From a Slow June Morning
Muddy Feet, Wild Hearts | Field Notes, No. 2 | Aberdeen, Scotland, June 2026
Dear reader,
I can't believe it's been a month since the last letter.
Coming back to Scotland always seems to warp time and space in my head. I leave Africa with the very best intentions — bring the calm with you, keep the slow rhythm, stop chasing the clock — and within a fortnight, the city has done its quiet work and I'm back to running after minutes rather than walking towards experiences. I do try. I don't always succeed. There is something about a city, I think, that turns life into a transaction with the day rather than a conversation with it.
The past month has felt like six already, and Nakuru has slipped into that soft, gilded place where particularly good memories go to live.
So I am, as ever, attempting slowness in small ways.
The sourdough starter is back up and bubbling on the kitchen counter, and this morning I mixed my first loaf since we got home. There is something genuinely useful about bread for re-calibrating a head that has gone too fast. You can't hurry it. The dough decides what it wants, and you are at best a careful, attentive partner in the project. It rises when it rises. It is ready when it is ready. Three days back into the rhythm and my shoulders have already dropped half an inch.
I've also still to properly sit with the Nakuru photographs. There's a kind of quiet guilt to having frames I haven't yet looked at properly — a sense that they're waiting patiently in a folder, and I owe them the time. Soon, I promise them. Soon.
In the meantime, I've redesigned my office to look like a slightly haunted bookshop, which has done wonders for reading. The total book count for the year is now sitting at fifty-six, and a friend leaving for Abu Dhabi has bequeathed me her variegated monstera, which has taken up residence by the window and looks, frankly, ridiculously beautiful and pleased with itself.
The best day in October
We've booked the wedding.
The 13th of October, 2027. The best month, and the best day. It will mark two years of owning the bookshop, almost five years of being a couple, and — with any luck — one very large garden party that just happens to begin with a wedding.
I had been planning the day in my head for so long that booking it felt slightly anticlimactic. The 13th appeared on a calendar, a few people said yes, that works, sign here, and that was that. Now, in theory, I sit back and relax. In practice, I have already started a spreadsheet, and my Pinterest account is full of decorating ideas. Relaxation, it turns out, is a long-term goal.
The P&J, and other small surprises
I was featured in The Press and Journal this past month. There were one or two inconsistencies in the final piece that I noticed and quietly winced at, but it was an exciting thing all the same. The best part was sitting down with the journalist in person — a lovely expat, just like me, with that easy understanding of what it means to live somewhere you didn't quite grow up. We talked for far longer than the article required. Sometimes that's the whole point of these things: the conversations around the edges, not the words on the page.
On creativity, and other ways out of the day
I picked up my paintbrushes again this month. Small things at first, the way you do when a thing has been put down for too long and you're nervous of it. But it's reminded me of something I keep needing to relearn: creativity stops time. A painting, or a chapter, or a really good photograph — any of them can lift you out of your own day and set you down somewhere else for an hour. A few artist friends and I have started talking about a project together, and I'm absurdly excited.
I wonder, sometimes, if this is really what I love most in life — the sheer number of ways there are to step into a different world for a while. Travel. A conversation with a stranger. A book. A painting. A long lens at first light. They're not, when you look at them properly, separate hobbies. They're all the same essentially generous act: noticing the world from a slightly different angle, and letting it change you a little.
One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me, I think, is the thrill of adventure and the habit of curiosity. Pack the bag. Go and see. Ask the question. Read the book. It is, I'm only just starting to understand, the kind of inheritance that quietly keeps giving.
The crow situation
Before we left for Kenya, we'd had a small crew of crows beginning to visit the garden for dog treats. I was genuinely worried, the whole flight home, that they'd have forgotten us. The morning after we got back, there they were, waiting on the wall in their usual spot, looking mildly insulted by how long we'd kept them.
This week I mounted a bird feeder on the window. Partly for the smaller birds, but mostly — let's be honest — in the hope that the crows will figure out there are treats up there too. The ambition of becoming a fully accredited Crazy Crow Lady is, I think, well on track.
A thing I noticed this week
I realised something, one slow grey afternoon. I am living the life that fifteen-year-old me could only dream of.
The bookshop. The fiancé. The mornings in the African bush with a camera around my neck. The bread on the counter, the monstera on the windowsill, the spooky office, the crows on the fence. Even the variegated, untidy, sometimes-too-busy shape of it all. She would be — and I think this is the important bit — so deeply proud of who we've become.
I don't say it often enough, even to myself. It feels almost indulgent. But I want to leave it here in this letter, in case any of you needs to hear it about your own life: somewhere behind us, there is a younger version of ourselves quietly cheering. Whatever we're getting wrong this week, however warped our sense of time is, however far we still feel from the lives we want — there is also, almost certainly, a fifteen-year-old version of us looking at where we are and being completely amazed.
Worth a thought, I think. Worth a quiet moment with a cup of tea.
The dough should be ready for its next fold soon. The crows are doing rounds on the wall again. I'll write again next month.
Stay wild,
Marlene
