bird faces):

[In the film] they're definitely not birds. They're surrounded by seals. They don't seem to have any clothes on. But I think they're sort of naked seal ladies. But I'm not really sure.

Instead of watching the movie, consider reading Wilson’s translation! Or even better, read this:

Plays

Sad Cypress is, of course, named from the song ‘Come away, come away, death’ in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.

And knowing that, you know the story. But only in part. And this time, there’s a murder! (It’s a Christie, after all.)

Poems

You’ll always get me with sea imagery. This poem by software developer and writer James Tadd Adcox knocked me straight in the windpipe.

Picture the ocean. No.

Picture the entire thing, all at once.

You are not doing it.

It's okay.

One day something terrible will happen, and I will not be prepared.

That’s all for July

Thanks for reading Meanwhile in July! If you were sent this and fancy subscribing or reading past editions, you can do so below — feel free to share it far and wide or keep it squirrelled away just for you. I’ll be back, but in the meantime, my inbox is open. 💌

PS: If the images are all over the place in this email, it’s simply evidence that I have Given Up™. Ily 🫡