I love spring and summer best. Daylight from 5am to 9pm, everything is green, all the doors and windows are open, and even on an overcast day the world somehow feels full of life. Every autumn, without fail, the melancholy settles in around mid October. It’s not as bad as it used to be as I make sure I get out for a walk every day and have introduced hobbies that don’t require light in the same way photography does, but I struggle with the gloominess and lack of light, and I just don’t like the colour palette of late autumn as green, red and yellow fade to bare branches and slush. There are some things I like about autumn though, so here’s a little collection of them.
On my eighth birthday my parents packed up the house in Berlin where we had lived for four years and our family moved back to England. English was my first language, my parents were British, I had gone to an English language school in Germany and I held a British passport, but culturally I didn’t feel British. I didn’t know what a pound or a penny was, having only ever used the Deutsche Mark and Pfennig, and I didn’t know the pop-music or TV shows that were popular among English children my age either. We had SSVC and Cartoon Network in Germany rather than BBC and ITV. I simply didn’t hold the cultural reference points that other children who had grown up in Britain did, and felt like a bit of a misfit.
I thought I’d share my skincare routine because every time I tried searching for a minimalist skincare routine for normal skin I found routines with ten steps and twenty products, and to me that’s not very simple! If it’s not simple then I know I won’t bother with it for long. I’ve put together my own routine and I’m sharing it in case it’s helpful for anyone else who is looking for a simple, minimalist skincare routine.
This month I read an interesting article about voice, pitch and the gender bias present in recording and broadcast technology. Out of curiosity, I tried to find out what the pitch or frequency of my regular speaking voice is. It turns out it is F# below Middle C. I have an alto singing voice, although I haven’t sung in a choir since I was eighteen, so the range doesn’t surprise me but the pitch is interesting.
