On Fairy Houses, Goth Spreadsheets and a New Way of Eating

31 Aug

Field Notes, No. 3 – Aberdeen, September 2026

Dear reader,

First of all, my lovely readers, I forgot to write last month.

I'm sure I could make up excuses – and there are plenty of good ones sitting on the shelf, ready to be dusted off – but honestly, I simply forgot. Life got busy, last-minute flights were booked, and I was lucky enough to spend a month with my wonderful nephew and my parents. And so a month slipped by, and taking a moment to sit down and write was promptly swapped out for building fairy houses with Little Bug, reading books together, and squeezing work in around the edges.

It was glorious in its own particular way. It also gave me a genuinely renewed respect for parents – and especially parents who work from home with a toddler underfoot. Getting anything done between snack requests, negotiations about which cardigan is the correct cardigan, and impromptu fairy-house architectural reviews is, I now understand, its own quiet superpower. It was a good lesson, and – if we're lucky enough to have children of our own one day – a very useful bit of preparation.

Dreaming the wedding into shape

Wedding plans are going well. We're now into the properly fun part: planning games, thinking up ideas, gathering little gifts for everyone. My brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to bring us wedding gifts all the way back from Kenya, which felt like a lovely tying-together of the two threads of this whole adventure.

My Instagram and Pinterest are currently packed with fun wedding ideas, and I'm really enjoying this stretch of pure dreaming – thinking up what our version of a dream wedding can look like, before reality and quote sheets start doing their inevitable narrowing work.

Everyone keeps telling us we're well prepared for something that's still thirteen months away. I just keep thinking we must have missed something. It's an odd feeling – being simultaneously on top of things and completely at sea, because I've never done this before. An exciting adventure, and one that keeps prompting the question: should I make a manual for this? A digital download, maybe. Would other people benefit from the way I like to plan?

Which brings me to something I've noticed and want to share.

Most wedding planners – the paper ones, the printables, the whole visual language of the industry – are pink. Frilly (not literally, but you know what I mean). Very cool-toned. Pastels. Soft florals. Script fonts. I have honestly never felt more goth than I did trying to find a black wedding planner online. I found one dark blue option that was quite pretty, but in the end I've stuck to my spreadsheets, because at least those I can theme however I like.

The same is true, incidentally, of most baby-related things I've had a curious poke around online. (No, I am not pregnant. I am simply nosy about what's out there.) And it does make me wonder how many women are looking for things that actually feel like them – and quietly making do with pastel florals because that's what's on offer. Not a complaint, exactly. Just a curiosity worth passing on.

From the bookshop

A quick Ghost & Quill update, because it deserves one. While I was away, the Mountain Man was making rather more trips to the post office than usual – orders have been coming in every few days, which is genuinely exciting. There are lots of plans in the works for expanding the bookshop and what it can do, and I'm looking forward to the day I open the laptop and find five online orders waiting for me. Small numbers, big feelings. This is how it starts.

A new way of eating

Another new thing has happened. We've found out that I most likely have a histamine intolerance, which has led me down the road of trying a low-FODMAP diet – essentially gluten- and lactose-free, with a longer list of quiet exclusions underneath. I do feel a lot better already, and it's dawning on me that the inflammation markers that have been stubbornly elevated for at least two years may well be tied to the food I've been eating.

It's a strange thing to reach adulthood and discover that your body has been waving a small polite flag at you for years, and you simply hadn't learned to read the signal. But there we are. A new dawn begins, and we'll see how much of my inner farmer – the one who grew up with fresh food from the garden and same-day cooking as the default – can be persuaded to come through and make me into a proper farm wife.

The sourdough is getting a full revamp. I'd love to have a go at making my own butter. The Mountain Man is going to have to be careful about where we live next, because chickens and/or runner ducks are now firmly part of the package. His dad, kindly and rather brilliantly, gifted me a beekeeping course earlier this year that I still need to complete. It's all quietly building into quite the storybook life.

There's something lovely about being nudged back towards fresh ingredients and food cooked the day it's eaten. There's a rhythm to it that I think I've been missing without quite knowing it.

A small thought to leave you with

Somewhere between the fairy houses, the spreadsheets and the low-FODMAP shopping list, I've been thinking about how much of adult life is about learning to notice the small mismatches. The wedding planner that isn't quite you. The food that doesn't quite agree with you. The month that slipped away without a letter. The industries and defaults that assume we all want the same pastel version of things.

The gentle answer, I'm slowly learning, isn't to complain about the defaults. It's just to notice them, and then quietly make your own. A black spreadsheet. A garden salad instead of the sandwich. A letter written a month late, because you were building fairy houses instead, and that was the right call.

What I'm reading

This month's recommendation is The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao. I listened to the audiobook while in Sweden and it was fabulous – the narrator does a wonderful job of voicing the characters, and I found myself completely transported to India for the duration. It's one of the shortlisted titles for this year's Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize, and I've been slowly making my way through the list. So far, this is the one that really stands out.